Van Jones slams liberals over Iran
Both Koh and Cupp had expressed disapproval of President Donald Trump's decision-making leading up to the attack. This earned a stern rebuke from Jones, who demanded that progressives 'get on board' with Trump's position. 'I think progressives underestimate how dangerous Iran is,' he began, as Jennings, fresh off a trip to Israel, nodded his head in approval.
'And the why: because they say, "Death to America. Death to Israel. And death to all the Jews." 'One of those should offend you - if you're progressives. At least one should offend you.' He then turned to the 'who' and 'how' of the conflict.
'Is Israel going to take out this nuclear capacity by dropping people there who blow it up?' Jones asked. 'Or is America going to take it out by dropping a bomb that blows it up?' Pleading for a preemptive strike that soon came to pass, Jones then turned back to 'the what and the why' of the situation, which he said was quite 'clear.'
That evening, Jones words proved prophetic, with the US attacking several known nuclear facilities in Iran. The move - made a little over a week after Israel claimed Iran had been close to obtaining nuclear weapons - sparked pushback from both sides of the aisle. Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie slammed it as 'not Constitutional,' since it was made without the approval of Congress.
'This is not about the merits of Iran's nuclear program. No president has the authority to bomb another country that does not pose an imminent threat to the US without the approval of Congress,' added Democratic Rep. Sean Casten of Illinois, calling the bombings 'an unambiguous impeachable offense.' Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez - one of the fiercest critics of Israel - unsurprisingly agreed.
'The President's disastrous decision to bomb Iran without authorization is a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers,' the New York Democrat said. 'He has impulsively risked launching a war that may ensnare us for generations,' she went on, also calling the order 'grounds for impeachment.' The president, meanwhile, deployed B-2 stealth bombers in the attack, after more than a week of strikes by Israel on Iran.
On Friday, Trump said he was going to wait two weeks before deciding whether to enter the conflict. Iran has since promised to respond, after saying the strikes on the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites constituted the US 'enter[ing] the war clearly and directly'. The country is currently weighing its military options. It launched a new wave of missiles and drones against Israel Monday.
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Times
13 minutes ago
- Times
Trump's cynical bluster has echoes of Vietnam
In Anchorage on Friday, the president of the United States was confronted with the truth of an old superpower adage: it is easier to bully allies than to bend enemies. Since January, Donald Trump has enjoyed remarkable success in causing formerly friendly countries to submit without retaliation to his tariffs and insults. They have thus far preferred this course to an escalation of hostilities — and hostilities are what tariffs represent — with the most powerful nation on earth. America has become widely disliked and feared, especially in Europe and Canada. Most national leaders nonetheless continue to abase themselves before Trump, though Sir Keir Starmer may already regret his gushingly enthusiastic weekend remarks about the Alaska summit. Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, is an utterly different proposition. He is pursuing a nationalist agenda, to the point of obsession. He has no interest in compromise over Ukraine. He is bent upon victory. He seeks to recreate what some would call a sphere of influence but which we should recognise as a sphere of coercion, extending from Georgia through Ukraine and Belarus, and thereafter beyond. • Putin demands Ukraine surrender the Donbas as price of peace He is convinced that he can achieve this because he continues to command support among his own people. Sanctions are porous and his armed forces are slowly grinding down Ukraine. Europe is weak — incapable of arming Volodymyr Zelensky if the US quits. Putin believes that Trump will give him what he wants. The evidence from Friday's summit suggests that he is right. The president cares nothing for Zelensky and his country but respects the master of the Kremlin. He likes dictators and clings to hopes of prising Russia apart from China, which he views as the only adversary that should matter to Americans. Incomprehensible though it seems to us, he is more eager to build a relationship with Putin than to stay friends with Europe. A precedent for Trump's clumsy and cynical attempts to end the war lies in America's diplomatic efforts to disengage from Vietnam, half a century