The (Fatuous) Case for Betraying Ukraine

Opinion|The (Fatuous) Case for Betraying Ukraine

There’s an argument that passes for a sophisticated defense of Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s beat down of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office last Friday. Here it is in a nutshell:

The United States is spending billions for a war in Ukraine that is not in our vital interests and in which victory is not possible. America’s central foreign-policy concern is our strategic competition with China. But our knee-jerk hostility toward Russia — principally through our cavalier indifference to Moscow’s legitimate grievances, our blind support for Ukraine and our hypocritical posturing about not invading other countries — has merely consolidated Vladimir Putin’s alliance with Beijing and other bad actors in Pyongyang and Tehran.

This is worse than counterproductive; it risks World War III. As with Dwight Eisenhower in the Korean War, the best Trump can do is to bring about a swift end to the conflict through an armistice that preserves Ukraine’s independence but accepts that it won’t be able to reclaim its former borders. If the Europeans now want to take on the risks of defending Ukraine, that’s their business; it is past time they got serious about their own security instead of mooching off the United States, which can ill afford the defense subsidy given our enormous debt.

In the meantime, America expects payback from Ukraine for the support we’ve already given, mainly in the form of critical minerals. And we’ll continue to work to detach Moscow from Beijing’s orbit, not least by welcoming the Russians back to the Group of 7 and other Western councils. As for the moral issue: If Richard Nixon could do business with a monster like Mao Zedong, why can’t Trump do business with Putin?

Now let’s understand why this argument fails.

First, Putin’s grievances with the West did not begin with the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine on the eve of the 2022 invasion, or the Obama administration’s support for Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution in 2014. They did not begin in 2005 — a relatively halcyon period of Western-Russian relations — when Putin called the fall of the Soviet Union “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” They did not even happen with NATO’s enlargement, which, as Rahm Emanuel likes to point out, wasn’t a case of the Atlantic Alliance moving east but of the Eastern Bloc moving west out of a well-placed fear of Russia.

They began in 1989, when Putin, as a K.G.B. officer in East Germany, witnessed the collapse of Soviet power — his power — at the hands of people power. The organizing principle of Putin’s 25-year reign has been the restoration of the former at the expense of the latter. He has done this through the elimination of democracy, the assassination of opponents, cyberattacks on neighboring countries, military invasions, repeated violation of longstanding international agreements and illegal interference in the politics of Western countries.

Putin is not the aggrieved defender of historic Russian interests. He is a malign aggressor in pursuit of a deeply personal ambition. A victory in Ukraine won’t satisfy that ambition; it will whet it.