Tuesday, August 19, 2025

Part I

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We Will Know Quickly If There is a Ukraine Peace Agreement Coming: But President Trump is Pushing Hard and Monday's Meetings with Allies Were Crucial

Let’s take a quick look at what has taken place just over the last several days in terms of Russia’s war against Ukraine and efforts to achieve peace.

Last Friday in Alaska, Russian president Vladimir Putin came to meet with US president Donald Trump. The meeting was only about three hours, most of the sessions absolutely in private. President Trump came out saying that certain understandings have been made. There were certain obstacles, hard issues to work through. It was also clear that immediately after the meeting with President Putin, President Trump on Air Force One began calling world leaders, most importantly, Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, but also major European and NATO leaders as well.

And then those NATO leaders came with President Zelensky to the White House yesterday. And so there’s a flurry of activity here that reminds us of some of the hottest eras in the Cold War. This really is an unusual situation. I think a lot of people look at this and think, “Well, it’s just more news.” No, there is a lot going on here and there’s so much at stake. Russia made that abundantly, tragically clear by launching an attack again from the air against Ukraine just to make a point. This is Vladimir Putin to a tee, just to make a point about how deadly serious Russia is, and emphasis upon deadly.

One family was killed, including children and a grandparent. Just another indication of the brutality of Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Another indication, no doubt, coming from Vladimir Putin of how intent Russia is on holding this territory. If there is to be a peace, it will be a peace on Vladimir Putin’s terms. 

Now, here’s what realpolitik, realism, and foreign policy comes down to. Right now, Vladimir Putin, as the invader, holds the upper hand. Now, I think this, from a worldview perspective, is really interesting because there are an awful lot of people in the West, defenders of freedom, friends of Ukraine who say it’s not fair that Vladimir Putin is in the driver’s seat having most of the initiative here. Okay, it’s not fair. We don’t live in a fair world. It’s unjust, it’s unrighteous, it’s morally wrong, but it’s also true.

And so no settled peace, not even a ceasefire, but certainly no settled peace is going to take place on anything other than Vladimir Putin’s terms. That doesn’t mean his terms alone. And this is where President Zelensky of Ukraine, along with President Trump and NATO leaders and other Western presidents and prime ministers, they can have a lot of effect here.

And so Russia has interests that they can play upon, and these leaders behind Ukraine, and I put President Trump and the United States in that category, are in the position of trying to achieve the greatest peace possible, the greatest arrangement possible, the most intact Ukraine possible, the safest Ukraine from a future Russian aggression possible in terms of these arrangements. And it looks like that at least some progress was made yesterday.

At the end of the meeting, which went into the early evening yesterday, it was also very clear that President Trump said he was going to call President Putin and see if they could actually reach an agreement at least on future meetings, a meeting between the Russian president and the Ukrainian president. For one thing, that is going to be at least somewhat necessary in this. I think we can see that. But remember that at least a part of Vladimir Putin’s aims in invading Ukraine was to get rid of President Zelensky. And so that’s a factor in all of this. And then President Trump said there might be another meeting in which he would be president. Some of the other leaders there in Europe and NATO might also be present.

We do have to hope and pray this is a breakthrough or leads to a breakthrough because it is clear that the situation right now is two nations bleeding out, and our main concern here is the nation that was attacked and that is Ukraine. But we’re also looking at the fact there are a lot of interests on the table here. Vladimir Putin has his interest, and right now occupies a lot of territory.

Now, one of the things that became clear yesterday in the news is that in the conversation with President Trump, we now know Vladimir Putin made clear he wants not only the land that Russia currently occupies, but he wants to fill out the map in terms of the Donbas and the other regions there in the east of Ukraine in order to achieve the line that he would accept. And that’s a very bitter pill because that would mean not only that Ukraine would, if not concede, it would at least recognize Russian occupation of those lands, but it might be lands in addition to what Russia already has.

On the other hand, the other game-changer in all this, and I discussed it yesterday on The Briefing, is that there’s a conversation about President Trump, that means the United States and other Western nations, assuring Ukraine of something like Article 5 protections. That’s a reference to NATO protections, and that means mutual defense. It means if Ukraine would be invaded, there would be an assurance of military action on Ukraine’s behalf on the part of the nations that would agree to the Article 5 agreement.

