Trump's senseless capitulation to Putin is a betrayal of Ukraine - and terrible dealmaking
From: Timothy Garton Ash at The Guardian
2-13-2025
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/13/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-ukraine-us-europe
As the US and its European allies head to the Munich security conference, Europe must learn from its tragic history and oppose appeasement
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For a few weeks after Trump’s election we had a faint hope that when it came to Ukraine his administration would follow its proclaimed motto of “peace through strength”, understanding that strength is the only language Putin comprehends. Now we see that Trump not only bullies his country’s friends but sucks up to his country’s enemies.
This so-called strongman is actually a weak man when it comes to confronting the hostile authoritarians of this world. In just one day, he has made four large, unnecessary and damaging concessions. First, he has not just initiated exploratory talks with Putin via an intermediary, which would be defensible, but personally given the Russian dictator fulsome and sycophantic recognition as a world leader. “We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations,” he reported of their long phone call, in a social media post. They discussed “the great benefit that we will someday have in working together. But first, as we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine.” Imagine if in 1941, instead of entering the war against Nazi Germany on the side of Britain and other allied European nations, the president of the United States had rung up Hitler, reflected on “the Great History of our Nations”, and then talked about jointly ending “the War with Germany/Britain”.
Second, he has offered the Russian leader a bilateral US-Russian negotiation over the heads of the Ukrainians, precisely the kind of new Yalta that Putin has always wanted. And then, third and fourth, he has declared that Ukraine will almost certainly have to concede territory and that the US will not support its membership of Nato. Both those things have been said privately in Washington and other western capitals for some time, but publicly conceding them upfront is a masterclass in how not to practise the “art of the deal”. (He did something similar in negotiations with the Taliban over Afghanistan, starting rather than ending with a timetable for US withdrawal.) Historians now have the notes and recollections of those close to Hitler, documenting his delight at the deal he exacted from Chamberlain. One day, we may have similar evidence of Putin’s private glee at the concessions made by Trump.
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