Trump v. Ukraine

There’s no excuse for his lies and demagoguery

No love lost: The former president and his Ukrainian nemesis

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In my role as a political pundit, I’ve been hard on Biden/Harris & Co. And justly so, for that scurvy mob well deserves to be knocked down and kicked around on the floor—metaphorically, of course! From Afghanistan to the Middle East, the Biden/Harris Administration’s foreign policy record is a resounding epic of stupidity, mendacity, and incompetence.

Which is not to say that Donald Trump displays the profile of a Bismarck or a Kissinger. Erratic as he is, it’s been difficult to figure out what he really thinks about foreign policy. Probably he’d be better than Harris on the Middle East, but where he stands on China, Taiwan, and the Pacific is anybody’s guess. And until quite recently, the same applied to Ukraine. While his natcon supporters pursued their despicable pro-Putin line, Trump had little to say about the Russo-Ukrainian War. But last week, the mask dropped.

The former president was understandably peeved when congressional Democrats drafted Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy for an appearance at a munitions factory in Pennsylvania, perhaps the key swing state in this year’s presidential election. This smacked of partisan politics, and it was unwise of Zelenskyy to accept the Dems’ invitation. Republicans were not pleased, and the natcons were quick to raise the cry of election interference.

Trump being Trump, he took Zelenskyy’s misstep very personally indeed. And it led him to make comments about the war that no serious presidential candidate should ever utter. Trump proclaimed that Ukraine was “gone,” and that millions of people have been killed been killed since February 2022—a gross exaggeration. One again he insisted that if he’d been president then, Putin would never have launched his invasion. Though that may be true, it’s an unprovable counterfactual. But the former president was just getting started.

Trump defaulted to his usual complaint: that NATO and Ukraine were ripping off the United States. He said that the US has dumped $300 billion into Ukraine since the beginning of the war. He lamented that every time Zelenskyy visits Washington, he walks away with another $100 billion. And of course, he charged that America was bearing the full financial burden of the war, while our NATO allies are paying little or nothing.

In its original form—that NATO allies were not meeting the alliance’s goal of defense spending at 2% of GDP—this charge had some validity. Though Trump pressed his case with his usual tactlessness and hyperbole, he did have a point. But his recent comments on Ukraine were marbled with outright lies.

Here are the facts: Since 2022, the United States has provided military aid to Ukraine to the tune of around $175 billion—no trivial sum, but hardly excessive in the context of federal government spending, which logged in at $6.134 trillion in 2023. In the course of his diatribe Trump correctly noted that in the aggregate, Europe’s economy is about the size of America’s, and this is reflected in the total aid to Ukraine coming from European sources: around $132 billion (€118 billion).

Trump wound up with his usual claim that once he’s president again, he’ll end the war with a snap of his fingers. No details of his plans on that front have ever been provided, but it’s plausible to think that he’d pressure Ukraine into accepting a deal by cutting off US aid. And such a deal would no doubt deliver Ukraine into the demanding embrace of the Bear Who Walks Like a Man.

There’s no excusing this: What Trump proposes is both dishonorable and dangerous. If V. Putin is allowed to profit from his unprovoked act of aggression, that will only embolden him to drive on toward his vision of a restored Russian imperium. And since that vision encompasses several countries that are NATO member states, such a policy of appeasement would make the war that the former president claims to oppose more rather than less likely.

With Trump the personal is always the political, and I have no doubt that his animus toward Ukraine goes back to the Democrats’ attempt to impeach him over the “perfect phone call” with Zelenskyy in 2019. This congenital inability to separate his own interests from the national interest must really be judged as a trait disqualifying him from the presidency.

Unfortunately, however, there’s not much more to be expected from a potential Harris Administration. The best that can be said for Biden/Harris is that the US aid provided to Ukraine has been sufficient to prolong the war. But the irrational fear of “escalation” has deterred Biden/Harris from giving Ukraine the freedom of action necessary to score a decisive battlefield victory over Russia, sufficient to create favorable conditions for a negotiated peace. The Biden/Harris Administration’s atrocious Middle East policy would likely be replicated in eastern Europe by Kamala Harris, if she’s elected president: pressure on a US ally to make concessions to the aggressor in the pursuit of “peace.”

Under Trump or Harris, therefore, US policy on this issue will boil down to the management of defeat. So whichever way you vote, America, the result will not be pretty.