Make Money Not War; My reaction to the headline was the opposite to the one the Wall Street Journal intended.

 

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine.”

Kewl, I thought when I read that. I have long held that the reason the Arabs stopped fighting Israel was the Arabs were losing money and prestige. Wars are expensive and unless you have a surplus of military-age men that you want to get rid of, you don’t go to war.

But many are those who make a killing off war, which is why Putin’s War drags on. Our NATO allies—for lack of a better word—are no more interested in ending the war than Lindsey Graham is interested in women.

Putin, too, profits from the war or else he would not have started it. President Trump is going over Putin’s head to offer financial incentives to the oligarch crowd to give peace a chance.

The Journal’s story began:

Three powerful businessmen—two Americans and a Russian—hunched over a laptop in Miami Beach last month, ostensibly to draw up a plan to end Russia’s long and deadly war with Ukraine.

But the full scope of their project went much further, according to people familiar with the talks. They were privately charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold—with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends.

At his waterfront estate, billionaire developer-turned-special envoy Steve Witkoff was hosting Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and Vladimir Putin’s handpicked negotiator, who had largely shaped the document they were revising on the screen. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had arrived from his nearby home on an island known as the “Billionaire Bunker.”

Dmitriev was pushing a plan for U.S. companies to tap the roughly $300 billion of Russian central bank assets, frozen in Europe, for U.S.-Russian investment projects and a U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine. U.S. and Russian companies could join to exploit the vast mineral wealth in the Arctic. There were no limits to what two longtime adversaries could achieve, Dmitriev had argued for months: Their rival space industries, which raced one another during the Cold War, could even pursue a joint mission to Mars with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Russia’s space program blew up a last week. According to the Independent, Moscow accidentally destroyed its launch pad and for the first time in 64 years, Russia—which pioneered putting men into space—has no means of putting a cosmonaut into the heavens above.

The British newspaper reported:

Russia’s only crewed-mission launch site has suffered major damage following a rocket launch on Thursday.

The Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan will be unable to host launches until repairs are made, according to the space agency Roscosmos, marking the first time in decades that Russia has lost the ability to send people to space.

The launch of the Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft was otherwise successful, with none of the crew members injured.

If it is any comfort to Putin, Boeing suffers the same problem of getting it up. One nation’s misery is Elon Musk’s opportunity.

The WSJ story explained well what Trump is trying to do in peace talks with Russia: “For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials. By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.”

Our traditional allies are more like dead weight. They’ve driven the wedge in.

The EU launched the Airbus to compete with makers of U.S. airliners. The Europeans launched the euro to compete with the dollar. And the mayor of London launched the baby Trump balloon to compete with Democrat protesters. George Soros pays good money for his AstroTurf. How dare the Brits put Americans out of work?

Oh how those sophisticated cosmopolitan Europeans who speak 5 languages and have been to 10 countries oppose American hegemony—except when it comes to defending their disconsolate continent.

Some of the Eastern Europeans are OK. Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria aren’t accepting Syrian infiltrators. But with the exception of Giorgia Meloni, the leaders of Western Europe are doing more for Muslims than the leaders do for their own people.

That includes King Chuck, who is the titular head of the Church of England. Ronni L. Gordon and David M. Stillman wrote a piece in the Middle East Quarterly nearly 30 years ago entitled “Prince Charles of Arabia”:

The future Charles III has made several strong public statements endorsing Islam as the solution to the spiritual and cultural ills of Britain and the West. His public advocacy of Islam appears to go back to 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued an edict (fatwa) against Salman Rushdie, a British citizen, for blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad in his novel The Satanic Verses. Rather than defend Rushdie’s freedom of speech, Charles reacted to the death decree by reflecting on the positive features that Islam has to offer the spiritually empty lives of his countrymen.

Under his mother and him, the colonizer has become the colonized as Third Worlders take control of the British government and the military. The latter fortunately is skeleton strong thanks to decades of starving the protectors of freedom to finance universal health care and the rest.

Why should American men and women risk their lives protecting an island whose king would sell out for a hummus?

I have noticed that for all the lecturing about the need to keep Ukraine out of Russian hands, no one has been stupid enough to suggest American soldiers be sent in to quell this existential threat to Europe.

In fact, no one is sending in soldiers. Not France, not Germany, not England. They don’t fear losing; they fear winning and ending the war because while war is bad for business, it can be excellent for politicians with the right connections.

Consider the unprovoked Libyan War. Hillary said, “We came. We saw. He’s dead.” She should have added: “I got a book deal.”

Trump is using The Art of The Deal instead of The Art of War.

Make money, not war. I like it.

This article first appeared on Don Surber’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission.

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