Tag: nato

On Ukraine, Trump is an obstacle

President Trump’s constant self-reversals on the war in Ukraine must be a great comfort to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who can see clearly that although Trump occasionally talks tough about punishing Putin for the war that he voluntarily started in Ukraine, the U.S. president’s heart is just not in the business of opposing the Russian.

Trump’s record speaks for itself.

On the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as Russian military forces were massed on Ukraine’s border with Russia to the east and on the frontier with Belarus in the north, candidate Trump praised as “genius” Vladimir Putin’s declaration two days earlier that the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine were “independent” of Ukraine. Putin was “savvy” because he was going to go into Ukraine to keep the peace. What?

Pro-Russian separatists had for a decade been fighting the Ukrainian military with the goal of tearing a huge part of eastern Ukraine away from the national territory and aligning it with Russia. And from 2014, the separatists in Ukraine had the assistance of Putin’s “little green men” — Russian troops operating on Ukrainian soil but wearing military uniforms without identifying markings. Putin’s declaration on Luhansk and Donetsk, made on Feb. 21, 2022, was his way of cementing independence declarations made by pro-Russian separatists in the two regions in 2014. The proclamations purported to establish a Donetsk People’s Republic and a Luhansk People’s Republic, both occupying Ukrainian land.

You may recall that before the 2022 invasion, Putin had threatened to resort to a “military-technical solution” in Ukraine if he did not receive from NATO an assurance that Ukraine would never join the alliance and if certain other demands about NATO’s posture were not met. NATO, including the United States, rejected Putin’s demands, and so we have a war.

On Feb. 24, 2022, Putin’s forces rolled west out of Russia and south out of Belarus in an operation that the Kremlin thought would have vanquished Ukraine in a matter of days, but the war has been raging from that day to this. Ukraine, reinforced by arms flowing in from Europe and the U.S., has proved a hard nut for Russia to crack.

The Russia-Ukraine war was just another trigger for candidate Trump to tout his imagined greatness as a deal-maker and settler of conflicts. On dozens of occasions during his third presidential campaign, he declared publicly and loudly that he would end the Ukraine war before even starting his new presidency or would do it on Day One. He won the election last November and took office on Jan. 20 of this year, and we are nearing the end of October with the war no closer to being ended.

In April, Time magazine asked Trump about his unfulfilled promise to have ended the war already, and he replied:
“Well, I said that figuratively, and I said that as an exaggeration, because to make a point, and you know, it gets, of course, by the fake news [unintelligible]. Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest, but it was also said that it will be ended.”

Asked what was taking so long, Trump responded:
“Well, I don’t think it’s long. I mean, look, I got here three months ago. This war has been going on for three years. It’s a war that would have never happened if I was president. It’s Biden’s war. It’s not my war. I have nothing to do with it. I would have never had this war. This war would have never happened. Putin would have never done it. This war would have never happened. Oct. 6 would have never happened. Oct. 7 would have never happened. Would have never happened. Ever.“

Also during the campaign, Trump repeatedly criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for his efforts to obtain U.S. weaponry to fight off the Russian aggression, accused him of bearing blame for the war and said that Ukraine, the victim of Russia’s aggression, probably would have to cede territory to Russia for there to be peace.

On April 14 of this year, Trump again blamed Zelensky for the war. “Listen, when you start a war, you gotta know you can win a war,” Trump said at a news conference at the White House. “You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.”

Trump has gone back and forth, again and again, in assigning blame for the war, even, of course, faulting Joe Biden, on whose watch as U.S. president the 2022 invasion took place. In his criticisms, Trump has been tougher on Biden and Zelensky than he has been on Putin. Remember his and Vice President JD Vance’s berating of the Ukrainian leader as ungrateful in the Oval Office on Feb. 28 of this year. Shortly after that acrimonious meeting, U.S. arms transfers to Ukraine were stopped, then quickly restarted. Trump’s pique actually figures into whether the U.S. president will support a country righteously fighting for its very life.

On Aug. 15, Trump hosted Putin in Alaska for a summit on the war. The U.S. president received the Russian graciously at an American military base, according the war-starter the courtesies appropriate for an honored guest. Putin was even allowed to lay flowers in honor of World War II Soviet pilots buried at Fort Richardson National Cemetery. The whole event was yet another instance of Trump flopping in front of Putin, who is the driving force behind a war of aggression and a man indicted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges.