Now, at the same time, President Trump has made very clear it’s not officially NATO that’s off the table for Ukraine. It’s not officially Article 5. But now the White House has said that Vladimir Putin, at least according to the White House, does recognize it as something like that kind of security guarantee is going to be necessary for any kind of lasting peace. And Russia has an interest in that kind of peace as well. But that interest is very different than what the interest of other nations, especially democratic nations, might be.

Now, here’s something to think about. Vladimir Putin has transformed Russia into a war state. That’s more easily done than undone. So Vladimir Putin is not really in any kind of political danger in Russia, but he is looking at the fact that Russia’s economy has very little runway ahead before it’s going to face some very real problems if it doesn’t get relief from some of the sanctions and restrictions and frankly, some of the costs of the war in Ukraine. So that’s playing into the expectation that there might actually be some kind of peace or at least some kind of peace agreement out of this.

The other thing to recognize is that Ukraine, defensively, has been forced into a similar position. And so at least a part of what we have to recognize in Ukraine is that if there is some settlement to this war, the government in Ukraine is subject to dangers the government in Russia is not. And that means, say, some kind of a decision by the voters in Ukraine to take a very different direction. In other words, in Ukraine, President Zelensky has to worry about democratic credibility.

Vladimir Putin, by definition as an autocrat, doesn’t have to worry about that. At this point, what we need to watch is what happens over the next several days. If this is not a genuine movement towards some kind of agreement, I think we’ll find out pretty fast. President Trump basically said that we’re going to know pretty quickly and we’ll know at least in general terms how Russia is responding, not so much by what it says, but remember this, by what it does.

Part II

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Canada is Turning Itself Into a Death Cult: Assisted Suicide Has Turned the Whole Moral World of Canada Upside Down

But next, I want to come back to North America, and I want to tell you upfront, I intended to begin with this issue because of its importance. The urgency of the meetings that took place yesterday at the White House meant I needed to discuss that first, and that is a huge development. But in worldview terms, I don’t think there’s a bigger story than what I want to turn to now. And as I tell you what we’re going to talk about, I want to measure my words very carefully.

And so carefully measuring my words, here’s what I want to tell you. The nation of Canada is turning itself into a death cult. It’s doing so through euthanasia, assisted suicide, what the preferred term there is medical assistance in dying, that’s a euphemism. But we need to realize a threshold has been passed. And we also need to realize that what we see documented now in Canada is the momentum, the trajectory, the inevitable slide that takes place, euthanasia, assisted suicide. Once you begin to make this legal and thus, in some sense, morally acceptable, before you know it, all the rules you put in place about who’s this limited to, all those go out the door and they go out the door fast.

The Atlantic, a major magazine in the United States, not conservative, not Christian, a major secular thought magazine in the United States has made that clear with a big investigative report entitled “Canada Is Killing Itself.” It’s by Elaina Plott Calabro. And indeed, even as the subhead says, “The country gave its citizens the right to die, doctors are struggling to keep up with the demand.”

All right, we’ve seen this before, but I think a lot of listeners to The Briefing might not know some of the history. We have seen this over the course of the last 40 years, mostly in European nations such as Belgium and the Netherlands. We have seen a slide towards physician-assisted suicide, in particular legalized euthanasia. And this euphemism M-A-I-D, Medical Assistance in Dying, is the way to try to hide the moral importance of the issue we’re talking about here.

We’re talking about a nation killing itself. As I say, Canada is turning itself into a death cult. And The Atlantic hits this squarely by talking about a recent conference on euthanasia. And to the credit of The Atlantic, it calls it a euthanasia conference. I appreciate the candor. “The euthanasia conference was held at the Sheraton. Some 300 Canadian professionals, most of them clinicians, had arrived for the annual event. There were lunch buffets and complementary tote bags. Attendees could look forward to a Friday night social outing with a DJ at an event space above a place in downtown Vancouver.”

