The winning presidential candidate in the 2024 election cycle promised to find a way to a negotiated peace between Russia and Ukraine.
Days later, the current president ignored this mandate and authorized Ukrainian forces to use long-range missiles inside Russian territory. Lo and behold, they did.
To Tucker Carlson, formerly of Fox News and currently social media’s most influential conservative pundit, that’s “the most evil thing I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.”
That quote came during an interview published Wednesday on X with another notable dissident journalist who defected to independent media — this one on the left, Glenn Greenwald, a co-founder of The Intercept.
Both were particularly alarmed that, after the election was over, Biden allowed Ukrainian forces to use the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, to attack inside Russia to defend territory gained in an August offensive.
The Wall Street Journal reported the weapons “could initially target positions in the Kursk region, where Russia has amassed more than 50,000 troops, including some 10,000 soldiers from North Korea, in an effort to recapture the territory. Ukraine’s forces seized the territory earlier this year.”
While this possibility had been briefly floated in May by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, nothing was done on it — and probably for good reason. As the Journal noted in its Nov. 18 piece, “Biden administration officials were loath to greenlight the strikes until now for fear it could cross a red line for Russia and provoke a wider conflict.” Which, at the risk of sounding flippant, duh.
The escalation is continuing apace, as you might imagine; CBS News reported that the long-rage weapons were first used by Ukranian forces on a Russian military facility in the Bryansk region, which was followed by Russia launching “a barrage of missiles at Ukraine Thursday in its first major retaliation” for the strikes.
It’s unclear whether the missile fired by the Russians was a regular ballistic missile or an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy said it was the latter, which isn’t exactly a positive augury.
Is the Biden administration trying to destabilize the world Trump inherits?
Carlson and Greenwald — both skeptics of the continuation of the conflict, it must be noted — started their conversation with the nature of this escalation.
“I think we’re watching the most evil thing I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, which is the lame duck administration leaving the next administration with a world war, with a nuclear conflict, by allowing Ukraine — a proxy state of the United States — to strike within Russia,” Carlson said.
Carlson reiterated his longstanding belief that “people in Washington misunderstand Vladimir Putin” and that his hold on autocracy is much more tenuous than it is — which is why, to Carlson, the move was so dangerous.
“Putin is very concerned with his approval rating in Russia. He cannot appear weak,” Carlson said.
“That’s a huge threat to him. He feels that — I can confirm — and if he can’t hide attacks by him by the United States through Ukraine, either in Moscow or big civilian casualties, I think he will have no choice, in his view, but to launch a serious response against Ukraine or some of NATO’s countries … So this seems like the most reckless thing that’s ever happened in my life.”
Granted, Carlson might be a bit of an outlier here — the man interviewed Putin, after all, and he was a skeptic of the wisdom of backing up Zelenskyy’s government during the conflict during his time at Fox News — but Greenwald said he was “not even remotely” overstating things.
As Greenwald pointed out, other NATO countries have been pressuring Biden to give Ukraine the greenlight to launch these missiles inside Russia for some time — but the administration had held back because, as he noted, it would involve “direct involvement” in not only allowing them to launch the missiles but providing the precise guidance for those weapons.
The full discussion is here, but the pertinent exchange is at the very beginning:
Permanent Washington decides nuclear war is preferable to Donald Trump. Glenn Greenwald on the nihilism of our ruling class.
(0:00) Permanent Washington Dangerously Misunderstands Vladimir Putin
(23:06) We Are on the Verge of Nuclear War
(28:11) The Concerted Effort to Control… pic.twitter.com/GOJDslU23W— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) November 20, 2024
Again, one must stress both Carlson and Greenwald are among the most ardent skeptics of NATO involvement in the war — to the point where both have been tarred and feathered as Putin apologists without any evidence they particularly like the guy.
What they do acknowledge is that he remains leader of Russia and seeks to remain there, which should be obvious. Less obvious is the fact that his grip on the country is more complicated than the unshakable iron-fist autocracy we’ve been led to believe exists. And on the occasions that becomes obvious, that’s considered an opportunity for NATO by the punditocracy, not a problem.
Whether or not you agree with Carlson and Greenwald’s assessment in toto, you may begin to see the contradiction inherent in those two things. If Putin is a dictator who ensures stability for himself and his regime at all costs and that regime becomes unstable, and the projection of weakness increases that instability, that would only be an opportunity if you weren’t dealing with a nuclear state that has a massive military, huge reserves of energy required to keep Europe running and every reason to believe that its war is no longer with Ukraine, but with its NATO backers.
So, what does our lame-duck administration do? Give Kyiv the go-ahead to escalate, a move designed to not only thwart Donald Trump’s overtures toward peace but to put into motion a series of events that could cause the conflict to metastasize well beyond Ukraine and Russia.
But that’s not Biden’s problem after Jan. 20, is it?
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