US army secretary briefs ambassadors at ‘nightmare meeting’ in Kyiv on Friday after talks with Ukrainian leader
US officials have told Nato allies they expect to push president Volodymyr Zelenskyy into agreeing to a peace deal in the coming days, under the threat that if Kyiv does not sign, it will face a much worse deal in future.
The US army secretary, Dan Driscoll, briefed ambassadors from Nato nations at a meeting in Kyiv late on Friday, after talks with Zelenskyy and taking a phone call from the White House. “No deal is perfect, but it must be done sooner rather than later,” he told them, according to one person who was present.
The mood in the room was sombre, with several European ambassadors questioning the content of the deal and the way in which the US had conducted the negotiations with Russia without keeping allies informed.
Yeah cooperation is kind of important for humans, I agree that there’s not enough of it and that we are governed by a financial system that actively promotes competition and strife instead.
I think what you say, you are listing in a sense ideals. “More cooperation, more tolerance, encourage curiosity and passion”, basically “cut people some slack”, and I agree with that. I started out going to say, if you ask any person of any political conviction what kind of society they would want, they would all say something along the same lines- peace and understanding.
But then I thought about it for a moment and decided that in fact, people would answer very differently. Not in the goals but in the definitions and paths- “I would like to see more cooperation between multinational businesses and trade agreements allowing them to merge, I would like to see more tolerance for my personal bigoted beliefs, I would like people to be curious and passionate about the Nation’s path to racial supremacy”.
I believe that people like you and I, let’s say idealists, see the goals of cooperation and equality as ends in themselves. I believe that other people, the salt of the Earth kind, you know, morons, only see goals as instrumental for the agency of expressing their own personal dispositions.
I don’t know if that makes sense. I’m kind of drunk.