“The most important thing one doctor told me is the networking.” Here’s what follows. It sounds like any convention, maybe a convention of medical professionals, doctors and others. Here’s how the story continues, “Which is to say that it might’ve been any other convention in Canada. Over the past decade, practitioners of euthanasia have become as familiar as orthodontists or plastic surgeons with the mundane rituals of lanyards and drink tickets and, ‘It’s been so long’ outside the ballroom of a four-star hotel. The difference is that 10 years ago, what many of the attendees do here for work would’ve been considered homicide.” Let that sink in. What these convention attendees now say is work, just a decade ago in Canada would’ve legally been defined as homicide, and thus one of the most serious of all criminal acts. 

So what changed? Well, what changed most was action by Canada’s Parliament in the year 2016 to legalize euthanasia. It was defined again as MAID, Medical Assistance in Dying, an effort to try to euphemize the evil of what’s taking place here.

And as The Atlantic says, “It was an open-ended medical experiment.” Now, here’s what I want you to note. It’s never sold that way. As a matter of fact, it’s always accompanied by lies, saying this isn’t going to happen. You look at Belgium, you look at the Netherlands, you look right now at England, but to tell you the truth, Canada is becoming, tragically, the quintessential case. You say this, medical assistance in dying is going to be limited to persons who have a certifiable, documented, confirmed medical diagnosis of impending death, and they’re in excruciating distress. It’s going to be limited to them. And of course, this means adults in an end stage of some kind of terminal disease. You say it’s going to be limited there. Trust me, it’s going to be limited there. The next thing you know in Canada right now, all that’s basically out the window right down to the fact that there are people openly suggesting that teenagers and children should be allowed to end their own lives this way. And already in Canada, you don’t even need a terminal diagnosis, you don’t even need to have the hint of a terminal diagnosis. All you have to say is that you are experiencing sufficient suffering, that this is the way out.

Now, there’s another huge worldview issue here, and I want to give The Atlantic credit again. I want to give this writer, Elaina Plott Calabro, credit. She uses the term euthanasia. She doesn’t euphemize it. She calls it euthanasia, means good death, going back to the Greek. It’s a lie in itself, but at least it indicates the moral nature of what’s going on here. It’s intentionally bringing about death.

The next thing is repeatedly in the article, she understands exactly what’s at stake. After human dignity, what’s at stake? The claim of human autonomy. So even on the first page, she writes this, “At the center of the world’s fastest growing euthanasia regime is the concept of patient autonomy. Honoring a patient’s wishes is, of course, a core value in medicine, but here it has become paramount allowing Canada’s MAID advocates to push for expansion in terms that brook no argument, refracted through the language of equality, access, and compassion. As Canada contends with an ever evolving claim [that is ever-evolving claim on the right to die], the demand for euthanasia has begun to outstrip the capacity of clinicians to provide it.”

By the way, cited in this article is one clinician who has performed more than 400 assisted suicides as the medical authority. And she, by the way, has been brought up on at least some medical investigations. But you know what? Just as you see in Europe, there’s virtually no way of convicting anyone for anything like, say, homicide when you go down the path of legalizing physician or medical clinician assisted aid in dying. It’s becoming clear that everything we would and have been warning about, about physician-assisted suicide comes into play here. For one thing, you have this unbelievable protean projection of personal autonomy, of human autonomy.

Now, let’s just note human autonomy is not a nothing. It’s something in the Christian worldview. There’s human responsibility. We are separate human beings made in God’s image. There is a limited amount of autonomy, but we need to recognize the Christian worldview says our autonomy is incredibly limited. Let me tell you the two most obvious ways our autonomy is limited. We don’t choose to be born. There’s the first one.

And then number two, according to the Christian worldview, we don’t decide the length of our days and when we’re going to die. The second thing is, when it comes to limitations on autonomy, we lack fundamental control over the most basic issues of our lives. Not only do we not decide to be, we don’t decide when to be born, to whom to be born in what circumstance. We can play around with what it would’ve been like to have been born in the 16th century in China. But you know what? It’s a mind game because we don’t have the autonomy to determine that we are, when we are, where we are. All of this is a matter of given.

And furthermore, even when we claim we’re exercising autonomy, “I’m going to buy that car rather than that car,” the reality is even that’s in a more limited frame than we want to admit. Even as economists would say, all your autonomy and projecting which car you’re going to buy is completely dependent upon which ones are available for sale. So again, we exercise some autonomy. I can decide what I’m going to order on a dinner menu in a restaurant, but you know what? I can’t order what they don’t have. And furthermore, anyone in a restaurant knows your autonomy is not all that clear in some of those situations. Anyway, there it is, buddy. Eat it.

