Why Does The Liz Cheney Like Cauldrons?

Reject Liz Cheney’s War

The first step to take in returning to peaceful and normal relations with Russia will be to reject the Wyoming Republican’s warmongering.

By Chris Buskirk at American Greatness:

March 7, 2022

After nearly two weeks, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine continues with the Russian military steadily gaining ground and methodically taking control of key assets such as highways, bridges, airports, and power plants. As the Russians advance, they are also encircling and cutting off the main concentrations of the Ukrainian military. If those encirclements are completed, it could get ugly.

It’s into that cauldron that U.S. Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) would plunge the United States. On “Face the Nation” last week Cheney was nothing short of bellicose calling for escalation across the board. 

Cheney wants Biden to expand already sweeping sanctions and seize the Russian Central Bank’s foreign reserves. Weaponizing the dollar and the banking system in this way, she apparently fails to realize, carries with it risks to dollar-supremacy and the global dominance of American financial institutions. As other nations watch America use the dollar and important elements of the international banking infrastructure such as the SWIFT system as weapons, they will realize their own vulnerability and take steps to protect themselves from U.S.-dominated financial systems. China already offers alternatives and Biden’s actions are the best advertising for those systems they could ask for. 

There is also an immediate threat of a trust crisis in the European banking system, which has significant exposure to Russia. This could cause a contagion-effect that negatively impacts American banks and financial markets and through them, the lives of ordinary Americans. Remember what happened in 2008. 

But economic war, which would be bad enough, is not enough for Cheney. When asked, she refused to rule out direct American military intervention with Russia and, in fact, urged deploying American troops close to the Russian border and flooding Ukraine with weapons. Though many Americans favor “arming the Ukranians,” we should learn from rather than repeat past mistakes where we have followed this policy and enabled years-long civil wars as in Libya, Syria, and the former Yugoslavia—to say nothing of Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Americans are generally unaware that there has been ongoing war between Ukraine and ethnic Russians in the Donbass regions of Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014. That war, which already has claimed 14,000 lives, has been carried on in part with American complicity and American weapons. A policy like Cheney’s, which aims to turn all of Ukraine into a long-term, low-intensity, battlefield like the Donbass has been, is cruel in that it can serve only to increase the butcher’s bill paid by ordinary Ukranians. 

Cheney was also surprisingly blasé about the prospect of this regional conflict escalating to the point of nuclear war. Rather than trying to de-escalate the situation, it’s clear that Cheney is more interested in nuclear brinkmanship, which carries with it no potential upside but very significant risk for Americans.