Last week’s essay, “Fighting Fascism Isn’t Fun,” spent some time talking about the foreign policy and national security implications of the newly Trumpified United States. This week let’s look at one piece of that in more detail.
Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, I wrote here (and on Consequence Forum, an online journal about violent conflict) about the worrying zeal for military force that had understandably gripped many in the West in response to that brutal aggression. The sheer brutality of Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked attack, and the valor of the Ukrainian people and their leaders in resisting it, were deeply stirring. But the brave Ukrainian struggle also brought out a bellicose wave of enthusiasm for warfighting among many in the West who are usually more reluctant about such things. Predictably, it also elicited a disgusting pro-Putin response from the American right, which lives in an alternate reality where day is night, up is down, and villains are heroes.
Military force was undeniably required to resist the Russian campaign, but the rah-rah cheerleading for it—even among people not usually given to jingoism—and the simplistic grasp of what that entailed, irked and worried me. (Among its risks, it also opened the door for those aforementioned right wingers to justify their own acts of violence when their temporary pacificism inevitably abated.)
When it came to a cause as noble as Ukraine’s, I understood where that aggressive feeling came from, and how seductive it was. It’s very much human nature. But my concern at the time, continuing to this day, is how that justifiably righteous fervor placed far too much faith in the effectiveness of brute force as a tool for achieving national objectives.
To paraphrase a famous Prussian: war is only the continuation of politics by other means. As such, it is not an objective nor an end in itself, and is constrained by multiple other factors in any given conflict.
Now that the endgame in Ukraine—or should I say for Ukraine—is at hand, we see that dynamic demonstrated in its most sobering form.
CARL IS RIGHT AGAIN
The people of Ukraine fought valiantly against their Russian aggressor, dealt him losses and setbacks that few thought possible before hostilities commenced, and for a time—with Western aid—looked like they might even prevail. But with Putin’s vassal Donald J. Trump back in the White House and US aid to Kyiv is about to be shut off, the strategic situation has irrevocably changed. Now we are faced with a completely different and much more grim scenario: a political solution that renders the bravery and physical courage of the Ukrainian people and their leaders moot in the face of a deal between two despots, Putin and Trump. And won’t Donnie be pleased to mentioned in the same breath with his hero.
Ukraine has been at the center of Trump‘s horrific reign for two administrations now. It’s worth remembering that the “perfect call” to Zelenskyy in 2019 to blackmail him over the Javelin missiles that Ukraine desperately needed to defend itself against an earlier and ongoing Russian incursion, in 2014—and Trump‘s desire for manufactured dirt on Biden for use in the 2020 election—is what got Donnie impeached the first time. And of course there’s the whole Manafort/Yanukovych/Deripaska connection, which is tied to Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Trump‘s acceptance of it. Now, in this third presidential cycle in a row, Ukraine again is front and center.
Trump has never made any secret of his venal, shortsighted view that any foreign aid constitutes the US being “suckered.” Twinned with that, ever since his first KGB/Intourist-sponsored visit to the then-USSR in 1987, he has vocally promoted an isolationist foreign policy that perfectly aligns with Moscow’s goals, both in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. (Why he feels that way is a topic for another day, or yet another remake of The Manchurian Candidate.)
Atop that broad selfishness and strategic ignorance, we have the added factor of Trump’s adoration of Putin and despots in general. As Robert Kagan wrote in The Atlantic last month, “Trump himself is no ideologist, but his sympathies clearly lie with those around the world who share a hatred of what they perceive to be the oppressive and bullying liberal world order, people such as Viktor Orbán, Nigel Farage, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin.”
That spells doom for Kyiv—and a painful demonstration of how battlefield success or failure is far from the deciding factor in geopolitical outcomes.
Ultimately, it will be the economic power of the United States—specifically the withdrawal of it—that will doom Ukraine, not military defeat. It’s true the situation would be different if Ukraine had had even more operational success in repelling the Russian invaders, but that too was constrained by non-battlefield factors such as economic and military assistance from the West. One may argue that they are connected, of course, because economic power in the form of money, ordnance, and intelligence furthered Ukraine’s military efforts. Very true—but that is just another way of making my point. All these factors are always inextricably connected. Military force never operates in a vacuum—never. It’s impossible by definition. One cannot untangle military affairs from the broader political context in which they sit.