But the Christian worldview also reminds us that we don’t have autonomy over right and wrong. We don’t have autonomy over the most important moral issues because we didn’t create ourselves, we’re made by a creator. The Creator has addressed us with law, and again, from the Christian worldview, these laws are universally applicable by natural law. And this is where we understand that the first responsibility of civilization is to respect; civilizations, governments don’t grant the sanctity of life. They are to respect it. It’s a pre-existent pre-political reality. Again, basic Christian worldview principles, we need to be reminded of this.

What’s going on in Canada? Well, it did begin in 2016 with Parliament legalizing euthanasia. But what’s happened is all the barriers that were put in place then have been falling one by one. The likelihood of an imminent death, gone. The necessity of basically even a medical diagnosis, gone. The barrier that this would be limited to persons of sound mind, gone. One woman had to be held down in order for this to be administered. And again, no criminal consequences on the other side.

An entire moral world is turned upside down. Here, let me read to you one section from this report in The Atlantic. It’s about a neurologist from Nova Scotia, who told the reporter that people ask how much trauma’s involved in his work as a assisted suicide provider. “Isn’t it so emotionally draining?” And then the article says, “In fact, for him it’s just the opposite. He finds euthanasia to be energizing, the most meaningful work of his career. ‘It’s a happy, sad, right?'” He explained, “It’s really sad that you were in so much pain. It’s sad that your family is wracked with grief, but we’re so happy you got what you wanted.”

Let me tell you one of the chilling things on this article. The reporter accompanied at least some clinicians as this happened, and you know what? They go in, they do it, they leave and they stop at a coffee shop or whatever. They go home, they go out and have dinner. In other words, this begins to become routinized death. It also inevitably becomes celebrated death. It’s the culture of death bearing its teeth right across our northern border. And this article is a massive article, I can’t tell you how important I think it is.

As this massive article makes clear, we’re now not just talking about adults of sound mind, however you’re going to define that, we’re also talking about this being extended to those who are in distress and even to children and teenagers. And by the way, the logic of this means you have to, right? You have to, because let’s just follow with the logic in worldview terms. The logic is personal autonomy is everything. Okay? Well, guess what? How do you say that a 19-year-old has, in moral terms, a lot more, say, personal autonomy than a 14-year-old? It’s really not a plausible argument over time.

Part III

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If Autonomy in Death is Sacrosanct, Is There Anyone Who Shouldn't be Helped to Die?: The Idolatry of Personal Autonomy is Deadly

If you make human autonomy, your idolatrous singular good, guess what? Everybody’s autonomous. That’s recognized in this article fairly early on. Listen to this, “Has Canada itself gotten what it wanted? Nine years after the legalization of assisted death, Canada’s leaders seem to regard MAID from a strange, almost anthropological remove: as if the future of euthanasia is no more within their control than the laws of physics; as if continued expansion is not a reality, the government is choosing so much as conceding. This is the story,” the writer tells us, “of an ideology in motion of what happens when a nation enshrines a right before reckoning with the totality of its logic.”

And then listen to this, the final line in this paragraph, “If autonomy in death is sacrosanct, is there anyone who shouldn’t be helped to die?” You see how that logic works? It’s one of the deadliest logics I can imagine. It is the logic of the culture of death. It is taking place to an extent I don’t think many of us can actually even intellectually grasp, right across America’s northern border. The numbers are absolutely horrifying. The stories are even worse.

Let me deal with some of the smaller numbers. Here’s one clinician, has “thus far provided for more than 600 patients.” Another one I mentioned, over 400. And the numbers just keep going up. When you think about the total numbers in Canada, it’s now reaching from the hundreds to the thousands, and it is putting assisted death in the top ranks of the causes of death in the entire country. It’s about one out of 20 deaths at present. Think about that, one out of 20. Think about the number of deaths in a nation. Do the math.

