Christopher Bakes    

Trial Attorney | Keynote Speaker | Many Topics, Including Yours

• Speaking engagements by appointment.
• United States Naval Justice School

Sacramento, California, United States Contact info

Mar 29, 2025

No, Mr. Trump. We refuse to change sides.

To my friends and colleagues:

Those who know me well know of my dismay at the current state of American foreign policy. Attached is my letter to various Senators and Representatives and relevant committees: Foreign Relations, Armed Forces, and Intelligence.

I can barely ponder the damage being done to our country’s cherished allies and friends. I am sickened at the destabilization of their confidence in us as they question something we thought unquestionable: the sturdiness of American treaty commitments. 

I couldn’t help but think of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.” The poem became lodged in my head as a kid. My mother the amateur historian and child literary curator saw fit to imbue us with images from history and learning, with this poem introduced to us as particularly poignant and gripping. 

This would have been the early 60s when we were not all that far from World War II and “the Allies,” Britain towering above them all. 

My mother being a powerful reader, I was able to ponder the doom awaiting those British soldiers who followed their poor leadership into the abyss during the Crimean War. Russia was on the other side of that war too, with the British and French siding with Turkey (under the Ottomans) to resist Russian expansionism. The year was 1854. We the US had not yet arrived on the world stage, but our future allies had. 

The British and French eventually prevailed and Russia was defeated. In 1945 during the Yalta Conference, Churchill visited the site – Yalta being located in Crimea. Perhaps he and FDR should have better listened to history and not allowed Stalin to lay claim to Eastern Europe – the very Russian expansionism Britain had fought. At Yalta, it was as if Soviet Russia was an innocent, not a co-starter of the war alongside Germany with each wishing to divide Europe and take a half. Eastern Europe was handed to Soviet Russia. Russia was free to attack again. It did. Almost immediately, then repeatedly, striking yet again in 2022.

We now have in the White House someone who neglects history and history’s values, and who in defiance of treaty and honor appears bent on aligning with madness alongside this very same Russia and its dictator. Treaties are now in danger of being renounced. Our friends and allies are left wondering. Europe is exposed once again.  Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death

  Rode the six hundred.
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!’ he said.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

There is a lesson in those words. A loud command to march does not mean the leader doing the shouting knows what he is doing. It is as if we’re staging the events that will lead ultimately to the gloom and horror of another valley of Death. 

An America alone and without allies. Why would we ride into that? 

Please. Write to Congress. 

Chris

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Comment from :

John Lawson

A timely reminder that Russian imperialism through violence repression cruelty and despair is not a new phenomenon.
It has trescended Tsarism, Leninism, Stalinism, Putinism for over five centuries and ain’t gonna give up any time soon.

Christopher Bakes

John Lawson precisely. If Germany needed to be deNazified after only 12 years of Nazism, Russia has taken centuries to mutate into what it is.

Rauno Heiskanen

Re-Stalinization is mainstream in Russia and the US is not immune to it!
US daily politics speaks for itself.

Christopher Bakes
Heiskanen Luckily, we have no “Stalin” to return to. The English-speaking world has been evolving the representative government form of governance at least since 1215. The only “dictators” in the Anglosphere were the earlier monarchs and of course the deadly and hideous Oliver Cromwell who managed to inflict himself on both England and the American colonies. But the English-speaking world in the modern era has been mostly spared anything resembling a Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. The US has robust institutions, free speech, and various other freedoms that make us a very difficult citizenry for a maladjusted government to pick on. Trump is an aberration, not a throwback.

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A previous post from Chris. From last month :

Trump/Vance vs Democracy and Zelensky.

If you did not watch the horrific public abuse of President Zelinsky by Mr Trump today in the Oval Office, don’t speak again in support of Mr Trump until you do.

I am waiting for the moment when today’s tyrannical and unhinged Trump speaks to Putin as he did today to President Zelinsky.

A great American shame.

America is destination for all those “yearning to breathe free,” to quote the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, gifted to America by the French in the year 1886. We as a nation have opposed Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo. Our defense umbrella protects friends and allies.

Russia in its various costumes – Stalinist or Putinist – has repeatedly tricked the Free World, including several American Presidents.  But two Presidents – Reagan and Kennedy – were not tricked, and dealt with Russia with strength and soaring rhetoric that is – or should be – etched onto our national soul.  
 
Mr. Reagan’s speech at Normandy on June 4, 1984, 50th anniversary of the landing is particularly instructive: 
 
“The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge — and pray God we have not lost it — that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest … The strength of America’s allies is vital to the United States, and the American security guarantee is essential to the continued freedom of Europe’s democracies. We were with you then; we are with you now. Your hopes are our hopes, and your destiny is our destiny,” – Ronald Reagan at Pointe du Hoc, France on June 6, 1984.”
 
Russia today – dictatorial and murderous – represents the last bit of unfinished D-Day business. We the western Allies got rid of one dictator, but left the other one standing, even though both of them – Hitler and Stalin — had co-started the war D-Day was launched to end.  
 
Ridding Europe of occupation and tyranny was our promise then and it should remain our promise today. Be Reagan. Be Kennedy.  
 
In 1968 as a junior Democrat and political activist, I walked precincts for Robert F. Kennedy (Sr.), start of my political sensibilities. Along the way since then, I’ve seen both triumph and tragedy afflict our national soul. Should we abandon Ukraine, it will be by any measure a national tragedy and one from which we may never recover.  
 
Feel free to pass along my words to any you believe may benefit from a reminder of what America means to the Free World. No copyright claimed.