So now, after three years of courageous self-defense and sacrifice by the Ukrainian people, Ukraine’s fate will not be decided on the field of battle: it will be decided over a conference table, by the US and Russia.
In other words, by Russia.
WELCOME TO THE OCCUPATION
When a Western democracy makes weak-kneed and ill-conceived efforts to mollify a brutal dictator, the specter of Chamberlain and the appeasement at Munich in ’38 is usually invoked. But this is something worse. This is the United States actively aligning with a brutal dictator, and doing his bidding, and sacrificing a smaller democracy on the altar of greed, autocracy, and our own would-be dictator’s pathology.
Ukraine is about to be fed to the lions—or perhaps should I say to the bear?
Trump‘s attacks on Zelenskyy as an unelected “dictator,” (an appellation he refuses to apply to Putin), blaming him for starting the war, threatening him with the obliteration of his country, and faulting his failure to make a deal, are all preludes to Trump throwing up his hands and saying “I did what I could!” as he lets his pal Vlad gobble up an entire country and exterminate its people as if it had never existed at all, which of course Putin claims it did not. Trump is playacting at brokering a lasting peace, but all he’s really doing is the kabuki preparatory to giving Moscow everything it wants on a plate, with only the thinnest pretense of any sort of negotiation. And that should scare the piss out of Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and even Hungary.
Of course, short of maintaining US materiel support, which he has ruled out, Trump could probably not save Ukraine even if he wanted to, which he clearly does not. Kagan notes that Trump, for all his bluster, has no leverage with Russia. Putin knows he does not want to carry on supporting Ukraine, so he has no incentive to fold. Trump has a pair of twos and Vlad knows it. So much for the art of the deal.
I’ve quoted Kagan’s juggernaut piece from last month at length before, and I’m going to do it again, because it’s the clearest statement I’ve seen about the dire state of play:
(Putin’s) goal for more than two decades has been to weaken the US and break its global hegemony and its leadership of the “liberal world order” so that Russia may resume what he sees as its rightful place as a European great power and an empire with global influence….
(H)e also believes that victory will begin the unraveling of eight decades of American global primacy and the oppressive, American-led liberal world order.
Think of what he can accomplish by proving through the conquest of Ukraine that even America’s No. 1 tough guy, the man who would “make America great again,” who garnered the support of the majority of American male voters, is helpless to stop him and to prevent a significant blow to American power and influence. In other words, think of what it will mean for Donald Trump’s America to lose. Far from wanting to help Trump, Putin benefits by humiliating him.
So what will the sacrifice of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people mean? Kagan again:
Putin’s aim is not an independent albeit smaller Ukraine, a neutral Ukraine, or even an autonomous Ukraine within a Russian sphere of influence. His goal is no Ukraine. “Modern Ukraine,” he has said, “is entirely the product of the Soviet era.” Putin does not just want to sever Ukraine’s relationships with the West. He aims to stamp out the very idea of Ukraine, to erase it as a political and cultural entity.
And what will life in Russian-ruled former Ukraine look like? Like this, again per Kagan:
Putin has decreed that all people in the occupied territories must renounce their Ukrainian citizenship and become Russian citizens or face deportation. Russian citizenship is required to send children to school, to register a vehicle, to get medical treatment, and to receive pensions. People without Russian passports cannot own farmland, vote, run for office, or register a religious congregation. In schools throughout the Russian-occupied territories, students learn a Russian curriculum and complete a Russian “patriotic education program” and early military training, all taught by teachers sent from the Russian Federation.
The targeting of children in this crusade is among the most despicable and stomach-turning aspect, not unlike Trump’s targeting of children in the “family separation” policy.
Parents who object to this Russification risk having their children taken away and sent to boarding schools in Russia or occupied Crimea, where, Putin has decreed, they can be adopted by Russian citizens. By the end of 2023, Ukrainian officials had verified the names of 19,000 children relocated to schools and camps in Russia or to Russian-occupied territory. As former British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly put it in 2023, “Russia’s forcible deportation of innocent Ukrainian children is a systematic attempt to erase Ukraine’s future.”