Okay, what about human autonomy here, this false, totally unbiblical claim of personal autonomy? In this report, it becomes very clear that human autonomy is really being warped into something that, of course, the Parliament in 2016 didn’t explicitly affirm. Of course, I’m not going to let them off the hook. If they didn’t affirm it explicitly, they opened the door and the door can’t be closed at this point. So for instance, the law passed in 2016 said that this kind of assistance could be given when there is a grievous and irremediable medical condition, a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability.

However, the law didn’t define incurable. The law doesn’t define any of those terms. So in other words, they just left the barn door wide open. They had to know they were. They were told they were, given the experience in other nations, mostly European nations. But then get this, talking about personal autonomy, “A medical condition is incurable if it could not be cured by means acceptable to the patient.”

So there’s personal autonomy. You get to decide on your own as an individual human being if your malady is incurable. You don’t even have to define it. It’s just enough that you say it. It’s also very interesting in this article, there’s almost no one who’s totally against physician-assisted suicide. Instead, you got people who are mildly for it and those who are aggressively for it. And I think, journalistically in the article, the shock issue, and let’s face it in this kind of report, there’s just absolutely shocking material.

How many people, again, are in the hundreds of “patients” they have “served” by a physician-assisted suicide. But there’s also the other position which is described in this article as kind of a middle position, muddy middle is the way one person described it. In other words, they’re for it, not as aggressively for it as the persons who have had clients or patients now by the hundreds, but they’re not exactly against it either.

And here’s another Christian worldview principle, and that is that on a matter of absolute moral determination, being mildly for it, turns out to be as deadly as being aggressively for it. So let’s get that again. Once you buy into the logic of the culture of death and you decide that personal autonomy means you can claim a right to die and even to have a physician-assisted death, once you cross that barrier, there really isn’t a middle position.

And even the strictures you put in place don’t last. That’s the big lesson. It’s honestly laid out in this article. You say, “Only this, only this, only this. Not that, that, that.” The next thing you know, it’s that, that, that. And by the way, if personal autonomy is your only guide, then guess what? That means whatever any individual says it means. But even more horrifyingly here, like I say, they had to hold one woman down. What if, as the process begins, you decide you don’t want it? Well, at that point it appears your personal autonomy is gone. And by the way, you’re gone with it.

Part IV

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The Economic Realities of the Culture of Death: How the 'Right to Die' Becomes a 'Duty to Die'

We also need to deal with the economic realities and the relational realities. Economic realities. The nation’s going to save a lot of money through physician-assisted suicide. The healthcare system’s going to save a lot of money. And the second thing is, as you have incentives, this falls on families. So patients are going to be under all kinds of pressure to decide they’re going to use physician-assisted suicide rather than burden their families with increased medical costs. Not only that, Canada’s medical care healthcare system, which is a federalized system, is notoriously slow, really, really slow. Let’s just imagine government running medicine, you should be able to figure that out.

And so there are people who are simply saying, “I can’t even get a wheelchair.” This article says, “We know that in some places in our country, it’s easier to access medical assistance in dying than it is to get a wheelchair.” That was said by a disability expert. Again, just think of how evil all of this is. The other thing we want to point out morally is that what you have, at least in the beginning it’s claimed here, is a right to die, an opportunity to die under very limited circumstances. But that gets turned into a right to die, and you decide the circumstances and the criteria just go out.

But it’s also really clear that what is called passive euthanasia, you might say voluntary, can quickly turn into something involuntary. Again, the cost mechanism is just one way of making it in some cases involuntary. But honestly, once you start to look at the economic issues, it’s now an incentive for the Canadian government for as many of its citizens to kill themselves as possible.

The article tells us that Canada’s Parliament’s considering some legal questions related to, say, psychiatric issues, who’s stable-minded in making this kind of determination. But again, the barn door is open and the horse has already bolted. You’re way past that. This is just a parliamentary cleanup maybe for a face-saving gesture. But the issue of children and teenagers is even more fundamental. And I quote here, “Parliament’s Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying has formally recommended expanding medical assistance in dying access to mature minors.” Okay, there you go. Again, who’s fooling whom here?

I really can’t imagine a more urgent issue than this. I go back to the fact that Canada really is turning itself into a death cult. And the question is, how long would that death cult stay north of the border? And I think most of us know that logic is spreading right here as well.