ago. President Lyndon Johnson initiated talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris in 1968. These got nowhere, for the same reason that olive branches are wasted on Putin. Hanoi was interested only in victory. Meanwhile, just as Zelensky is cut out of Trump's conversations with the Russians, so during the Indochina wars no South Vietnamese was invited to attend a significant White House policy meeting, nor indeed the Paris peace talks. Trump should never have attempted a bilateral with Putin because he is too verbally incontinent to negotiate rationally with an iceman such as Putin. Henry Kissinger, though incomparably cleverer, suffered constant frustrations when he became US emissary facing the North Vietnamese in Paris. Only in October 1972, weeks before a presidential election in which Richard Nixon faced the Democrat George McGovern, did Kissinger finally agree draft terms with the communist diplomat Le Duc Tho. When he arrived back in Washington, he strode into the White House bursting with excitement. 'The deal we've got, Mr President,' he was taped telling his employer, 'is so far better than anything we dreamt of. I mean, it will absolutely, totally, wipe out McGovern.' • We are no closer to peace, say Ukrainian refugees in Britain That remark did no service to Kissinger's reputation, because it made explicit that he viewed escape from Vietnam principally as a partisan political coup. He told Nixon that, while the agreement could be billed as 'peace', it would empower Hanoi to seize the South after a decent interval. Eighteen months should be enough, said Kissinger: 'If we settle it, say, this October, by January '74 no one will give a damn.' Nixon was so delighted that at lunch he invited his surrender broker to share a Lafite Rothschild 1957, such as the president customarily indulged alone, serving Californian red to the help. A deal was finally signed in Paris in January 1973. The Americans went home. Two years later I was among the unhappy eyewitnesses as Hanoi's army swept south to Saigon. Vietnam was, of course, a war in which the US had become directly and bloodily involved, unlike Ukraine, where it is merely arming a sovereign, West-leaning state to defend itself. What the two conflicts have in common, however, is that by 1973 Nixon's nation desperately wanted out of Indochina; in 2025, only a minority of Americans care a fig for Ukraine. Trump has not yet borrowed Neville Chamberlain's 1938 line about Czechoslovakia — 'a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing' — but his vice-president JD Vance has come close. Matthew Whitaker, the US ambassador to Nato, told CNN last week that 'no big chunks' of Ukrainian territory would be 'just given' to Russia 'that haven't been fought for or earned on the battlefield'. That remark should send a shiver through every advocate of freedom, every opponent of permitting brute force to determine outcomes. The signature on Nixon's Vietnam peace deal was delayed for almost four months, chiefly by the resistance of the South's president, Nguyen Van Thieu. Nixon bullied him into acquiescence at a meeting during which he shouted: 'Without aid, you're finished! Understand?' Yes, the wretched Vietnamese was obliged to understand. That nasty conversation in the Oval Office has a contemporary resonance, does it not? Without American aid Ukraine, too, is finished. Kissinger shamelessly accepted a half-share of a Nobel peace prize which Le Duc Tho, his interlocutor, had the integrity to reject. Trump today makes plain his own ambition to secure this honour, plausibly for a similar shoddy betrayal, though Ukraine is an incomparably worthier cause than was South Vietnam. On Monday the president is expected to tell Zelensky, and the European leaders whom he has also summoned to make complicit in Ukraine's future, that to halt the Russian rape of his country he must surrender the east, renounce hopes of joining Nato or the EU and sign a deal that includes no credible security guarantee. Putin is determined to pull every string of a future puppet government in Kyiv. It is not too late for Donald Trump to change course, and we should cling to hopes that he will do so. The only rightful, statesmanlike response to Putin's murderous obduracy is for the US to boost arms supplies to Ukraine and escalate sanctions against Russia. If, instead, the president demands that Zelensky rolls over, we shall have cause to despair of his ever fulfilling the traditional role of successive US presidents, as the West's principal standard-bearers for freedom and justice. Next month's presidential state visit to London seems an ever more cringe-making prospect. There is malicious gossip in Washington that on the plane to Anchorage a triumphalist Putin and his acolytes ate chicken Kyiv. It will be a historic tragedy if Trump proves to have served it to them.