In the best case scenario, then, Ukraine will be a hobbled, war-weary fragment of itself, greatly geographically diminished, and living under Russian dominance. The worst case scenario is that Ukraine ceases to exist altogether, its people are exterminated as a nationality, and its entire culture, language, and history obliterated. Whether or not European peacekeeping forces wind up on the ground is meaningless. (Putin has already denied Trump’s claim that he will accept them.) But any way it shakes out, you can mark my words: there will be no peace in Ukraine, except on terms that are onerous to Kyiv and acceptable only to Vladimir Putin.
THE RAISING OF THE WHITE FLAG
Even if you don’t give a shit about your fellow humans in Ukraine or anywhere else, there are tectonic implications for the US in terms of our relationship with our erstwhile partners in what was once called the Free World. “The divisions between the US and its allies, and among the Europeans themselves, will deepen and multiply,” Kagan writes. “Putin is closer to his aim of splintering the West than at any other time in the quarter century since he took power.”
Some of that damage has already been done, and may be irreversible, as these events in Ukraine come on the heels of last week’s appalling and cowardly American abdication of global responsibility by Hegseth and Vance on their respective visits to Europe, and the installation of Russia’s useful idiot Tulsi Gabbard and the pro- authoritarian Kash Patel atop the US Intelligence Community. No one in Europe or anywhere else will ever trust the US again, knowing that we would elect a government like this that would do the things it has done, and with the threat of even worse.
NATO itself may soon since to exist—can you imagine a greater victory for Russia?—or at least be radically reimagined as a Europe-only venture without the participation of the once-indispensable United States. Remember the “end of history,” per Francis Fukuyama, when the West was triumphant and the Warsaw Pact allegedly consigned to the dustbin of history? Well the loser now will be later to win, ‘cause the times they are a-changin’.
(In fairness to Francis, his original earthquake of an article carried a question mark—”The End of History?”—though his subsequent book did not.)
At the extreme end of this trajectory, ask yourself this: If all US forces are withdrawn from Europe, and Article 5 of the NATO charter is no longer in effect, what happens if Vladimir Putin gets the bright idea of invading Germany or France? Not that he would necessarily do that, for various practical reasons, but just as a thought experiment, imagine that he did. Do you think Donald Trump would send US troops back to Europe to defend our old friends? I can’t imagine that he would.
But such baroque scenarios are not really the point. The point is that after eighty years of active US engagement and investment in global security, Donald Trump is now openly surrendering to Moscow and leaving the planet at the mercy of the worst dictators around, whom he actively admires, and doing it without so much as a shrug. More like a rictus of a smile, in fact.
When future historians write about the last two weeks, it will be the most scalding indictment of the United States and its “leaders” that you can imagine. And even worse is likely still to come.
RETURN OF THE PIRHANA BROTHERS
But Trump & Co,. aren’t just throwing Ukraine to the wolves. (Lions. Bears. Whatever. The whole damn zoo.) They’re shaking them down in the process like the two-bit gangsters they are.
The Guardian reports: “White House officials have told Ukraine to stop badmouthing Donald Trump and to sign a deal handing over half of the country’s mineral wealth to the US, saying a failure to do so would be unacceptable.”
The US national security adviser, Mike Waltz, told Fox News that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, should “tone down” his criticism of the US and take a “hard look” at the deal. It proposes giving Washington $500bn worth of natural resources, including oil and gas.
Waltz said Kyiv was wrong to push back against the US president’s approach to peace talks with Moscow, given everything the US had done for Ukraine. He denied accusations the US had snubbed Ukraine and America’s European allies by excluding them from talks earlier this week with Russia. This was routine “shuttle diplomacy”, he said.
Yes—routine shuttle diplomacy. “Nice country ya got here. Shame if somethin’ happened to it.”
The Guardian further reports that there are “signs that the Trump administration now considers Ukraine an adversary, and is working against it on a diplomatic level.” Sure looks that way.
So wtf is this “proposal,” contained in a surprise two-page document delivered to Zelenskyy by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a visit to Kyiv last week? In The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum writes:
(The document) calls for the US to take 50 percent of all “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine,” including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure,” not just now but forever, as the British newspaper The Telegraph reported and others confirmed: “For all future licenses the US will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals,” the document says.
These terms resemble nothing so much as the Versailles Treaty imposed on a defeated Germany after World War I, and are dramatically worse than those imposed on Germany and Japan after World War.
