It’s not just Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. Fox’s pro-Putin appeasers include a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel named Daniel Davis.
There has been a lot of criticism of Fox News primetime hosts Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson for their jarring pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine commentary.
This criticism is well-deserved. But retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis, a featured Fox News military commentator, is a far worse Putin shill or stooge.
And, alarmingly, insofar as I have seen, Davis’s pro-Putin propaganda on Fox goes unchallenged by the network’s anchors and reporters:
I report and truth decides. Here is Davis on Fox News, Feb. 24, 2022:
Davis: I think that we’re really misreading what’s going on with Putin here. I don’t think that he’s after trying to rebuild the Soviet Union. I think he means what he’s been saying for 15 years: that NATO and Ukraine is a redline that he will fight to prevent. And he proved it in 2008 with Georgia.
He proved it in 2014 with Crimea. And even as recently as last December, he was saying, “You guys just aren’t believing me. I was serious about this. This is a redline.” And then when he started building up these forces, he was showing us.
We [the United States] had every opportunity to just acknowledge reality and we should have pulled the NATO offer off the table for Ukraine.
That could probably have been the one thing that might have prevented this war entirely. But instead, we wanted to hold with principles and stuff and now the people of Ukraine are paying for that.
Now, let me be very clear: Nobody is responsible for the blood except for Vladimir Putin. Nobody. But we could have mitigated this. We could have.
Fox News Anchor Trace Gallagher: And, you know, Tulsi Gabbard kind of echoed that, Colonel, if you will. She was saying, you know, maybe somebody should have listened at least a little bit to what the President of Russia was saying.
Because if you were saying: Listen, I don’t want weapons. I don’t want NATO weapons that close to my country.
And you know, an example somebody gave tonight was: listen, the United States didn’t want Cuba to have NATO weapons [sic] that close to their country. So, you know, countries are very territorial and they don’t want that.
So, nobody is letting Putin off the hook by any stretch here, Colonel. But what you’re saying is that there might have been a pathway to resolve, earlier in this diplomatic debate.
Davis: One-hundred percent. I’ve been saying for months on this network that that very thing right there: that we had a shot to deescalate this and remove Vladimir Putin’s reason for actually launching an invasion.
Notice: Davis gives a quick and obligatory, pro forma denunciation of Putin as the person responsible for the Russian war against Ukraine. However, the thrust of his commentary is altogether different.
NATO Expansion. The thrust of Davis’s commentary is that America and NATO could have stoped Putin from invading Ukraine if they had simply recognized his “red line” concerning NATO membership.
But this is patently untrue, and we know it is untrue because Putin himself has explicitly said that his concern about Ukraine extends far beyond NATO. Putin views Ukraine as an allegedly lost Russia territory whose sovereignty and independence must be destroyed regardless of what becomes of NATO.
As I’ve explained here and in the Wall Street Journal, NATO’s expansion after the Cold War resulted from Russian threats and aggression; it did not cause Russian threats and aggression.
For Putin,
NATO expansion was always a convenient pretext, but never the reason, for Russia’s invasions of Ukraine… NATO [moreover], saved Europe from Russian military domination, and it would have deterred Russia this time had Ukraine been a NATO member.
Yet, despite this clear and unambiguous history, Gallagher adds insult to injury by agreeing with Davis (!) and saying “somebody should have listened at least a little bit to what the President of Russia was saying.”
Cuba. Gallagher then references Cuba and says, essentially, that when, back in 1962, the Soviet Union placed missiles in Cuba, the United States took this as a hostile act. So of course, he argues, Russia views NATO encroachment in its near abroad as a hostile act.
Finally, Davis chimes in:
We have to acknowledge that if Russia was trying to have a military alliance with Mexico, and they were gonna put Russian troops on the ground there, there is no way we would ever be satisfied and okay with that.
And it is unrealistic for us to expect Putin to have the exact same thing on his border and be okay with it.
What Davis and Gallagher conveniently ignore: NATO is a defensive alliance of free, sovereign, and independent states.
Putin knows full well that Poland and other NATO countries have absolutely zero intention of ever invading Russia. Nor do non-NATO countries, such as Ukraine, have any interest in invading Russia or acting as a platform for a NATO invasion of Russia—and again, Putin knows this.
Historically speaking, in fact, the East European countries have never threatened Russia; Russia has threatened them, and that remains true today.
The Soviet Union, by contrast, was bent on world domination, which is why President Kennedy, in 1962, acted to ensure that Russian missiles were removed from Cuba.
So no, NATO in Europe near Russia today is not at all the equivalent of the Soviet Union in the Western hemisphere near the United States at the height of the Cold War. This is an utterly false equivalence.
Nor does Mexico have reason to fear an American invasion, which is why there never will be any Russian troops in Mexico. Again, this is a ludicrous analogy divorced from all political and historical reality.
Davis goes on:
All we have to do is just treat Russia the way we did all during the Cold War… We cooperated with them and we had an understanding: We wouldn’t get into their territory and they wouldn’t get into ours, and that was that balance there.
We have to now recognize that this is not 1994 anymore, and we can’t just tell them what is gonna happen, or we’re gonna have an even worse situation than we have now.
Again, this is factually and historically inaccurate and it is the counsel of appeasement. Seldom has so much disinformation and blatant pro-Putin propaganda been crammed into so few words.
What Davis euphemistically calls “cooperation” is appeasement, and that is not what guided American and NATO policy during the Cold War.
Instead, the United States and NATO checked the Soviets—in Greece, Turkey, Korea, Berlin, Cuba, Africa, Asia, Central America, and around the globe. And it is because we checked the Soviets that the Cold War ended and Eastern Europe was freed of Russian domination.
Yet, Davis says that Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, is “their territory,” meaning Russian territory. Putin, of course, agrees; but this is a lie. The countries of Eastern Europe—including Poland, the Baltic states, and Ukraine—are free and sovereign states, not “Russian territory” that ought to be ruled by Moscow.
So I ask you: is Daniel Davis a Russian stooge? Is he on Putin’s payroll? Or is he simply too historically illiterate and ill-informed to separate fact from fiction?
More to the point, why does Fox continue to feature Davis as a military commentator when he spouts such blatantly pro-Putin, anti-America propaganda? Does this enrich the public dialogue and debate? Is this fair and balanced?
Feature photo credit: Fox News military commentator Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis (L) and Fox News anchor Trace Gallagher (R), captured via screen shots of a Fox News broadcast, Feb. 24, 2022.