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Secretary of State Marco Rubio blasts ‘stupid media narrative' of Zelensky being bullied by Trump
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has blasted the "stupid media narrative" that President Donald Trump is going to "bully" Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into signing a bad deal with Russia. Rubio pushed back during a Sunday appearance on CBS, where he was asked about the European leaders attending the negotiations with Zelensky and if this was to ensure he isn't "bullied into signing something away" by Trump. Trump is set to meet Monday with Zelensky, several European leaders and NATO's secretary-general. Trump met with Putin for nearly three hours Friday at a U.S. military base in Anchorage. In their first meeting in six years the two leaders discussed the war in Ukraine. Trump has pushed for peace in the region but no ceasefire deal came out of the talks. 'That's why you have these European leaders coming as backup tomorrow. Can you reassure them?' Margaret Brennan asked Rubio. 'That's not true,' Rubio replied. 'They're not coming here tomorrow to keep Zelensky from being bullied. They're coming here tomorrow because we've been working with the Europeans. We talked to them last week. There were meetings in the U.K. over the following, the previous weekend.' He added that the suggestion of bullying was a 'stupid media narrative'. "They're coming here tomorrow because they chose to come here tomorrow. We invited them to come. We invited them to come. The president invited them to come," Rubio insisted. The secretary of state noted that the U.S. has met with Zelensky many more times than with Putin. Brennan recalled Trump's meeting with Zelensky in Washington, D.C. during which Vice President JD Vance asked the Ukrainian leader how often he'd said "thank you" for America's help with the war. 'You're right now, not in a very good position. You're not in a good position. You don't have the cards right now with us,' Trump also said to Zelensky during the extraordinary meeting. His fiery response came after Zelensky told Trump the U.S. would 'feel it in the future' if Trump ignored Russia's actions in Europe. 'I'm not playing cards right now, I'm very serious Mr President. I am a wartime president,' Zelensky replied, further infuriating Trump. 'You're gambling with the lives of millions of people. You're gambling with World War Three,' Trump shouted. 'You're gambling with World War Three, and what you're doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country, far more than a lot of people say they should.' After that, Vance asked Zelensky 'have you said thank you once?' 'A lot of times. Even today,' Zelensky replied. Rubio was present in the Oval Office for that meeting. Rubio also appeared Sunday on NBC's morning show where he was asked if he could name a single concession that Trump was going to ask Russia to make. Rubio refused to answer, insisting that doing so would potentially degrade the negotiations. "Well I'm not going to name those things because if I do, you can imagine, our negotiations could fall apart," Rubio said. "I know everybody wants to know what's happening — and to a certain degree that's important — but what's more important is these negotiations work."
Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
Oil slips as Russia supply concerns ease after Trump-Putin meet
SINGAPORE, Aug 18 (Reuters) - Oil prices slipped in early Asian trade on Monday as the United States did not exert more pressure on Russia to end the Ukraine war by implementing further measures to disrupt Moscow's oil exports after presidents from both countries met on Friday. Brent crude futures dropped 32 cents, or 0.49%, to $65.53 a barrel by 2213 GMT while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude was at $62.57 a barrel, down 23 cents. U.S. President Donald Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday and emerged more aligned with Moscow on seeking a peace deal instead of a ceasefire first. Trump will meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and European leaders on Monday to strike a quick peace deal to end Europe's deadliest war in 80 years. "What was primarily in play were the secondary tariffs targeting the key importers of Russian energy, and President Trump has indeed indicated that he will pause pursuing incremental action on this front, at least for China," RBC Capital analyst Helima Croft said in a note. "The status quo remains largely intact for now," she said, adding that Moscow will not walk back on territorial demands while Ukraine and some European leaders will balk at the land-for-peace deal.
