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**FEBRUARY 25, 2025**

On the Prospect website

Why Haven't House Democrats Moved to Impeach Scott Bessent?
[link removed]
There's mounting evidence that Donald Trump's Treasury secretary is not telling the truth about DOGE's infiltration of the federal payments system. BY KENNY STANCIL

Don't Expect Corporations to Save Us From Trump [link removed]
Restoration of democracy will require containing both Trumpism and corporate excess, which feed on each other. BY ROBERT KUTTNER

VA Research Funding Slashed [link removed]
Though not as prominent as the NIH, VA researchers play a major role in advancing basic health science. Hundreds of projects have been cut. BY SUZANNE GORDON & STEVE EARLY

Meyerson on TAP

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Hey, America: Here Are Our New Allies!

Trump swaps democracies for the tin-pot tyrants of what he's termed 'shithole nations.'

Yesterday, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution, on the third anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, condemning Russia for that invasion and demanding that it withdraw its forces to the long-established borders between the two countries (and the two Soviet "republics" before the USSR broke up in 1991).

Ninety-three nations voted for the resolution; only 18 opposed it, including Vladimir Putin's Russia and Donald Trump's USA. Here's how every member nation voted [link removed]. Every European nation supported the resolution with the sole exception of Viktor Orb??n's Hungary.

The list of the 17 nations that sided with the United States makes for interesting reading. In addition to Russia,

**America**, and
Hungary, here they are:

To begin, there's the one post-Soviet nation that transitioned from Russophile communism to Russophile authoritarian autocracy without so much as an intermission: Belarus.

Then there's North Korea, under the rule of the one government leader whose admiration for Stalin probably exceeds Putin's. In the Ukraine war, North Korea, of course, has provided troops to fill the gaps in Russia's lines.

Then there are eight African nations that Russian military aid, or military presence, or contracted-out Russian military presence (chiefly, the Wagner Group) helps keep those nations' rulers in power. In alphabetical order, there's Burkina Faso, ruled by its military. There's Burundi, where the government deals with dissent through torture and other bodily (and non-bodily) violations. There's the Central African Republic, whose military rulers have benefited for years from Wagner Group assistance. There's Equatorial Guinea, to which Russia has sent troops to
train the dictator's personal guard, lest anything befall him. There's Eritrea, to which Russia provides significant military and development aid in return for use of its seaports. There's Mali, led by a military junta that took power in 2020 with Russian support, and bolstered since by Russian and Wagner Group troops. There's Niger, where Russian-aided military leaders took power in a 2023 coup, expelling U.S. forces the following year. And there's Sudan, whose long-running war against Darfur has been sustained by Russian arms (according to various studies, 80 percent of Sudan's arms are Russian-supplied), and where Russia has constructed its own naval bases.

[link removed]

Russia isn't the only nation to have military dependents. Two of the countries that voted against the resolution are mid-Pacific island nations that are U.S. military dependencies: the Marshall
Islands and Palau, both of which host major American military installations and depend on U.S. aid for much of their existence.

Two Western Hemisphere nations joined Putin and Trump in opposing the resolution. The first is Nicaragua, which, under the rule of Daniel Ortega, went from being a left-wing autocracy to a right-wing autocracy. The second is Haiti, in a state of such profound disarray that it's difficult to locate the government not just politically but spatially (i.e., which parts of Haiti, if any, does it control), but which may be seeking to curry Trump's favor in return for more support for its very existence, or for not repatriating the more than half-million Haitians who've fled, legally, to the U.S.

Finally, there's Bibi Netanyahu's

**Israel**, which I suppose is trying to tell us that its support for deadly military invasions and rule isn't confined to Gaza and the West Bank.

And America? So much for our onetime allies and neighbors on the other side
of the U.N. vote; so much for our friends in Paris, London, Rome, Athens, Madrid, Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Toronto, Mexico City, Santiago, Amman, Tokyo, and Lagos; so much for nations that hold free elections and don't threaten or persecute the losers. Trump has repositioned us so that we're now the foundation for a sturdy grouping of backward, benighted autocrats; for, if you will, a NATO of his own: the New Alliance of Thuggish Oligarchs.

Do you feel more secure? Do you feel more American?

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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