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!

 

 

Return to Shinbone

 The Shinbone: The Frontier of the Free Press 

 Mailbag . Issue Index . Politimals . College Football Czar