Steve Bannon: Ukraine risks being ‘Trump’s Vietnam’

Steve Bannon.
Photo: ctvnews.ca

Donald Trump is in danger of failing to make a clean break with Ukraine and could be sucked deeper into Vladimir Putin’s war — just as Richard Nixon was stung in his attempts to pull out of Vietnam — Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon warned in a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO.

The host of the influential “War Room” podcast is girding for a major political showdown over United States intervention in Ukraine. He advocates ending America’s all-important military aid to Kyiv, but fears his old boss is going to fall into a trap being set by an unlikely alliance of the U.S. defense industry, the Europeans and even some of Bannon’s own friends, whom he argues are now misguided. These include Keith Kellogg, a retired U.S. general who is Trump’s pick to be special envoy to Ukraine and Russia.

“If we aren’t careful, it will turn into Trump’s Vietnam. That’s what happened to Richard Nixon. He ended up owning the war and it went down as his war not Lyndon Johnson’s,” Bannon said.

Kellogg argues any deal to end the three-year-long war needs to include solid security guarantees for Ukraine to ensure Russia won’t just invade again. And Kellogg has talked about maintaining U.S. military aid to apply pressure on Moscow to agree a decent deal.

Despite his friendship with Kellogg, Bannon thinks this kind of delay will only heighten the risk of the U.S. being pulled deeper into a war he believes is unwinnable and one that isn’t in America’s national interest. Behind the scenes, he’s lobbying furiously for Trump to declare in his inauguration speech on Monday that he will end the war quickly.

On his daily radio show and podcast, Bannon’s been campaigning for this announcement on Day One. “I’m going nuts right now to make sure there’s something on Monday, an announcement. Because you have Kellogg saying it will take 100 days, the old foreign policy establishment are saying six months,” Bannon said.

He argues Trump should spell out to Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy “there’s a new sheriff in town, and we’re going to get a deal done and we’re going to get it done quickly.” Zelenskyy should, he goes on, take note of how Trump steamrollered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into accepting a cease-fire-for-hostages deal with Hamas.

He was scathing about the Europeans and the transatlantic alliance. “If you look at NATO, I don’t think it can put together two combat divisions of Europeans that are ready to fight,” he scoffed, complaining NATO had turned into an American protectorate, rather than being an alliance.

“Europe has gotten away with early retirement and full health care because they don’t pay for their own defense,” he protested.

“The Ukraine war is the central screw up of Europe over the last couple of years. You have a million dead or wounded Ukrainians. And we’re going to end up, best case, we’re going to end up exactly where this thing started, as I said three years ago. And it’s because you have Boris Johnson and [French President Emmanuel] Macron, all these fantasists that won’t pay for their own defense. They want to be big shots. They all want to be Winston Churchill with other people’s money and other people’s lives,” he says.

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