Why will the Democrats, from the president down through the ranks of the party that controls Congress, not give peace a chance? When members of the party’s progressive caucus recently issued a call for Biden to negotiate with Putin, they were forced by the party leadership and its cheerleader chorus in the media to meekly back down and rescind their letter to the president. The message was: How dare they suggest a path of negotiation followed by every president, irrespective of party, to pursue a peaceful alternative to the inevitably indiscriminate killing of war?
Suddenly, the example of President Kennedy’s Cuban missile crisis dialogue with Khrushchev and Nixon’s visit with Mao during the Vietnam War were deemed off limits. Or Trump attempting to diffuse tension with nuclear-armed North Korea. Diplomacy is not to be considered even as a tightly restrained suggestion in a letter by 30 Democratic members of Congress to the leader of their party, our current president.
In this week’s Scheer Intelligence, Kucinich states, “I read the letter several times, and it mentioned diplomacy about a half dozen times, he tells host Robert Scheer. “And what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with trying to end a war where the U.S. has already spent upwards of $60 billion, where Ukraine is being wrecked, at least 15,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and Russian soldiers killed. This thing has all the signs of spiraling out of control and so it was appropriate for members to send that letter to the White House and to see the leadership’s response was not just disappointing but alarming.”
Alarming, in Kucinich’s world view because the NATO financed proxy war with Russia is a prelude to an even more ominous confrontation with China. As Kucinich warns: “What we’re seeing both in the ratcheting up of tensions with China and the continued prosecution of the war in the Ukraine, which is squarely aimed at trying to displace Russia as a world power, what we’re seeing in that is a misguided attempt to assert American hegemony. And that era is over. The world is changing. We cannot pursue policies by force. And when we tried to do it over the past 50 years, it’s generally been a disaster. So, I think that this is an inflection point, the Democratic party slapping down 30 Democrats who said, ‘Look, let’s try for peace, let’s negotiate. Because if you don’t negotiate, you’re going to escalate.’ And that’s the path that we’re on right now, escalation.”
