Pelosi Takes Virtue-Signaling Trip to Ukraine

BUCK: Nancy Pelosi just finished up a visit to Ukraine, and Pelosi’s out there, not somebody who I think anyone who has paid attention to her political career would think has much to add to the strategy and the reality of what is going on over there. Here is Pelosi doing the usual talking points, the boilerplate.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says not to be intimidated by “bullies” regarding potential Russian retaliation for US military assistance to Ukraine. #UkraineRussia pic.twitter.com/X0v2AXdyXe

— euronews (@euronews) May 2, 2022

BUCK: Pelosi not exactly giving Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech there. But, you know, I guess people are supposed to be very impressed that Pelosi would even show up there. Obviously, the fighting seems to have lessened dramatically around Kiev, and so the violence there — the threat there — is much, much lower. In the east of the country, it continues on. Here’s my concern.

I have a, you know, CIA analyst background so I used to do a lot — spent a lot of time reading about wars. Iraq, Afghanistan, involved in the analysis of what was going on in those countries for years of my life. I don’t speak to you that much, we don’t speak to you that much about the Ukraine situation because there are I think limits to what the U.S.’s involvement should be.

And I think for a lot of people, this has become an issue of their own — and I don’t mean in the media in general. It’s an issue of their brand building to think, “Oh, I stand with Ukraine, I have eight Ukraine flags in my Facebook bio or Twitter bio or something, so I’m a good person. And anybody who doesn’t make a big show of their standing with Ukraine is not as good a person as me,” which I think is a lot of it.

This is also, you see this with the activist mentality in general. An activist, so much of what… When you listen to what they’re saying, what activists are really pushing for is for everyone to think they’re a better person. They’re not actually doing anything to help anybody but they want everybody to think that they are and they maybe want to take some donations in that process as well. Here’s Pelosi though also telling Zelensky in Kiev that we’re gonna be there with them until the very end.

“We believe that we are visiting you to say thank you for your fight for freedom.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a delegation of representatives in a previously unannounced visit to meet with Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelenskyy in war-torn Kyiv. https://t.co/Th48YBL6Kp pic.twitter.com/oLK3RhNOmZ

— ABC News (@ABC) May 2, 2022

BUCK: This is a fight for everybody, she says. It is very interesting to me to see — and I do believe this is a long-standing historical precedent — Democrats are generally more interested in war when there’s some concept of the global good that is involved, right? If it’s a human rights-based military intervention, Republicans tend to be more interested in what is in the American interests.

Although neoconservatives — and there’s a whole debate we can have over how much they actually adhere to that. But I would just say we’re successful in trying to achieve. That may be a better way of saying it about the neocon. I’d say this about Pelosi telling Zelensky that we’ll be there ’til the very end, what does the very end look like here? What are we really trying to achieve?

Moscow keeps saying things that are very bellicose about what they will be willing to do if there’s any real intervention. Now, the Biden administration — because we deal in facts here and reality. The Biden administration has not militarily intervened yet and says they will not do so. I hope they stay to that promise. I can’t say that I’m a hundred percent confident that that’s the case, not even close to hundred percent.

So that’s what I worry about here. I also think that there’s a lack of seriousness about what is the end of this conflict supposed to look like. Obviously, we want the bombs and the bullets to stop. But we haven’t had much discussion, there isn’t much discussion about what would bring that to be and what does Ukraine look like and U.S. involvement, both military and otherwise?

You know, there was a kind of a meme, a social media post that went mega-viral over the weekend, that showed downtown Philadelphia with just the worst kind of urban decay, fires lit on the streets, trash everywhere, a bad scene. And the caption was pretty clear. It was “Democrats are sending $33 billion to Ukraine.” Meanwhile, here’s downtown Philadelphia which just had its highest ever murder rate recorded in the city last year.

I think that Democrats are very comfortable moralizing about Ukraine and sending taxpayer dollars over there because it makes them feel like they’re good people who are on the right side of things. And I certainly think the Ukrainians, we stand with the Ukrainians in their fight against Russia in rhetorical and material terms.

But what is the end of the conflict look like and how is the Biden administration trying to get us there, get closer to it? I just think when you look at the foreign policy failures of Joe Biden and his team, you look at Afghanistan, you look at everything they’ve done so far, the inability to stop this war? This is not the A-team.