The $500 billion figure supposedly is meant to “recoup” the price of military aid the Biden administration provided Ukraine since the 2022 Russian invasion. Where Donald got that figure no one knows. Estimates of how much the US has given Ukraine vary depending on how you calculate it, some as low as $106 billion, but even the very highest no more than $175 billion. (Of that, about $65.9 billion is military aid.)
Comparing US aid to EU aid is also trickly, depending on how one defines the terms and separates grants from loans, but they are roughly on par, despite Trump’s lies to the contrary. Ian Bremmer’s GZERO website reports that “European countries, including the EU, have collectively exceeded America’s support, providing $138 billion in allocated aid compared to America’s $119 billion (though America maintains a slight edge in military assistance). When factoring in additional pending commitments, Europe’s lead increases further. However, nearly 90% of EU institutional financial support consists of loans (albeit with very favorable terms), while approximately 60% of American financial aid has been delivered as outright grants.”
Clear as mud?
Zelenskyy has already refused to sign the document, which apparently would violate Ukrainian law in any event, but he has also offered to resign if that will bring better peace terms for his people. (Again, contrary to Trump’s lies, Zelenskyy is immensely popular with his countrymen, with approval numbers an American president would die for—around 57%. Trump, pulling a number out of his fat white ass, claimed it is 4%.) But that does not mean somehow the bullies that comprise the Trump administration will not succeed foisting this criminal arrangement down Kyiv’s throat.
But it isn’t just the money at issue here; apparently it’s also about Donald Trump’s feelings. The AP reports that Waltz said: “There needs to be a deep appreciation for what the American people and the American taxpayer, what President Trump did in his first term and what we’ve done since. There’s some of the rhetoric coming out of Kyiv, frankly, and insults to President Trump (that) were unacceptable.”
So this isn’t even about policy, or even money—it’s about our infantile leader’s fragile fucking ego.
And what will the betrayal of Ukraine mean for domestic US politics? (The most American question imaginable.) When Donald Trump presides over the violent dismemberment of an ally, sitting idly by while Putin crushes an entire democracy and its people and turns it into a Russian fiefdom, will the American people believe Donald’s bullshit that it was some sort of US diplomatic triumph?
Bobby Kagan doesn’t think so. In fact, he believes that Trump’s entire presidency rests on this decision, and that his chosen path will be disastrous for him as well as for Kyiv:
(Trump) faces the unpalatable prospect of presiding over a major strategic defeat. Historically, that has never been good for a leader’s political standing. Jimmy Carter looked weak when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, which was of far less strategic significance than Ukraine. Henry Kissinger, despite his Nobel Prize, was drummed out of the Republican Party in the mid-1970s in no small part because of America’s failure in Vietnam and the perception that the Soviet Union was on the march during his time in office. Joe Biden ended an unpopular war in Afghanistan, only to pay a political price for doing so.
The fall of Ukraine will be far messier—and better televised. Trump has created and cherished an aura of power and toughness, but that can quickly vanish. When the fall of Ukraine comes, it will be hard to spin as anything but a defeat for the United States, and for its president.
This was not what Trump had in mind when he said he could get a peace deal in Ukraine. He no doubt envisioned being lauded as the statesman who persuaded Putin to make a deal, saving the world from the horrors of another endless war. His power and prestige would be enhanced. He would be a winner. His plans do not include being rebuffed, rolled over, and by most of the world’s judgment, defeated.
AH, BUT THE STRAWBERRIES
In addition to the US surrendering to Russia, and the impending collapse of security alliances that have been a bulwark against authoritarianism for eighty years (while that same vile ideology is on the rapid rise here at home), there are other worrying developments of late.
In Germany, results of the election on Sunday were certainly brow-raising. The neo-Nazi AfD doubled its showing in 2021, to about 20% of the vote, edging the ruling Social Democrats (more or less analogous to the Democratic Party in the US), putting them second after the conservative CDU/CSU. That is by far the best showing for a far right party in Germany since the end of World War II. And—big shock—the Trump administration is openly embracing it. While the conservatives have sworn that they will not form a coalition government with the AfD, and will seek other partners, including the Social Democrats and/or the Greens, the sheer fact that a party like that has jumped in popularity the way it has is extremely concerning to say the least. There is also good reason to fear that the Christian Democrats might break that promise down the road.
