The significant fact about Ukraine’s corruption scandal is that it is having one. A scandal, that is, as opposed to just a fact of life.

Last month an investigation led by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, an independent agency, accused allies of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, including two ministers, of graft and fraud to the tune of $100 million. The ministers have resigned. So has the president’s chief of staff, while a former business partner of Zelenskyy appears to have fled the country. The president himself is not accused of wrongdoing but has been politically damaged.

Corruption has always been what’s wrong with Ukraine. The investigation, and the legal and political accountability that have gone with it, is what’s right. A nation that can investigate its leaders even as it fights for its existence is one worth defending.

That’s the thought that should animate anyone not part of the peace-at-any-price wing of the Trump administration, whose leading lights, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, were in Moscow on Tuesday for personal talks with Vladimir Putin. The two real-estate developers were previously the authors, with Putin negotiator Kirill Dmitriev, of a 28-point plan devised in Miami that amounted to a Ukraine surrender document; the thinking behind it, as The Wall Street Journal reported last week, was even scarier.

“For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity,” the Journal noted. “By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe — while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.”

What’s wrong with this thinking? To adapt Winston Churchill’s line about Russia — “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” — the notion of peace through business is self-dealing wrapped in self-delusion inside self-harm.

History refutes it: Britain and Germany were major trading partners on the eve of World War I; economic ties between China and the West have grown as Beijing has become more truculent. Experience with Putin’s Russia refutes it: One Western company after another got burned — or worse — doing business in Russia in the era when the Kremlin supposedly welcomed foreign investment.

And common sense refutes it. If Putin were interested in peace and prosperity between Russia and the West, he would have pursued both over his quarter-century in power. But Putin does not want coexistence. He wants dominance, even at the cost of the 1 million casualties his forces have reportedly suffered so far. His role models aren’t Bill Gates or Konrad Adenauer. They’re Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible.

That’s not going to change. Putin is 73, sees himself as a world-historical figure and has thus far mainly succeeded in getting his way against adversaries he despises as weak, vain and corruptible. By sending two developers to negotiate with him, President Donald Trump merely ratified Putin’s attitude.

The significant danger now is that Putin will agree, conditionally, to some sort of Trump-endorsed “peace plan,” putting unbearable diplomatic pressure on Kyiv to accept it. Among other effects, this will fracture Ukrainian politics, fracture the NATO alliance, rescue Russia’s economy, strengthen pro-Russian voices in European politics and give Russia time to recover its military strength. In exchange, Ukraine will get the kind of paper promises it got back in 1994, when it gave up its nuclear weapons for nonbinding security guarantees — another reminder that disarmament is as often a road to war as it is to peace.

A question for Marco Rubio: How good will U.S. security guarantees for Kyiv be in 2029, when he’s a private citizen, JD Vance is president and Putin is hungry again for another choice cut of Ukraine?

There’s always the chance that Putin will overplay his hand, once again giving Trump the feeling that the Russian is “tapping us along,” as he put it in May, and reviving the administration’s appetite to defend Ukraine. Besides being the right thing to do, it would signal to China that the administration will not bargain away the independence of Taiwan for the sake of lucrative business opportunities for the Trump family and its friends.

Zelenskyy and his remaining supporters in Europe shouldn’t count on it. They may soon have to make a terrible choice between grasping for a temporary peace or continuing to suffer through a punishing war. Far be it for a columnist writing from the safety of New York to offer his advice, but another line from Churchill is worth recalling: “Nations that went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.”

The larger warning here is for free nations everywhere, particularly in Europe. The era of Pax Americana may soon be drawing to a close. From then on it will be every region, or country, for itself, against emboldened and avaricious adversaries. For a sense of how to fight, look no further than the Ukrainians whom we abandon at our peril and to our shame.

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.

 

By ADRIAN SAINZ, Associated Press

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Steve Cropper, the lean, soulful guitarist and songwriter who helped anchor the celebrated Memphis backing band Booker T. and the M.G.’s at Stax Records and co-wrote the classics “Green Onions,” “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay” and “In the Midnight Hour,” has died. He was 84.

