Proposed: Time to End the Ukraine War

A few days ago, a utility guy came to my house to fix a technical problem. He was a healthy looking fellow about 25. He had a Slavic accent.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Ukraine.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Two and a half years,” he said. And I thought, but did not say, not wanting to challenge him, “That’s when the war started. You fled the war.”

And I thought, “Good for you.”

I note that the Wall Street Journal reports intelligence estimates that 80,000 Ukrainians and 200,000 Russians have been killed in that war. Counting both sides, perhaps a million persons have been wounded, many of them grievously.

It’s hard to imagine a million. I think of my technical guy. A million would be as many guys like him as the population of Seattle and Tacoma combined, all of them dead or wounded. And I think of Donald Trump’s being asked in the recent debate whether he wanted Ukraine to win.

“I want to end the war,” Trump said.

From the people who don’t want to end the war, I hear the argument that sending weapons to Kyiv is a “good investment” because it’s “degrading Russia” without killing Americans. I hear this ghoulish argument from Democrats. In my youth, the Democrats I knew didn’t talk this way. They were against war. In 2024, under Kamala Harris, the Democrats are the war party.

So are the mainstream media. At the Washington Post, foreign-affairs writer David Ignatius just returned from Eastern Europe. “Ukraine is bleeding out,” he writes. “Its will to fight is as strong as ever, but its army is exhausted.” Ignatius goes on. “The Biden administration’s rubric of support — “as long as it takes” — simply doesn’t match the reality of this conflict. Ukraine doesn’t have enough soldiers to fight an indefinite war of attrition.”

Ukraine is going to lose, Ignatius writes, unless the United States and its NATO allies have the will “to escalate to be strong enough to reach a decent settlement.”

Escalate. I remember that word. Lyndon Johnson escalated by bombing North Vietnam, which was supposed to lead to a decent settlement. Richard Nixon escalated by invading Cambodia. A generation later, Barack Obama escalated (without using the word) by sending more American soldiers to Afghanistan.

Escalation has not been a war-winning strategy. Nonetheless, President Biden is now being urged is to try it again, this time by unleashing missiles that can strike deeper into Russia. In reference to that threat, President Vladimir Putin says, “This will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”

That’s a nuclear power talking. Russia is a lesser power than the old Soviet Union, and we are inclined to ignore the power it still has. We think Putin is bluffing — but maybe he isn’t. For years Putin threatened Ukraine, and in 2022 he followed through with his threat. Our war party, who likes to argue that Ukraine can win because Russia is weak, also likes to compare Putin to Hitler. If we don’t stop Putin in Ukraine, they say, we’ll have to fight him in Poland. To cut a deal would be “appeasement,” the folly of Neville Chamberlain in his 1938 deal with Hitler. For years, “appeasement” was a rhetorical club for war-supporting conservatives to beat down war-shy liberals. I remember Rush Limbaugh using it. Now I hear it from Democrats.

Hitler comparisons are almost always over the top. Hitler started the bloodiest war in European history. He reneged on his deal with Chamberlain and also on his deal with Stalin. The man was in a class by himself.

Putin is a Russian nationalist who hates the idea of an anti-Russian military alliance enlisting Ukraine, which nationalists think of as Russia’s little brother. He’s a dangerous man, but we should listen to what he says. That his attack on Ukraine has been bogged down for two and a half years does not suggest that Poland, or any other NATO country, will be next. On the contrary, it suggests that Putin might welcome a deal.

Donald Trump has boasted that if he is elected, he will settle the war before he takes office. The Donald does like to boast. But it’s not a bad idea. The obvious deal would be to let Russia keep the territory it has taken, much of which is Russian-speaking, on condition that it takes no more. NATO would have to give up on admitting Ukraine to the alliance, and Russia would have to agree to leave the somewhat shrunken Ukraine alone. If Russia broke its promise, NATO could do the same.

Suggest this, and the answer you get from the war party is, “You’re giving Putin what he wants.” Actually, it’s letting Putin keep what he already has, the 20 percent or so of Ukraine, much of it Russian-speaking, that the Russian army has held since February 2022. Putin wanted all of Ukraine. The suggested deal is letting the Ukrainians keep the 80 percent they still have. Of course, they want all of Ukraine, too, but in a negotiation, what you get depends on what power you have. And Russia has a population more than four times that of Ukraine. It has an economy more than 10 times the size of Ukraine’s. It has petroleum. It designs and manufactures its own aircraft, its own tanks, its own submachine guns. It has a leader who has been willing to start the largest war in Europe in 75 years and a people who, for the most part, believe what their government tells them.

Here in progressive Seattle, we fly Ukrainian flags. “The Russians started it,” we say — even if the NATO expansion under Clinton, Bush and Obama was why Putin started it. Still, he did start it. I agree that he’s a bad guy, but the need now is not to express our feelings about bad guys, but to end a war. In the coming election, one of the major-party candidates vows he will end it. There are many reasons not to like Donald Trump, and I agree with most of them, but he’s right about this war.

All my life, America has been in and out of war. I was in grade school, junior high, high school and college during the Vietnam War. I was a young newspaper reporter during the Gulf War, a little older during the Kosovo war, and middle aged during the Iraq War. The war in Afghanistan lasted until I was well past retirement.

Americans were told that each one of these wars was necessary. Vital. Unavoidable. Good. Afterward, it came out that many of the things we were told were lies. The Tonkin Gulf resolution — our declaration of war in Vietnam — was based on a lie about an attack on a Navy ship in international waters. (It was in North Vietnamese waters.) The Second Iraq War was based on a lie that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction.” We Americans are suckers for this stuff. We watch war movies. We put up signs that say, “Support Our Troops,” and our government smiles and interprets the message as “Support Our War.”

For Americans, the fight in Ukraine has been a nice war. In a place most Americans can’t find on a map, our historic adversary is killing its former subjects. CNN shows us horrible images, but the death and destruction are not here, and the people suffering are not us or even our close friends. The war has cost us billions, but the cost has been charged to the national Visa card. Our income-tax rates are the same as before, and our military contractors are making money. An election is underway, and our politicians are making Halloween images of their opponents.

In the midst of our political entertainment, Donald Trump promises to end the war. Kamala Harris calls him an admirer of Putin. Dick Cheney, the Republican who all good Democrats despised 20 years ago — the vice president who got us into the Second Iraq War — endorses Harris.

Now the foreign-affairs correspondent of the Washington Post tells us we must pay more, do more and risk more — not for the Ukrainians to win back their country, a task that is beyond them, but “to reach a decent settlement.” And the Wall Street Journal tells us that the butcher’s bill is already more than one million wounded and dead.

Well, you can have it. I don’t want it. I remember my utility guy, and I think: He had the right idea. Get out.