At the United Nations, the US voted against a resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. In so doing, we joined Russia itself, Israel, North Korea, Belarus, and fourteen other countries friendly to Moscow in opposition as the measure passed overwhelmingly. (China and India abstained.) Please consider the company we have chosen to put ourselves in, and the side with which we are now eagerly aligned. Following the vote, Heather Cox Richardson notes, “On Google Maps, users changed the name of Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago to ‘Kremlin Headquarters’.”
On the media front, there was a Trump-driven bloodbath at MSNBC this week, taking out a huge number of its most prominent top non-white anchors, almost certainly connected to the network’s parent company, Comcast, currying favor with the administration ahead of a hoped-for merger with Charter Spectrum. But that was nothing compared to the DEI bloodbath at the Pentagon.
In the first week of his second term, Trump fired the commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Linda Fagan, because she is a woman, and this past Friday he fired the Navy’s top officer, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti also because she is a woman, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., because he is Black, and let’s not pretend there were any other reasons.
Trump’s nominee to replace General Brown as CJCS, USAF Lieutenant General Dan Caine, is retired, and was a three-star general, not four-star as the law requires, and would therefore need a waiver to take the job. (That won’t be a problem, though, since it’s up to Trump to issue that waiver.) Nor, evidently, does Caine have the requisite command, staff, and educational experience typical of a Chairman, including graduation from one of the senior service colleges like the Army War College, Naval War College, or Air War College. (You can divine for yourselves what it means that his undergraduate degree is from VMI.)
But apparently Caine impressed Trump during their introduction in 2018, when Trump claims that Caine told him “he could defeat the Islamic State in a week.”
“‘One week?’” Mr. Trump said he asked incredulously. “‘I was told two years!’”
“‘We’re only hitting them from a temporary base in Syria, but if you gave us permission, we could hit them from the back, from the side, from all over, from the base you’re right on right now, sir,’” Mr. Trump quoted him as saying. “‘They won’t know what the hell hit them.’”
I don’t know much else about “Razin’” Caine, the callsign (I presume) by which he likes to be known, but that interaction is a bad omen. The idea that airpower alone can win wars is the oldest canard in modern military affairs, dating back to Billy Mitchell and the advent of the warplane itself, and has had disastrous consequences every time it has been tried. But if Razin’ gets confirmed, can look forward to it being applied a lot in the near future.
So now evidently we’re going to have an underqualified Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (to go without our wholly unqualified SecDef) who believes in Curt LeMay-style “bomb ‘em into the Stone Age” warfighting—the same naïve and wishful thinking that would have you believe that force alone was going to be the solution in Ukraine, any more than it was in Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan.
Of course, Trump’s storytelling can’t be trusted. In a later telling, he changed General Caine’s estimate from two years to four, but then claimed that Caine told him that Trump was the only politician ever to listen to his field commanders, donned a MAGA hat (in defiance of regulations against wearing political paraphernalia) and said, “‘I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.’”
All of which Caine denies. (Insert Caine mutiny joke here.)
Perhaps even more worrying than the JCS Friday night massacre was the simultaneous purge of all four armed services’ top JAG officers (Judge Advocate General), the senior military attorneys who would decide what presidential orders are legal or not…..such as attempts to involve the active duty military in the mass arrest, detention, deportation of migrants, or deployment against fellow Americans should Trump invoke the Insurrection Act.
And Caine’s appointment plays into that as well. After getting humiliated in his first term by the courageous Mark Milley, who played a key role in preventing a self-coup, Trump is clearly determined to have a compliant lickspittle in that role this time around. I don’t wanna prejudge the guy before he even gets confirmed, but the initial indicators for Caine are not good. In fact, he looks to be the anti-Milley, which is clearly what Donald wants.
We are in a dark place both domestically and internationally. But the impending fall of Ukraine should remind us that wars are not won with bombs and bullets alone, or even principally, and that democracies must fight in many ways—not just with violence—against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
We are living in a time when there are plenty of both.
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Photo: Ukrainian soldier during the battle for the city of Avdiivka, which fell to Russia in February 2024. Credit: Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images.
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