The Alaska summit ended inconclusively, but Trump then spoke of Ukraine’s needing to give up land for a peace agreement to be realized. And here we saw, again, one of Trump’s great weaknesses: a tendency to be swayed by the disputant with whom he has most recently spoken.

On Aug. 18, just three days after the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, Zelensky was to be at the White House again to meet with Trump. But this time, Western Europe was not going to allow Zelensky to walk into a trap as he had at the White House on Feb. 28. A delegation of NATO, European Union and other leaders from Europe rushed to Washington to support Zelensky. That meeting, too, was inconclusive.

Then came another flip. Trump and Zelensky met at the United Nations in New York in September after Trump’s address to the General Assembly. And after his meeting with Zelensky, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Ukraine could “win all of [its territory] back in its original form.”

Zelensky was back at the White House on Oct. 17, without the European posse, and that meeting did not go well, news reports say. Before the meeting, Trump had spoken of granting a request by Zelensky for Tomahawk cruise missiles to allow Ukraine to strike key targets deep inside Russia and make the war much more costly and difficult for Moscow. All seemed to be moving in Ukraine’s desired direction — until Putin called Trump before Zelensky’s visit to the White House.

Whatever Putin said to Trump moved the U.S. president’s position, and he began hedging on Tomahawk deliveries before meeting with Zelensky. The meeting proved to be inconclusive and apparently was confrontational. Immediately after, Trump was back to the line that Ukraine, the victim in the fight, needs to concede territory to Russia, the aggressor in the fight, for the war to stop. It was yet another frustrating and utterly unproductive reversal by Trump.

Our president’s principal formula for peace appears to involve Kyiv’s giving up Ukrainian land that Russia has occupied by force. That idea is a nonstarter for Zelensky. Ukraine is the victim. Russia is the aggressor. Russia should stop the war and leave Ukrainian territory. The formula is simple, and it is the most sensible for the world beyond Russia, because a Russian victory in Ukraine will embolden Putin and thereby endanger all of Europe. After all, Putin’s great dream is to reconstitute a grand Russian empire. Yet Trump just cannot seem to wrap his head around this idea.

He cannot seem to grasp the concept that it is best to stop Putin in Ukraine so that NATO minus one (the U.S.) does not end up fighting Russia after a Putin victory in Ukraine. I say “minus one” because it is not clear at all that the U.S. under Donald Trump would stand with its allies in a conflict started by an expansionist Russia. Such a scenario would have been unthinkable before Putin appeaser Donald Trump became U.S. president. Now we have Trump apparently being more enthusiastic about putting U.S. troops on the streets of American cities than he is about sending weapons to Ukraine to help it fight for its freedom.

What is this mysterious hold that Vladimir Putin has over Trump? Why won’t our leader deal with Putin as the offender that the Russian is? For the sake of world peace, I hope that sooner rather than later we get an answer to this mystery. Something is rotten in it, and it stinks dangerously.

Europe learns to manage Donald J. Chamberlain

When the pro-Ukraine leaders of Europe heard that President Trump had decided to have last Friday’s Ukraine-specific face-to-face meeting with the invader Vladimir Putin, those European allies must have shot out of their chairs in alarm. Knowing that Putin exercises a kind of cordyceps hold on Trump’s mind, they would rightly have worried about what might result from the American president’s inability to show to Putin the toughness required as the Russian works to dismember Ukraine.

Trump has repeatedly said that Ukraine should not expect to recover territory within its borders that Russia has seized. That means Trump expects President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people simply to turn their backs on the approximately 20 percent of Ukraine that Russia significantly controls: all of the Crimean Peninsula and, generally, the eastern region of Ukraine known as Donbas, and some additional provinces.

A significant displacement of Ukrainians began in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea after a pro-European revolution occurred in Kyiv, and the displacement accelerated with the arrival of Russia’s full-on invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Some 3 million Ukrainians now live under Russian authority on their own Ukrainian soil. In an ideal world, most Ukrainians would not agree to cede even an inch of their country’s territory to the Russian aggressor, but war might so exhaust and terrify them that they clamor to fold and walk away. Putin is counting on that. And Putin is counting on Trump to bring Zelenskyy to that acceptance.

