Today's D Brief: Zelenskyy’s ‘Reagan’ plea; Houthis hit another tanker; Europe’s weakened militaries; US breaks mass-shooting record; And a bit more.
Reagan who? Ukraine’s president visited American troops on Monday to invoke former President Ronald Reagan, but his visit comes at a time when Republicans in congress seem farther from Reagan-era U.S. foreign policy than perhaps ever before.
“The world really did change after [the Berlin] Wall came down, starting a new era,” President Volodymir Zelenskyy said during a speech at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. “Nations that had been under the thumb for so long and could only dream of freedom started walking that path. But, the ones who used to suppress freedom, they didn’t give up their dreams either,” he said, alluding to Russian leader and convicted war criminal Vladimir Putin.
“In Berlin, the great words were spoken: ‘Tear down this wall.’ We need no less confidence now than President Reagan had then,” said Zelenskyy, whose military has been stymied and largely held in check by invading Russian forces since June, despite billions of dollars in weapons from the U.S. and its allies to help Zelenskyy’s troops take back almost 42,000 square miles of invaded land across the south and the east. It’s a conflict that’s cost Russia more troops than its Afghan invasion in the 1980s, and indeed any period since the Second World War.
“Russia’s war on Ukraine isn’t just about some old-fashioned dictatorship trying to settle scores, real or imagined,” the Ukrainian president said. “It’s Putin attacking that big shift that happened back in 1989.” But what happens next depends, at least in part, on discussions today with key lawmakers and President Joe Biden.
One big problem: Isolationists have taken control of the Republican party, as the Wall Street Journal reported Monday following the paper’s CEO Council Summit, featuring House Speaker Mike Johnson. The speaker persists in his refusal to decouple future U.S. aid to Ukraine from immigration reforms demanded by Republicans, telling the audience, “If we’re going to have a national-security supplemental package, it ought to begin with our own national security.”
Worth noting: Study after study shows that rising immigration does not equal rising crime in the U.S., yet the stereotype and talking point persists throughout Johnson’s Republican Party. The Atlantic’s David Frum, writing on Tuesday, explains the more salient issue of asylum and “asylum abuse” in the U.S., as he lays out four primary obstacles amid the currently stalled negotiations between Republicans and the White House, including “playing to the gallery” and “the politics of domination.”
Johnson was even confronted over the political impasse by former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Monday. “I absolutely take your point about the need to sort out the chaos on the border,” Abbott said during audience questions. “But just because you can’t get both things, right, isn’t it better to get one thing right? So could I please appeal to you, please don’t go out for Christmas without at least giving the Ukrainians what they need.”
Johnson responded that the White House wouldn’t tell him when Russia’s Ukraine invasion will end, or if Russia will leave the nearly 20% of Ukraine that it currently occupies.
Meanwhile across town, “We are determined to show the world that America will not flinch in our defense of freedom,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Monday as he introduced Zelenskyy at the National Defense University. “America will be more secure if we stand up for our bedrock values, and America will be more secure if we make it clear to would-be aggressors worldwide that they do not get to decide which countries live or which countries die,” Austin said.
“Putin still believes that he can outlast Ukraine, and that he can outlast America. But he is wrong,” Austin predicted. “Together with our allies and partners, we are determined to help Ukraine consolidate and extend its battlefield gains, and to build a future force that can ward off Russian aggression in the years ahead,” he said.
SecDef Austin then quoted Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
“We are living in just such a time,” Austin warned. “And we must all decide on where we stand.”
“If there’s anyone inspired by unresolved issues on Capitol Hill, it’s just Putin and his sick clique,” Zelenskyy told the audience at NDU. “They see the dreams come true when they see the delays and scandals. They see freedom falling when the support of freedom fighters goes down. People like Putin shouldn’t even hope to conquer freedom,” he continued. “And we can show our children and grandchildren what real confidence is, as was shown to us.”
Looking ahead, it may only take Russia three to four years to rebuild its military after all the losses it has suffered trying to invade Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend (gift link here), citing Estonian military intelligence. And based on inventories revealed by Putin’s full-scale Ukraine invasion, Europe’s various armies are not at all ready for any sort of direct conflict with Russia.
Consider: France “has fewer than 90 heavy artillery pieces, equivalent to what Russia loses roughly every month on the Ukraine battlefield,” the Journal reports. “Denmark has no heavy artillery, submarines or air-defense systems. Germany’s army has enough ammunition for two days of battle.”
One top British military official compared 2023 to just after Hitler invaded the Rhineland, telling the Journal, “The lesson from the 1930s is that when the strategic context and the threats begin to increase, and I think that’s what we’ve seen, then you need to begin to prepare for it.”
Related reading:
- “Huge Cyberattack Knocks Ukraine’s Largest Mobile Operator Offline,” the New York Times reported Tuesday from Kyiv;
- “US Sanctions China, Turkey and UAE Firms for Supporting Russia,” Bloomberg reported Tuesday; Reuters has non-paywalled coverage here; or read over the sanctions from the Treasury Department, here;
- “Senate Republican [J.D. Vance] says US needs to accept Ukraine will ‘cede some territory’ to Russia,” The Hill reported Sunday after Vance’s appearance on CNN;
- “Tillis calls Vance remarks on Ukraine ‘total and unmitigated bull‑‑‑‑’,” The Hill reported Monday;
- And “'Well done gramps': See Russian state media praise McConnell and GOP,” CNN reported Tuesday.
Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback for the year ahead here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1941, Adolf Hitler met with his top officials to inform them of his goal to kill all of the Jews in Europe.
Houthi missile hits civilian tanker in the Red Sea. The attack on the Norwegian-flagged oil and chemical tanker Strinda “expands a campaign by the Iranian-backed rebels targeting ships close to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait into apparently now striking those that have no clear ties to Israel,” AP reports. “That potentially imperils cargo and energy shipments coming through the Suez Canal and further widens the international impact of the Israel-Hamas war now raging in the Gaza Strip.” More coverage: Reuters, UKMTO.
Elite Afghan troops face deportation to Afghanistan. About 200 Afghan special-forces troops, trained and funded by the UK, face imminent explusion from Pakistan, where they took refuge after their homeland fell to the Taliban, the BBC reports.
The UK’s failure to find a new home for these soldiers "is a disgrace, because it reflects that either we're duplicitous as a nation or incompetent," Richard Barrons, a retired British Army who served in Afghanistan for over 12 years, told BBC Newsnight. More, here.
And lastly: 2023 broke the U.S. record for most mass shootings in a year. Last week, the count hit 38—in which at least 203 people have died—passing the previous high of 36, the Guardian reports.
Related: U.S. cities tried to destroy guns used in crimes. Instead, the parts were resold as kits. The New York Times reports on “a private company that has collected millions of dollars taking firearms from police agencies, destroying a single piece of each weapon stamped with the serial number and selling the rest as nearly complete gun kits.”
And: rarely seen photos of gun victims. Last month, The Washington Post took the rare step of publishing graphic and gory photos of Americans killed by AR-15s.
Why? Publisher Sally Buzbee wrote that “because journalists generally do not have access to crime scenes and news organizations rarely if ever publish graphic content, most Americans have no way to understand the full scope of an AR-15’s destructive power or the extent of the trauma inflicted on victims, survivors and first responders when a shooter uses this weapon on people.”