WASHINGTON – This week, Congressman Eugene Vindman (Va.-07) delivered remarks on the House Floor marking the end of Pax Americana.
His remarks as prepared are below. You can watch the speech here.
Madam Speaker:
I rise to address the house as we have just marked the third anniversary of the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine. February 24, 2022, the date on which commenced the largest land grab in Europe since World War II, joins an ignominious list of others as a day of infamy.
But this month is also notorious for something else. In this month and in this year, the Pax Americana, the rules-based international order established in the aftermath of World War II, an order that has delivered peace and prosperity to the United States, has been brought to a dishonorable end.
In this month, Trump ordered the US Representative to the UN to vote with autocrats and against democracy.
Pete Hegseth, the FOX weekend television host improbably elevated into an American secretary of defense, announced that NATO membership for Ukraine was off the table.
Going further, he suggested that Ukraine’s return to its 2014 borders was also no longer in the cards. Hegseth thereby deprived Ukraine and the West of two of their most valuable bargaining chips in determining the shape of any peace agreement that is to come.
In this same month, Donald Trump, the President of the United States, standing facts on their head, called Volodymr Zelensky, the leader of Ukrainian democracy, a
In this month, in perhaps the most shameful statement from an American president in the history of our republic, Trump explained that because Russia had lost so many soldiers, it was entitled to keep some or all of the territory it had seized in its unprovoked war of aggression.
It is bad enough that these are lies and betrayals of America’s great traditions.
It is bad enough that these statements legitimize violations of the fundamental principles of Pax Americana and the UN Charter.
Namely, that the rules of the jungle no longer apply to international relations, that might does not make right, and that powerful nations cannot employ force to redraw international borders at will.
It is bad enough that the Trump administration is failing to offer a strong bargaining position for Ukraine from which to negotiate a just peace.
And it is bad enough that its statements have sent an unmistakable message to the world—and in particular to Communist China—that aggression pays.
But things are even worse than all of that.
Under the tutelage of Donald Trump, we are witnessing a fundamental transformation of American foreign policy from a force for good in the world to a force for evil.
Trump is aligning American foreign policy with that of the Kremlin.
As the analyst Phillips O’Brien has put it, “the USA is now run by gangsters who both want to ally with other gangsters, and are using threats of destruction and violence to get their way.”
In his first term in office, Trump was surrounded by so-called grown-ups — people like White House chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, secretary of state Rex Tillerson, national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, and secretary of defense Gen. James Mattis.
These men were the guard rails.
They were serious and experienced hands who bent every effort to stop Trump from taking the disastrous steps he repeatedly bruited, like withdrawing the United States from NATO, or inviting the Taliban to Camp David, or using the American military to shoot down protesters in American cities.
This time around, there are no such adults in the room.
Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants and yes-men, third rate fanatics and clowns from MAGA world.
The guard rails are gone.
Trump is free to follow his peculiar whims and unhinged instincts. Indeed, he is free to act as would a mad king. The results are already plain to see.
The results are visible in Trump’s repeated attacks on Denmark for refusing to sell Greenland to the United States, another dangerous fantasy, which is roiling relations with a NATO ally that has been an exceptionally loyal friend in times of need.
They are visible in the trade war that Trump is promising to unleash on Mexico, on Canada, on Europe, and on the entire world, with untold consequences for prosperity everywhere, including here at home.
And they are most visible in the collapse of our friendship with Ukraine, our abandonment of a fledgling democracy that has been valiantly fighting for its very existence.
Instead of standing by Ukraine, the Trump administration is insisting that it yield its natural resource wealth to the United States in exchange for PREVIOUS American support and without any sort of territorial guarantee.
The details of this mercantilist proposal are horrendous.
According to the draft agreement reviewed by the New York Times, the United States is insisting on receiving up to $500 billion of Ukraine’s revenues from its own natural resources, including minerals, gas and oil, as well as revenue from ports and other infrastructure.
Yet Ukraine’s annual revenue from natural resources last year was a mere $1.1 billion.
Such a bankrupting agreement smacks of colonial exploitation.
This is not the behavior of a great democratic power, the leader of the free world.