Pat Mitchell Worley, president and CEO of the Soulsville Foundation, said Cropper’s family told her that Cropper died on Wednesday in Nashville. The foundation operates the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, located at the site of the former Stax Records, where Cropper worked for years.

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The guitarist, songwriter and record producer was not known for flashy playing, but his spare, catchy licks and solid rhythm chops helped define Memphis soul music. His very name was immortalized in the 1967 smash “Soul Man,” recorded by Sam & Dave. Midway, singer Sam Moore calls out “Play it, Steve!” as Cropper pulls off a characteristically tight, ringing riff, a slide sound that Cropper used a Zippo lighter to create. The exchange was reenacted in the late 1970s when Cropper joined the John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd act “The Blues Brothers” and played on their hit cover of “Soul Man.”

Cropper was born near Dora, Missouri, but moved with his family to Memphis when he was 9 and got his first mail-order guitar at age 14, according to his website, playitsteve.com. Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed and Chet Atkins were among his early influences.

Cropper was a Stax artist before the label was even called Stax, which Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton had founded as Satellite Records in 1957. In the early 1960s, Satellite signed up Cropper and his instrumental band the Royals Spades. The band soon changed its name to the Mar-Keys and had a hit with the funky “Last Night.” Satellite soon was renamed Stax; a California label with the same name had threatened legal action.

At Stax, some of the Mar-Keys became the label’s horn section while Cropper and other Mar-Keys eventually formed Booker T. and the MG’s. Featuring Cropper, keyboard player Booker T. Jones, bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn and drummer Al Jackson, Booker T. and the M.G.’s were known for their hit instrumentals “Green Onions,” “Hang ‘Em High” and “Time Is Tight,” and backed Otis Redding, Sam & Dave and other artists. The racially integrated band, a rarity in its day, was so admired that even non-Stax artists recorded with them, notably Wilson Pickett.

In the mid-1960s, Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler brought Pickett to Memphis to work with the Stax musicians. During a 2015 gathering with the National Music Publishers Association, Cropper acknowledged he had never heard of Pickett before working with him. He found some gospel recordings by Pickett, was taken by the line “I’ll see my Jesus in the midnight hour” and with a slight change helped write a secular standard.

“The man up there has been forgiving me for this ever since!” he said.

Cropper was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 as a member of Booker T. and the M.G.’s. The same year, Cropper, Dunn and Jones were part of the house band for an all-star tribute at Madison Square Garden to Bob Dylan, with other performers including Neil Young, George Harrison and Stevie Wonder. (Al Jackson died in 1975, Dunn in 2012).

Rolling Stone magazine ranked Cropper 39th on its 100 Greatest Guitarists list, calling him “the secret ingredient in some of the greatest rock and soul songs.”

He played guitar on hits by Eddie Floyd, Wilson Pickett and many others, but was especially close to Redding. In an interview on his website, Cropper recalled collaborating on “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” completed shortly before Redding’s death in a December 1967 plane crash and a No. 1 hit in 1968.

The brooding, folkish ballad was a departure from Redding’s signature soul sound and a bittersweet reflection on his triumphant appearance a few months earlier at the Monterey Pop Festival. Cropper would remember adding the final touches on the recording while still grieving for Redding.

“We had been looking for the crossover song,” he said. “This song, we knew we had it.”

Cropper was in the 1980 movie “The Blues Brothers” and its follow-up, “Blues Brothers 2000,” portraying “The Colonel” in the Blues Brothers band. In real life, he toured with them.

He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005 in New York City, and two years later received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement.

Over the long weekend, new reporting from the Washington Post indicated that U.S. forces conducting counter-drug operations in the Caribbean have fired second missiles at people who survived an initial strike and were left swimming in the water. Should the reports be confirmed, this would mark a stark departure from long-standing U.S. military practice and from the most basic prohibitions in the laws of war.

If the United States has been firing second missiles at the survivors of its own strikes, we are no longer debating policy. We are describing a nation committing the very acts it once prosecuted others for. We have become what we once condemned.

