Letters to the Editor | March 19, 2025

The writers of the Constitution struggled to find the right checks they knew were needed to keep the balance of power between the three branches of government. They decided to give Congress control over spending, the so-called power of the purse. They decided to give the president the power over the armed forces, thus the power over the gun. To the U.S. Supreme Court, they gave the final say in disputes between the other two branches. That may not seem like much power, but former Justice Robert Jackson, in a famous quote, disagreed when he wrote: “We are not final because we are infallible. We are infallible because we are final.” Infallibility notwithstanding, the danger I see looming on the horizon is that Donald Trump, who respects no laws or the Constitution, will one day say to hell with the court and encircle the Supreme Court with tanks. Then we will see how final the court really is.

Leon Williams, Philadelphia

Donald Trump is wrong that Ukraine started its war with Russia, but the president is on to something about what precipitated the conflict. The word unprovoked has been echoed repeatedly across the media with regard to Russia’s invasion. However, that descriptor obscures a long history of provocative behavior by the United States regarding Ukraine and Russia.

As part of the deal that finalized the reunification of Germany, James Baker, President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state, promised Moscow in 1990 that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward” beyond East Germany. However, Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush violated that promise. In 1997, dozens of U.S. foreign policy veterans sent Clinton a joint letter calling “the current U.S.-led effort to expand NATO ... a policy error of historic proportions.” Around the same time, George Kennan — architect of the U.S. Cold War strategy of containment — told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that NATO expansion was a “tragic mistake” and “the beginning of a new cold war.”

Despite these warnings, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were added to NATO in 1999, with Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia following in 2004. Kyiv has long proclaimed a desire to join NATO — and it is free to do so if the military alliance does not threaten any other nation. But its membership is a direct threat to Russia’s security. NATO is not a social club, but an alliance with Russia as the stated enemy. If NATO missile systems were deployed in Ukraine, their flight time to Moscow would be less than 10 minutes, a huge challenge Russia was expected to accept.

Unfortunately, the U.S. refused to negotiate on Russia’s core concerns: NATO’s military activity in Ukraine, and the deployment of nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe. Instead of addressing Russian concerns, the U.S. instead chose to pour hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine. Considering this, Russia’s actions hardly seem unprovoked.

Andrew Mills, Lower Gwynedd

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