It is the behavior of a mafia state engaged in coercion via blackmail. It is impossible not to be ashamed by what is being done in America’s name.
The problem we are confronting today is worse than rookie mistakes, incompetence, and stupidity. And it is worse than a mere return to isolationism.
The shocking fact that we must recognize is that the United States under Donald Trump is actively taking the side of its determined enemies.
For reasons that remain mysterious—perhaps it is nothing more complicated than Trump’s manifest admiration for strong men and dictators—our president has always been in thrall to Vladimir Putin.
Particularly notable in these developments is Trump’s newfound insistence that Ukraine hold elections before any peace agreement can be sealed.
It is extraordinarily telling that this is a demand straight out of the Kremlin playbook that Trump or his underlings never once raised over the past year until AFTER Trump had conversations with Putin.
Never mind that holding elections in wartime runs counter to the Ukrainian constitution.
Never mind that it would be impossible to hold free and fair elections as Russian missiles rain down upon Ukrainian cities.
Never mind that a fifth or more of the Ukrainian population is living either as refugees in the West or in territory conquered by Russia.
Putin would like nothing more than to cause internal chaos in Ukraine and rid Kyiv of Zelensky.
Trump is following suit. Zelensky is absolutely right when he stated that Trump is living inside a disinformation bubble.
At root, Trump’s policies betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the American idea, the fact that we are a free and self-governing people, a democracy that has always been a beacon of liberty to the world.
Instead of that beacon, Trump has embraced a false realism that ignores our values and our unique role as the leader of the free world. Indeed, he betrays those values and negates the very idea of a free world.
Along these lines, it is notable and highly significant that, trampling on the intentions of Congress, the Trump administration has slashed spending to zero for the National Endowment for Democracy, the government-funded quasi-private institution founded by Ronald Reagan to help foster democracy and counter dictatorships around the world.
Elon Musk, running his DOGE chainsaw on the federal government, like Trump, is spreading disinformation.
The president and his billionaire shadow co-president have embraced a dystopian ideology based on falsehoods. The effect of their disinformation is rapidly bringing us to a crisis point where their falsehoods will crash into the reality of great power conflict.
If America abandons Ukraine and embraces the Kremlin, the consequences for the United States and for the world will prove ruinous.
Already, everywhere Russia has advanced into Ukrainian territory, its forces have raped and pillaged and murdered.
Ukrainian prisoners of war have been executed in cold blood.
Children have been kidnapped en masse and shipped off to the Russian heartland for adoption. Cities have been left in ruins. Ukrainian citizens who resist Russification have been tortured and sent off to perform hard labor in the Gulag.
China, watching American fecklessness and betrayal, will be emboldened to seize Taiwan.
The possibility of a major war in Asia will be brought closer, with dire ramifications for American security.
A vacuum will have formed which will inevitably be filled by the revisionist powers of Russia and China.
A new world war could be upon us. Now that we are fully in the nuclear age, the level of death and destruction it could bring would be worse even than World War II.
What can be done to avert this impending chain of disasters?
Right now, there is little to check Trump’s behavior and ambitions. It is true that there are many Republicans in both houses of Congress who are discomfited by the administration’s pro-Russia tilt.
This can be seen by the vote tallies in support of Ukraine aid last year. But these Republicans have been cowed into a timorous silence.
It thus falls to each of us as individual Americans to speak out, to acknowledge the truth that American ideals have been the crucial factor in our successes of the past seventy-five years and our ability to collectively respond to threats. In a moment when our national leaders are no longer the torch bearer for those ideals, it falls to ordinary Americans, the rank-and-file citizenry, to shoulder the burden.
Those in leadership in the GOP today have abdicated their role as protectors of what makes America exceptional.
I offer my Republican colleagues in Congress a hand at any time should they ever want to reclaim what many of them know in their hearts their party has forsaken.
So much is at stake.
Not only the future of Ukraine, but the peace and prosperity of the entire world.
We cannot stand by in silence as the Pax Americana that has kept us free and safe since World War II is jettisoned by a rogue president.
At all costs, that Pax Americana has to be treasured and preserved.
Thank you, I yield back.
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