Submitted by blueapples on X
On the heels of Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th President Of The United States, emerging news regarding a rapidly advancing ceasefire between Israel and Hamas offers an auspicious omen of his new administration’s forthcoming foreign policy. During his presidential campaign, Trump was replete with political ammunition to attack his opponent’s administration with. The mass geopolitical instability caused by the onset of multiple theaters of war that unfolded under Biden’s watch became one of the core talking points of his rhetoric. While his ability to bring a resolution to the war in Gaza was one campaign promise Trump made to distinguish himself as a candidate who had the respect of world leaders that Biden had lost, the war in Ukraine took centerstage of his future foreign policy commitments. Before Trump had even received the Republican nomination, he assured his supporters that he would negotiate an end to the war between Russia in Ukraine in just 24 hours. However, the change of tone from Trump’s camp about the conflict in Ukraine just one week ahead of his inauguration comes in stark juxtaposition to the promises he made on the campaign trail.
According to Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, Trump’s new administration will lobby for Ukraine to lower its minimum age of conscription from 25 to just 18 years old. In the lame-duck period of the Biden Administration, its State Department urged Ukraine to take the same measure in an effort to post more troops to the front lines of the war. This came just months after Ukraine lowered the minimum age for conscription from 27 to 25 years old. Despite doing so, making more bodies available for Zelenskyy’s meat grinder was not enough to turn the tide of the rapidly deteriorating Ukrainian war effort. The futility of that effort led to the Biden administration seeking to lower the age even further drastically to just 18, a request so extreme that it was even rebuked by the Zelenskyy regime.
Trump campaigned on ending the war in Ukraine, but his new National Security Adviser Mike Waltz is claiming they plan to force Kiev to lower its conscription age to 18, in order to “generate hundreds of thousands of new soldiers.”
That sounds like a plan for more endless war… pic.twitter.com/GtBY0dNW3Y
— Rachel Blevins (@RachBlevins) January 13, 2025
The decision of Zelenskyy to reject the Biden administration’s proposal to lower Ukraine’s age of conscription was likely influenced by the crossroads the Ukrainian President found himself at with a transition of power in the United States underway. An incoming administration that took an entirely different political posture on the conflict required Zelenskyy to think with a more long-term oriented strategy than just acquiescing to the US’ demands as a proxy against Russia in order to continue to receive limitless military aid in order to curry the favor of President Trump. Yet before Trump could even be sworn in as the nation’s 47th president, Zelenskyy’s efforts to align himself with that new administration have already proven to be a poor political calculation as it seems he’ll be treated as a puppet of the interests driving the war with Russia all the same.
In an interview with ABC News, Waltz spoke about the lack of manpower Ukraine has on the front lines necessitating the need for the deployment of more troops despite the absence of available manpower:
“The other thing we’re going to need to see is really stabilizing things on the battlefield, and one of the things we’ll be asking of the Ukrainians is, they have real manpower issues. Their draft age right now is 26 [sic] years old, not 18. I don’t think a lot of people realize that they could generate hundreds of thousands of new soldiers. So when we hear about morale problems, when we hear about issues on the front line, look, if the Ukrainians have asked the entire world to be all in for democracy, we need them to be all in for democracy.”
Waltz’s remarks echo the empty rhetoric of Antony Blinken’s State Department as he framed the war in Ukraine as an existential fight for the future of democracy as if he was writing Democratic talking points to attack Trump for Biden’s re-election campaign. Although Waltz spoke to the measure being integral to stabilizing the Ukrainian front in the interest of furthering the country’s position to negotiate an end to the war, his tone continues the trend of increased bellicosity coming from the second Trump administration.
Trump team joins Biden, tells Ukraine to force adult teens onto the frontlines
Waltz says Ukraine — with 43,000 troops killed — needs to “be all in for democracy”
“Their draft age right now is 26 years old, not 18 … They could generate hundreds of thousands of new soldiers” https://t.co/SEo0lqy9bf pic.twitter.com/pfzSC5paYF
— Just Foreign Policy (@justfp) January 13, 2025
Trump has drawn criticism for those hawkish calls following the announcement of several of his key cabinet positions and advisors. The likes of the nominees for Secretary Of State and US Ambassador To The United Nations in Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik respectively brought the high that followed Trump’s re-election crashing down to Earth as even his most ardent supporters rued those nominations as a sign of neoconservative infiltration of his new administration. Waltz’ appointment as National Security Adviser was one of the first decisions that spawned that sense of pessimism.
The effort to lower Ukraine’s age of conscription forecasts a continuation of the bloodshed in Eastern Europe that the political establishment Trump railed against has supported in the years between his two terms. Despite constantly lamenting that the Biden administration’s handling of the war in Ukraine was putting the world on the precipice of nuclear war, Trump’s foreign policy appears to be following in his predecessor’s misguided footsteps. The departure from his promise to put an immediate end to the conflict follows a similar betrayal of a core campaign promise from another high profile nominee to Trump’s cabinet in Tulsi Gabbard.
President-elect Donald Trump has posted a demand that Russian President Vladimir Putin agree to an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine, citing the fall of Syria’s Assad as a warning.
Will tough talk yield the desired results in the nearly three-year war?
Also today, the US is… pic.twitter.com/9jGdPcxxAf
— Ron Paul (@RonPaul) December 10, 2024
Gabbard, the presumptive Director Of National Intelligence committed an equally stunning betrayal of trust when she stated she would continue to enforce Section 702 of FISA, a law she previously stated that she was diametrically opposed to. While optimists unwilling to accept the major flip-flop and political analysts alike rationalized that Gabbard had changed her position on FISA to secure the necessary votes needed to be confirmed as the next DNI, Waltz’s position of National Security Advisory doesn’t require the same Senate approval.
This means that Waltz’s lobbying of Ukraine to lower its age of conscription is not a mere matter of political pragmatism. Instead, it is a much more foreboding example of how the concerns Trump’s supporters have about the direction his second administration is going in following the appointments of politicians aligned with the neocon axis of power have been validated. Those decisions foreshadow that Trump has not corrected the one self-admitted mistake he made during his first term in office by hiring the wrong people to positions of enormous power. If that was the undoing of his first administration, the failure to learn from those mistakes casts serious doubt on how much of what Trump has promised to do to Make America Great Again during his second presidency will actually be achieved.
[ZH: Arguably, Waltz’s comments are more ‘America First’ with the implicit questioning of why we should send Americans into harm’s way to defend Ukraine when Ukraine itself has 1000s of 18-25 year olds who are not fighting. In other words – raise the costs for Ukrainians until they alone decide they have had enough of being hijacked by a corrupt regime (and their Western backers) in a proxy war that is, for now, un-ending.]
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/14/2025 – 14:25
