Posted on March 26, 2025
"End" Games
Only he who wants peace makes
concessions
by
Daniel Clark
During
Volodymyr Zelenskyy's ill-fated visit to the Oval Office, President Trump
scolded, "you don't have the cards." If the
Ukrainian president failed to grasp this analogy, perhaps that's because he did
not understand how his opponent could have any stronger a hand than he did.
If you are
the invading force, and after three years your attempted conquest has ground to
a stalemate, that means you're losing.
If you're making only glacial territorial gains using World War I
tactics, while enemy drones pulverize your navy behind the lines, and you've
had to enlist foreign mercenaries to repel a counter-invasion, you should be
receptive to any offer that would let you out of the war you've created. So why does Vladimir Putin think he can
make such outrageous demands as having territory ceded to him in
addition to what he's currently occupying, disarming Ukraine of all the
weaponry it has received from NATO member states, reducing the Ukrainian
military to a fraction of its current size, and forbidding the presence of European
peacekeepers?
Nothing that has taken place on the
battlefield suggests that the Russians should now find themselves in such a
commanding position. It's as if they had
just been hanging on, in hopes that the Great Negotiator would someday come and
rescue them. If Zelenskyy isn't holding
any cards, then Putin is holding only one -- the Trump card, you might say.
Last year,
candidate Donald Trump repeatedly insisted that he could "end" the war within
24 hours, echoing his pledge from the 2016 campaign to "end the forever war" in
Afghanistan. The instant Putin heard him
utter the e-word in relation to Ukraine, he must have known he had a pigeon,
because he remembers how the negotiation in Afghanistan turned out. In exchange for nothing verifiable, Trump
agreed to a complete withdrawal of American forces, which returned the Taliban
to power and gave al-Qaeda back its base of operations. Not only that, but he undermined the sitting
Afghan government by excluding it from the process, and then committed it to a
lopsided prisoner swap, releasing 5,000 Taliban fighters for 1,000 Afghans.
It's not
hard to see how this happened. Trump had
given away his endgame, which was that he desperately wanted an "end" to the
war, without preference for a particular outcome. Thus, the Taliban achieved a victory through
negotiation that they could never have won militarily, because an end to the
war had become something for which Trump was willing to compensate them.
Once
again, President Trump has unilaterally disarmed himself in a negotiation to
end a war. Because he has made it
abundantly clear that he must have peace in Ukraine, whoever is able to provide
it for him can name his price. The
Ukrainians, who have been forced to fight for their survival, are not able to
simply choose to end the war. The
Russian aggressors are the only ones who have the power to do that.
Only he who desires peace ever has
to make concessions for it. For example,
it wouldn't always be incumbent on Israel to "trade land for peace" if peace
were something its terrorist enemies wanted also. The reason Hitler won his negotiation in
Munich was that he was not the one who wanted peace. Because Britain and France did, they eagerly
signed over the Sudetenland (which wasn't theirs to give anyway). One of the problems with appeasement,
however, is that it does not provide an enforcement mechanism. The opposition can come back afterward and
say it doesn't agree to peace after all, and then what?
A peace
negotiation can only be successful if the forces of evil have been made to want
peace, and Trump has it in his power to bring that about. As a candidate, he once said he would bring
Putin to the table by threatening to strengthen Ukraine's hand rather than
weaken it, as he is now doing. What if
he really did that? What if he requested
that Congress provide Ukraine with all the drones, missile defenses, F-16s and
Bradley armored fighting vehicles that it could ever need? Then, he could tell Putin that if he was
expecting to be thrown a lifeline by the new Trump administration, he had been
badly mistaken. He could tell him that
his only two options are to continue to suffer unspeakable losses for the
foreseeable future, or to get out. That
means get out of Donbas. Get out of
Crimea. Get out.
Alas, it
looks as if Trump would prefer to go on misappropriating Ronald Reagan's "peace
through strength" slogan instead of taking the opportunity to demonstrate
it. Already, he has agreed to withdraw
his special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, Gen. Keith Kellogg, just because the
Russians objected that he was too close to Ukraine. It would not have taken that great a
demonstration of strength for Trump to tell the Russians that Kellogg is his
chosen representative, and that they could deal with him, or else there would
be no deal.
Instead,
Trump has replaced Kellogg with Steve Witkoff, who has obviously been chosen
for his overtly pro-Russian sympathies.
In a recent interview with Putin-friendly podcaster Tucker Carlson,
Witkoff criticized Zelenskyy for supposedly being disrespectful to President
Trump during their meeting, repeated the Kremlin propaganda that "the
overwhelming majority of the people" in the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine
"have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule," and uncritically
stated that "there's a sensibility in Russia that Ukraine is a false country."
Prior to
this assignment, Witkoff had been Trump's special envoy to the Middle
East. Imagine him saying there is a
sensibility that Israel is a false country, and then expecting the Israelis to
negotiate with him. That's about how
absurd this is. The Ukrainians must deal
with a mediator who respects the opinion that Ukraine has no right to exist,
and anything they say in their own defense will be denounced as uncooperative
and impudent.
By rigging
the peace talks in Russia's favor, Trump is not making the Russians want
peace. He's only giving Putin an
opportunity to pause the fighting long enough to replenish his military before
resuming the attack, perhaps stopping to gobble up Moldova along the way. Once again, the villain will feel free to
tear up the agreement, once it has ceased to serve his purposes.
Zelenskyy
tried to make this point, when he explained to Trump and J.D. Vance that Putin
had already broken a ceasefire in the Minsk Agreement ten years ago. In fact, that was the remark that earned him
his ejection from the White House. He
actually complained that the man who has invaded his country, and murdered, tortured
and kidnapped many of its inhabitants, is not to be trusted. The nerve of the guy!
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