There is a rule every professional military knows it cannot break: You do not kill people who can no longer fight. This restraint is not because it is merciful or sentimental. You don’t do it because the moment you do, you are no longer engaged in war. You are no longer fighting an enemy. You are killing for the state.

For weeks, the country has argued over legal memos, theories of presidential authority and the semantics of “armed conflict.” All of that obscures a simpler truth. Killing survivors is not a legal gray area, a battlefield innovation or a partisan dispute. It is a war crime. Full stop.

The Geneva Conventions forbid violence against anyone “placed hors de combat,” or “out of the fight.” The Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual restates this without qualification. Section 18.3.2.1 even states, “For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.” Every American service member learns it before deploying. Killing people who are swimming for their lives is not a “disputed framework.” It is the abandonment of law.

In three decades of service, I watched how the institution quietly conditions people for moments like this — not through malice, but through the steady rewarding of compliance and the quiet sidelining of candor. Call it professionalism, call it discipline, call it “good order,” but the result is predictable: By the time a real moral test arrives, most of the system has already learned that silence is the safest choice.

We know that a senior lawyer at U.S. Southern Command raised legal concerns and was sidelined from the process. Silencing a dissenting voice is not the act of a confident military. It is the act of one that knows its actions cannot withstand scrutiny. We know the SOUTHCOM commander, Admiral Alvin Holsey, abruptly announced his retirement amid these operations. While we do not yet know whether he objected, resisted or simply stepped aside — the effect was unmistakable: The last check on illegality disappeared, and the killing continued. That is not professionalism. That is a force conditioned to obey at the moment it most needed to resist.

A second missile does not fire itself. Killing survivors requires the participation or assent of entire layers of command: intelligence analysts, targeteers, pilots, strike cell leads, watch officers, military lawyers, commanders, post-strike assessors. This was not a lone aviator making a catastrophic judgment. This was institutional, and the institution committed a crime.

The cost of this atrocity is suffered by those least empowered to stop it. The moral burden of these acts does not fall on memo-writers in Washington. It falls on the officers and enlisted personnel ordered to carry them out. Young Americans — some barely old enough to drink — will carry this for the rest of their lives. Some will rationalize it. Some will bury it. Some will break under it. A nation that orders its warriors to kill the helpless forfeits the moral standing to ask anything further of them.

Let us also drop the fiction that this is some new legal frontier. It is not. The United States has condemned the extrajudicial killing of suspected drug traffickers in the Philippines. We have condemned regimes that shot the wounded or the drowning. We have denounced dictators who treated suspicion as a license to kill.

Firing on the defenseless is not a gray area or “irregular warfare.” Our uniforms may be cleaner, the legal memos more elaborate, the language more sanitized — but the act is the same. These are war crimes — ordered from the very top of the chain of command. And the consequence is unmistakable: the collapse of the moral credibility of American power.

There must be investigations. There must be consequences — reaching as far up the chain of command as the facts demand. A military that kills the helpless is not operating in a fog of war. It has crossed the final boundary separating a professional force from a system designed to execute, not to think. Once that boundary is breached, there is no such thing as “good order and discipline.” There is only obedience in service of harm.

A nation that orders its service members to kill the defenseless is not being protected by its military. It is morally injuring its warriors, dishonoring the institution they serve and disfiguring itself.

And a nation that tolerates this — without outrage, without accountability, without demanding that it stop immediately — can make no claim to exceptionalism. It has surrendered its soul.

Jon Duffy is a retired Navy captain. His active duty career included command at sea and national security roles. He writes about leadership and democracy. He wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

 

The Trump administration was voted in to turn price hikes around and make things more affordable. It’s time to try harder.

The last six weeks of the year are critical for the U.S. economy — retailers traditionally reap their highest sales figures, create seasonal employment and see a boost in profits.

It’s also, of course, a crucial time for Americans hoping to buy holiday gifts (and maybe snag a little something for themselves). But retailers aren’t offering as many seasonal jobs this year, the forecast for holiday spending is mixed, and prices remain stubbornly high.

