It is well known that Donald Trump has an affinity for dictators, particularly Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation.
A Senate committee headed by Marco Rubio stated in 2019 that Russia had intervened in the Presidential Election of 2016 to favor Trump over Hillary Clinton.
Trump has denied this, but now he is pressuring Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, which has been fighting a brutal war of survival against Russia for nearly four years now, to give up part of their territory and other concessions to Russia, giving a deadline of Thanksgiving.
In the middle of this mess, Rubio, now Secretary of State, is caught in turmoil, and seems confused as to what is going on, as he has a long history of being hardline toward Russia and other autocracies!
Donald Trump has no problem becoming the new Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain, who conceded Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany in 1938, which did not prevent the coming of World War II.
What Trump is perpetrating is a threat to NATO and, specifically, to Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, all part of the old Soviet Union before 1989, and also to Poland.
Trump’s conceding to Putin is also a warning to Taiwan, with the growing threat that mainland China claims it will take over that island, as in their view, it is part of their nation, rather than an independent nation, as it has been since 1949.
THe lessons of history are being ignored, that giving in to authoritarians never works out well for democracies, particularly when there are unreliable allies.