Donald Trump, would-be master dealmaker, is setting up Ukraine and us for an appeasing sellout to Russian leader Vladimir Putin and abandonment of an ally or a failed summit with no purpose.
By agreeing to the summit at all — perhaps without including direct participation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump already has given Putin a victory in a face-to-face summit that recognizes Russia’s assumed place in the world as a Big Power ready to slice up the world map.
Even before it is scheduled to start Friday in an unpublicized site in Alaska, the promised meeting feels depressingly wrong on several grounds.
Any other U.S. president would have done substantial groundwork by diplomats from both sides before acceding to a summit. Trump skipped the work, thinking that all international agreements are simple, and the result of personal relationships between leaders, and dependent on what he has heard from his friend Steve Witkoff, who has met five times with Putin. (Why is non-diplomat Witkoff doing this instead of Secretary of State Mario Rubio?)
Now Trump says the meeting is “is really a feel-out meeting, a little bit,” to find out Putin’s thinking.
To anyone but Trump, Putin’s thinking has been clear even before he invaded Ukraine. He wants to swallow the former Soviet republic whole, or at least bite off as much as he can, replace its government with a friendly leader and keep Ukraine from joining NATO or Europe — all with disdain for killing loads of civilians.
To underscore his disdain for a ceasefire, Putin has escalated militarily even in the last two days. Does dealmaker Trump think there is anything else substantive to learn?
Trump and Putin
As we all have followed, Trump has a special affinity for Putin. The threatened drop dead date for Putin to agree to a ceasefire has passed without any Trump action — exactly the kind of inaction for which he has accused Democratic predecessors.
No other U.S. president would seek to settle this war with “land swaps” that involve no swaps, but a giveaway of Ukrainian territory — especially without the approval of the Ukrainian leader at the table, who has specifically rejected them. No other U.S. president would walk away from Ukraine as an ally for democracy without prior assurances from Russia about security safeguards that Russia specifically rejects. In any case, the “swaps” seem one-way; Russia isn’t talking about withdrawing from designated, contested areas.
It smacks of 1938 appeasement by Britain’s Neville Chamberlain with Adolph Hitler that solved exactly nothing before spreading as World War II.
In like fashion, Putin expects Trump to hand him what apparently cannot win on the battlefield — control of about 20 percent of Ukraine, with no guarantee not to go back for more.
Erratic Acts Towards Friend and Foe
Trump is letting Putin manipulate him again, as columnist Max Boot writes in The Washington Post.
Boot argues that this premature summit came about because of Trump’s obsession with winning a Nobel Peace Prize for ending a complicated war that he promised to stop in 24 hours of becoming president.
That obsession has led to a series of ever-changing stances about support for Ukraine, including attacks on Zelenskyy, and frustration that finally recognized that Russia is the problem here, not Ukraine. But Russia is not stopping its bombs, missiles and drones from attacking Ukraine’s civilian population.
Trump is using his tariffs and trade policies as a weapon to force India to stop buying Russian oil, but other countries, including China, are buying plenty of it. Trump is back to claiming that “President Putin I believe wants to see peace.”
Land in Ukraine is not Trump’s to dissect, and even if he were Zelenskyy’s designated agent, Trump’s idea of negotiation appears to be to give away the prize without any guarantee that this indeed will be the end. Russia broke previous agreements to stop taking Ukrainian land before launching its invasion three years ago.
As the Institute for the Study of War notes, Russia has been trying, and failing, to capture all of Donbas since 2014. Putin is simply trying to achieve at the negotiating table what his troops have not been able to achieve on the ground, argues Boot.
Trump seems to believe Putin’s assertions that if he gains full control over eastern Ukrainian sectors and Crimea, Russia will stop. With the battle lines frozen, the Wall Street Journal reports, a final end to the war would supposedly be negotiated later.
Does anyone besides Trump believe this? How about a summit in which Trump is sufficiently prepared to know what constitutes a good, achievable goal that both sides can accept?
Would Trump offer a similar deal to Israel? He hasn’t. Would he offer China half of Taiwan? No. Would he give South Korean land to the North Korean leader or any of the Middle East territories to Iran? Of course not.
We are left not only with a continuing war, but with a dithering U.S. president who abandons even his own promise of sanctions aimed at forcing Russia to stop. Offering Putin a summit as an international reward for nothing seems the opposite of any art of deal.
CLICK HERE TO DONATE IN SUPPORT OF FREEDOM OF THE PRESS AND OUR NONPROFIT NEWSROOM
