Why Trump is Right to Try to Make a Ukraine War Deal

I see in the readers’ comments on Post Alley that Donald Trump is “betraying America and the West.” Another reader writes that the United States “is now allied with Mother Russia, North Korea, Hungary, and Belarus.” Several Post Alley readers darkly suggest that Trump has been “recruited or cultivated” as an “asset” by Moscow’s Federal Security Service (FSB) or by the secret police of the former Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

One reader suggests that past Russian investment in Trump properties means that “they own big chunks” of our president. When right-wingers talk this way, mainstream media dismiss their tales as “conspiracy theories.” I’m inclined to do that here, but talk like this does tell you something about how people think — and, in this case, how a lot of Trump-haters think.

For those of us old enough to remember the war in Vietnam, it’s eerie how familiar all this is. Then it was the left that wanted peace, and the right that denounced them as pinkos and commie lovers. Now the left denounces our right-wing president as a fascist and a Putin lover. The slander has changed sides.

The right was wrong about the Vietnam War — not about communism, which is as bad as they said it was, but about trying to snuff it out in Southeast Asia with M-16s and napalm. We didn’t need to be in that war. It was, in capitalist terms, a bad investment.

So is the war in Ukraine. In three years, the front line has hardly moved. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, most of them young men forced into service, have been maimed or killed. Thousands of young families have lost fathers. Whole towns have been wrecked. Millions have fled their homes. And there is no light at the end of the tunnel. None.

Why should we pay for more of this? Because Ukraine is a democracy? Don’t be so sure; it hasn’t had a free election in a long time. Even if it did hold an election, how much would that be worth to us? Another hundred thousand dead? Not our dead, to be sure, but Ukrainians and Russians ought to count for something. The cost to us has been tens of billions of dollars burned up on the battlefield, plus the ruin of our relations with Russia, whose nuclear-armed missiles are aimed at us.

Joe Biden refused to talk to Vladimir Putin. Maybe he wasn’t up to it. Anyway, he talked only to the side he was comfortable with, the side that gave his son a directorship in the Ukrainian gas company. When Biden became President, he promised his Ukrainian client, Volodymyr Zelensky, to do “whatever it takes” until the Russians bled out — a reckless promise that Zelensky now urges Trump to renew. Trump, who ran on a different promise, tells Zelensky, “You don’t have the cards.” Zelensky’s high card, Biden’s promise, expired on January 20.

 Ukraine begins to bleed out. Trump calls Putin on the telephone and proposes a settlement. Putin talks to him. Putin is delighted to talk to him. The reaction from Trump’s critics on the left is dismay and abuse. Setting aside the nasty stuff quoted above, there remains the charge that Trump is motivated only by money. One commenter on Post Alley writes sagely, “The adage from the Watergate era, ‘Follow the money’ should always be applied in trying to understand Chump’s decisions. I believe he will do whatever is asked of him by whoever will line his pockets.”

Follow the money! For years I have heard this ten-cent wisdom repeated like a Gregorian chant. My colleagues in the Seattle press said of Tim Eyman that he ran Washington state ballot measures only to enrich himself. (Losing his house disproves that, don’t you think?) They said of Trump that he was a businessman running to enrich himself. (Trump a businessman? I don’t think so.)

Last year, when I wrote about the Ukraine war here on Post Alley, one of my readers replied that it was a mistake to talk of Vladimir Putin as the leader of Russia. The correct way to look at Putin, he wrote, was as “a former St. Petersburg street thug” who itches only for graft and bribes. Elon Musk, who CNN says is “the world’s richest man,” has joined Trump in order to pile up more money.

Accusing one’s political opponents of being motivated by money is a perennial chestnut, a lazy man’s way to win an argument without doing any work. It’s an ad hominem, a rhetorical trick. If your opponent is only in it for the money, his political arguments are noise. You have no obligation to listen to him. You’re good!

Let’s not do that here. The war in Ukraine is too important for rhetorical games. Whatever he was years ago, Putin is the leader of a great power — the power that started the war. Putin styles himself as a nationalist out to Make Russia Great Again. He aims to look out for Russia first.

Zelensky is looking out for Ukraine first, and Trump, in his mind, is looking out for America first. You don’t have to like these guys, but they are the players. If you think Trump is wrong to talk to Putin, tell us why continuing the Biden policy will get better results. If you want the war to go on, as Zelensky clearly does, make the argument. Tell us why this war is a good investment.

And don’t assume negotiation means surrender. Zelensky may not hold a winning hand, but he has Europe behind him, and much of his country behind him. Zelensky’s men have held on to four-fifths of Ukraine’s territory for three years, and have spilled much Russian blood. Putin does not hold all the cards.

So, let’s see what our deal-making president can do.