Peace Goes to Pieces
The Art of the Deal blows up in Donald Trump's face
The scene in the Oval Office yesterday was unbecoming and disgraceful, with the president and vice president of the United States behaving, on camera, like a couple of bullying jerks. But the Trump/Vance temper tantrum was remarkable only in its display of Trump’s cluelessness and Vance’s penchant for dirty tricks. Otherwise it did no more than confirm my opinion, which I wrote about not long ago, that Trump’s Ukraine peace offensive would come to nothing.
The President’s tirade against Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky wasn’t just a demonstration of bad manners. It was triggered, I believe, by a belated realization that V. Putin is not to be talked around. The Trump Administration has found out—but will never admit—that Russia is unwilling to make any concessions at all for the sake of peace. Putin is sticking with his previous demands: a ceasefire with no verification mechanism, no third-party peacekeeping force, no security guarantees for Ukraine—no nothing. He even had the temerity to demand immediate elections in Ukraine, a demand that Trump was quick to echo. The Russian despot has calculated, correctly, that he need not make the slightest concession because Trump, desperate to make good on his promise to end the war, will try to browbeat the Ukrainians into accepting a ceasefire that locks in all of Russia’s gains to date.
And this is what the President tried to do yesterday. Zelensky is perhaps open to criticism for taking the bait that J.D. Vance so cynically dangled before him. But one can understand his frustration. Trump was demanding, in effect, that Zelensky agree to a ceasefire, without conditions, based on nothing more than Donald Trump’s belief that V. Putin’s word is to be trusted.
Donald Trump doesn’t like being thwarted; hence the Oval Office meltdown. Zelensky infuriated the American president with his manifest unwillingness to trust Putin’s word. But Trump trusts Putin—why isn’t that enough for Zelensky? The answer of course is that the President of Ukraine is understandably unwilling to surrender his country’s independence and turn it into a Russian puppet state for the sake of Donald Trump’s ego. And Trump being Trump, he’s utterly incapable of understanding that. It’s a blind spot the size of a black hole, and it prevents him from seeing that his increasingly frenetic pursuit of peace is fundamentally counterproductive.
This fiasco has created a lot of work for the Trump Administration’s enablers and apologists, who are trying their best to spin it as a great moment in American diplomacy. On “Fox & Friends Weekend,” the hosts made out that the scene in the Oval Office was actually Zelensky’s fault. That egregious idiot, Rachel Campos Duffy, blathered on and on about neocon warmongers and war profiteers and how the Ukrainians are a bunch of ingrates and how no American mother wants her son to die in Ukraine. Meanwhile, over at National Review Online, Michael Brendan Dougherty is rerunning his longstanding argument that the war only happened because poor, put-upon V. Putin was frightened by the prospect of NATO aggression, etc.—the standard-issue natcon appeasement line.
And this would indeed be a twenty-first century replay of Munich 1938 with features of cheap farce but for the fact that Trump has no backing for his campaign of appeasement by bullying. After what just happened, no other country is going to sign on to a deal hammered out by Trump and Putin. So now the President’s sweeping assurances that he and he alone could work his dealmaking magic to bring the Russo-Ukrainian War to an end has been exposed as a hollow boast, a hot-air balloon. The war will go on. And if, as seems likely, the Trump Administration reneges on America’s commitment to Ukraine, Donald Trump will stand exposed as small man whose inflated sense of self-esteem is paired with a fragile ego, a narcissist forever nagged by a sneaking fear that the world does not, after all, revolve around him.
And the world indeed does not so revolve.
What a collection of buffoons. Vance is going to regret abandoning his stated 2015-22 view of Trump as a gas-filled buffoon full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Trump's first term did not feature scenes like this, and did produce something constructive (like the Abraham Accords and the major ramp-up of natgas exports), only because Trump's White House was filled and surrounded by more conventional Republican figures from the Old Days (when competent people actually did something), like Pompeo, Pence, and Bolton. The cabinet now is no longer Republican or conservative, but Trumpist -- that is to say, crackpot.
Now we see why Chamberlain did not invite Benes to Munich in 1938.
Rape is better done in private.
I agree that Ukraine is done - I realized that when I heard all the European leaders yelling "Slava Ukraine" after the WH meeting.
I had hoped that Europe would find its manhood in the vacuum that Trump created. I was naive.
I wish that there was a better outcome for Ukraine, but I don't see it.
Ukraine will join 1939 Poland in the pantheon of "plucky countries".
As an aside, what the hell was Zelensky thinking?
You don't bite the hand that feeds you. You don't give Trump an excuse to walk. And you don't argue in a foreign language.
First real failure for Zelensky. But it wouldn't have mattered.
I sure hope that the U.S. can salvage something from this mess.