The Situation: Ignorant Dilettantes Give Up on Ukraine

The Situation on Thursday urged everyone to “Stand With Harvard” and “Stand With Big Law.”

Today, let’s consider the Trump administration’s apparent frustration with its own delusional policy toward the Russia-Ukraine war.

Trump came into office promising that he would get a deal to stop the fighting in Ukraine within 24 hours.

His approach, as his critics worried it would, seemed to involve bullying Ukraine into accepting major concessions to Russian President Vladimir Putin and sidelining European allies who have been close partners in keeping Ukraine viable in the fight. In exchange for capitulating to Russian aggression, what would Ukraine get? Well, nothing good. No security guarantees. No NATO membership. Ukraine would, instead, have the honor of rapacious American exploitation of mineral resources—the United States having rebranded itself as the East India Tea Company.

There were only two problems with this plan—both of which were obvious from the beginning to just about everyone except Trump.

The first was that there was no earthly reason for Ukraine to accept a deal like this. Ukraine’s military situation was and is bad and eroding, but it’s not hopeless, and it’s eroding slowly. Russian gains are small, and while Ukraine has manpower issues, Russia does too and is losing people at a rate that will not be easy for it to sustain. Moreover, while the United States is an essential partner for Ukraine, Europe is stepping up, so Western support is not about to flip off. And Ukraine has also developed manufacturing capacity for an increasing amount of weaponry, particularly drones. 

The second reason was that Russia has never shown any inclination to accept a deal that leaves Ukraine as a viable state. From the beginning, Russia has sought the obliteration of the independent Ukrainian state, the annexation of much of its territory, and the imposition on the rest of it of a Belarus-like client-state status. Putin has never made much secret of this, and the notion that he would agree to some kind of cease-fire in place while his forces are—while slowly and at great cost—advancing was always silly.

The deal Trump imagined wasn’t going to happen in 24 hours; it wasn’t going to happen in 24 days; and it’s probably not going to happen in 24 months.

It appears that Trump is, to his evident frustration, starting to figure this out. Over the last couple of weeks, he has started having social media temper tantrums—and at least one Oval Office temper tantrum—about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He has complained that Zelenskyy won’t agree to U.S. recognition that Crimea is Russian now. He has railed about how the war is Zelenskyy’s and Biden’s fault and the loss of Crimea is Obama’s fault, and none of it is his fault—as though the terms of settlement should depend on which American president is at fault for what part of the war. The whole war, Trump wants you to understand, would never have happened had he been president.

Trump has also suddenly noticed, seemingly for the first time, that Russia keeps rocketing civilian areas and doesn’t seem to actually be serious about reaching a deal. In social media posts, he has alternated between pleading with Putin to stop making him look like a fool by killing Ukrainian kids even as Trump and his negotiators are functioning as the Kremlin’s key international validators, and blustering about additional sanctions if Russia doesn’t get serious about peace.

Most tellingly, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have repeatedly said they will walk away from the negotiation if a deal isn’t reachable within days—though neither has said what that means.

And walking away is a funny phrase. It could mean, after all, giving up on Russia, having concluded that Putin really does want to wipe out Ukraine, and grudgingly reverting to a policy of supporting Ukraine. Much as I would like to believe this is where Trump is headed, I assess the probability of this outcome as being sadly low. It would require reversing years of hating Zelenskyy. It would require, at some level, admitting he has been wrong about Putin since before his first presidency. It would require admitting that the premise of his policy has been naively credulous of some of the world’s worst people.

It could also mean, and this is more probable, giving up on Ukraine, having concluded that the people who didn’t stop fighting when Russian troops were in Kyiv’s outskirts are not going to stop fighting because Trump tells them too—and cutting off aid and intelligence assistance to punish them.

Or it could mean, probably most likely of all, a kind of face-saving both-sidesism, in which the administration declares that the parties aren’t ready for peace because neither side will agree to compromise. Left unsaid will be that the “compromise” at hand would have one side accept the acquisition of its territory by force and the stealing of its children and have the other side stop acquiring territory by force and murdering civilians and deporting children from their homeland. Never mind the moral equities: neither side, the line will go, is ready to play ball. Depending on how badly the negotiations flop, it’s conceivable that there could be some sectoral or regional cease-fires that the administration could point to as all the parties are able to do right now, thus allowing the administration to claim that it has made some progress. But the point will be the same.

The both-sides-suck line would allow the administration a certain flexibility in precisely how it wants to “move on.” It’s consistent with continuing quiet support for Ukraine at some level—which Congress might insist on—just never talking about it. It’s also consistent with disengaging from the conflict and relaxing sanctions against the Russians, on the theory that this is just a conflict between two states who can’t get along and there’s no reason not to do business with both. It’s conceivably consistent with both at the same time. It’s also completely amoral, and it doesn’t require much of a mea culpa from Trump—both of which features will undoubtedly hold some attraction for him.

For those of us for whom an amoral American policy built on lies and delusions has no attractions, there is no schadenfreude in watching Trump’s Ukraine policy sputter—predictable as it was and stupidly hubristic as Trump was in pronouncing a deal easily within reach. Satisfying though it is in many arenas to watch reality catch up with him, this one has too many victims. Too many Ukrainians are in occupied lands to flirt with recognizing Russian annexation of those lands. Too many Ukrainians are being killed to suggest that this war of aggression against them is their own fault. Too many people have been on the front lines too long to toy with the military and intelligence assistance on which they depend.

There is a point at which ignorant dilettantism becomes a form of cruelty, and Trump passed that point long ago in his policies towards Ukraine and Russia.

The Situation continues tomorrow.