Ornaments that previously would have been stocking-stuffers were over my threshold. It’s the same sticker shock I’ve come to expect at the grocery store, especially when stocking up to feed extended family. (Friend to friend: “If you were going to save yourself some work and buy store-bought Christmas cookies this year, the cost of premade baked goods is up too, so pull down the flour.”)

Free-marketeers aren’t usually the life of the party (I say this with love) but their absence will be felt this December. It seems we are stuck between a protectionist regime on the political right and resurgent socialist energy on the political left. Not good news for consumers.

Members of the Trump administration have pointed to data to refute the bad economic vibes. To some extent, they are right. There’s been “savings” from a reduction in inflation relative to the runaway Biden era. Real incomes are up by nearly 1% year-over-year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Certain things like gasoline and interest rates (and thus mortgage rates) are down. And we mustn’t forget the tax relief passed as part of the reconciliation package.

On the other hand, that tax relief won’t be felt until April 2026, way after holiday presents are bought and paid for.  Although price increases are indeed lower than during the Biden era, prices themselves remain elevated and some are rising. Interest rates still feel high to an electorate accustomed to the historically low levels of the 2010s.

Affordability is a bipartisan concern. Trump is 39 points underwater on the cost of living, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. Anxiety about inflation is top of mind for voters all across America — in college towns and Evangelical communities, in rural areas and big cities, and among white, Hispanic and Black counties.

Some in the White House say prices are only elevated because we’re coming off the Biden-era bender. By this logic, they just need more time to see things right. But just as during the Biden administration, the rise in prices under the Trump administration is an unforced economic error. Don’t take my word for it: They are admitting it themselves, albeit quietly.

What we are seeing is two sides of the same coin (recall, inflation is too much money chasing too few goods). Although many countries experienced unavoidable pandemic-era inflation from supply chain backups, the Biden administration added to the problem in the U.S. by passing massive stimulus packages after the economy had largely stabilized. A demand-side error. The Trump administration’s rise in certain prices is also an unforced error, simply in reverse, by introducing massive tariffs and workplace raids and limiting the flow of labor and goods. A supply-side error.

Realizing their political liability, the Trump administration has lowered tariffs on household items such as coffee, bananas, beef and tomatoes. This is a good start. If prices fall it will be because of rollbacks like these — and more of them. All it takes is a slice of humble pie (surely there are Thanksgiving leftovers) and the swipe of a pen!

But we’re not there yet. This holiday season, many American small businesses and consumers remain hard-hit. For them, tariffs feel personal. My siblings run an online store selling rugs part-time while raising lots of kids. Turns out, Turkish rugs aren’t made in the U.S. They are taking home less profit, just in time for Christmas.

I have a friend who runs a successful clothing business that heavily relies on foreign imports. During the 2024 presidential campaign, this friend was a big Trump booster, mostly excited about the Make America Healthy Again movement. She even had a keychain on her purse that was what can best be described as a Trump troll, a plastic body with fuzzy long hair. I was with her recently and her business has taken a hit; they are letting someone go and cancelling year-end bonuses.  So much for the funny keychain.

I recently ordered something from Etsy. I was surprised to find that the item wouldn’t be delivered until I wrote an additional $32 check to the U.S. Postal Service for the tariff amount, which will go straight from my pockets into Uncle Sam’s coffers. At first, I thought it was a scam, until I paid and my item was promptly delivered. Try to tell me that a tariff is not a tax.

Here’s the problem with “affordability.” The Trump administration says, we’re better for prices than the Democrats. The Democrats say, we’re better for prices than the GOP. Each side has some good ideas and some bad ones. And around and around we go.

We have to stop and get the fundamentals right, stop being our own worst enemies.  This includes but is not limited to: tax and regulatory restraint, reducing the deficit, free and fair trade, an independent Federal Reserve, predictable policy.

If Santa is listening, can you drop economics textbooks down a few chimneys in Washington, DC?

Abby McCloskey is a columnist, podcast host, and consultant. She directed domestic policy on two presidential campaigns and was director of economic policy at the American Enterprise Institute.