Thus we have the spectacle of Trump, the president of the United States, running interference for the butcher Putin.

Our European allies have taken note.

When, after the Alaska meeting, it was announced that Zelenskyy and Trump would meet at the White House on Monday (yesterday), the European allies must have been even more alarmed. They and Zelenskyy would have recalled the disgraceful berating of the Ukrainian leader in the Oval Office in February by Trump and Vice President JD Vance. That White House meeting was an ambush against Zelenskyy.

This time around, Zelenskyy came with a posse of the willing: NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte; European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen; Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni; Finnish President Alexander Stubb; German Chancellor Friedrich Merz; French President Emmanuel Macron; and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. They would not allow Zelenskyy to be ambushed by Trump a second time. And TACO Trump behaved himself.

While speaking on Fox by phone this morning (on the day after the meeting), Trump was asked by an interviewer how he had managed to bring so many European leaders to the Oval Office together so quickly. Well, Trump said, America is respected again. A year ago, he said, such a thing would not have happened.

He was wrong on the first point and right on the second. A year ago, such a gathering would not have occurred because it would not have been necessary. This country’s allies in Europe had respected this country enough that they fully expected that it would do right by Ukraine. On Monday, they came here to Washington, and quickly, to ensure that Trump did not abuse Zelenskyy and bully him into caving to Putin’s demands.

What happened at the White House on Monday was not a display of responsible American leadership, as the White House has been spinning it. What happened there was an intervention. Those leaders who visited knew that Trump just cannot quit Putin and that there was a risk of a second disgraceful Oval Office performance by Trump if Zelenskyy stepped into the snake pit by himself.

It has to be said that even as a doddering president with a foggy mind, Joe Biden had a mostly properly functioning moral compass. His doddering steps were nearly always pointing him in the right direction, and unerringly in the matter of Ukraine.

Not so with Trump. His inflated ego is the magnetic north that guides his moral compass. When he met with Putin on Friday, that was an exercise in self-gratification (he is desperate for a Nobel Peace Prize), and also appeasement.

The European leaders who visited us on Monday grasp the relevant history in a way that is far superior to Trump’s awareness of it. They remember Europe’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler as first he rearmed Germany in violation of post-World War I treaty limits, then remilitarized the Rhineland, then executed the annexation of Austria via the Anschluss, then purloined the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and then invaded Czechoslovakia outright.

Next came Hitler’s triggering of the pivotal Danzig crisis, which ran through the summer of 1939 and was the last great spasm before that maniac launched what would become World War II. He wanted to retake control of Danzig, a largely ethnically German city over which Germany lost control with its defeat in WWI. But Danzig was now, by international treaty, a free city, the property of no particular nation, although it was connected administratively with its direct neighbor Poland. Germany, too, was a direct neighbor.

When Hitler signed a surprise nonaggression pact with Russia in late August 1939, providing himself security on his eastern front, France and Britain really began to panic. Britain was led by Neville Chamberlain, who in 1938 had appeasingly signed on the dotted line when Germany took the Sudentenland and Hitler gave an assurance that he had no further territorial ambitions. “Peace in our time,” Chamberlain said on his return from the now-infamous Munich Conference. How the British and the French cheered! How Hitler chortled!

A year later, the appeaser was recognizing his mistake and also stiffening his spine. But because he had earlier appeased Hitler, the tyrant did not think that his British adversary really would stand up if Germany invaded Poland. And if Britain did not stand up, neither would France, must have been Hitler’s calculation.

On Sept. 1, 1939, Germany and Russia attacked Poland. The rest is history.

It is a history that Europe remembers well. In Trump, Europe sees a new Chamberlain. The European leaders know that Ukraine is a modern Sudentenland, and they know that if Putin, a modern Hitler, is not stopped in Ukraine, Europe will end up fighting him in a wider war because he will not have been satisfied with forcing down the unpleasant meal that Ukraine has proved itself to be. Putin “hungers for sweeter meats,” to quote from “The Lord of the Rings.”

That is what Monday at the White House was really about. It was not an example of American leadership. It was an example of European leadership by intervention to head off a world-engulfing catastrophe. Thank God above that the Europeans are beginning to figure out how to handle Donald J. Chamberlain.