Re: “Zelenskyy leaves White House without signing minerals deal after Oval Office blowup” (Feb. 28, Nation & World):
Rising up in one other America, I recall despairing when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957 that our nation was completed, crushed. After all, I used to be 10 years previous on the time and could be forgiven for naiveté.
On Feb. 28, I watched as our president and vp tried to extort Volodymyr Zelenskyy. They urged that he “repay” us for the American armaments we have now furnished Ukraine over the previous three years by ceding entry to that nation’s mineral assets in perpetuity — not that we’d be giving something in return.
It was a shameful second for Individuals that tarnishes our popularity and undermines all the things we thought we stood for. No extra rights of sovereignty for us. No extra dedication to democracy, freedom of thought, liberty of affiliation. We now stand with North Korea, Russia, Hungary and China as a colossus of thug nations keen to extort what we will or steal what we will’t acquire by way of threats.
Now my adolescent fears are realized. We’ve got been reworked, humiliated, subsumed. We’re all the things these conservative hawks, who at the moment are hiding behind the couches of their congressional places of work, warned over all these many years may come to move.
Linda Beeman, Clinton
