There’s an argument that passes for a sophisticated defense of Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s beat down of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office last Friday. Here it is in a nutshell:
The United States is spending billions for a war in Ukraine that is not in our vital interests and in which victory is not possible. America’s central foreign-policy concern is our strategic competition with China. But our knee-jerk hostility toward Russia — principally through our cavalier indifference to Moscow’s legitimate grievances, our blind support for Ukraine and our hypocritical posturing about not invading other countries — has merely consolidated Vladimir Putin’s alliance with Beijing and other bad actors in Pyongyang and Tehran.
This is worse than counterproductive; it risks World War III. As with Dwight Eisenhower in the Korean War, the best Trump can do is to bring about a swift end to the conflict through an armistice that preserves Ukraine’s independence but accepts that it won’t be able to reclaim its former borders. If the Europeans now want to take on the risks of defending Ukraine, that’s their business; it is past time they got serious about their own security instead of mooching off the United States, which can ill afford the defense subsidy given our enormous debt.
In the meantime, America expects payback from Ukraine for the support we’ve already given, mainly in the form of critical minerals. And we’ll continue to work to detach Moscow from Beijing’s orbit, not least by welcoming the Russians back to the Group of 7 and other Western councils. As for the moral issue: If Richard Nixon could do business with a monster like Mao Zedong, why can’t Trump do business with Putin?
Now let’s understand why this argument fails.
First, Putin’s grievances with the West did not begin with the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine on the eve of the 2022 invasion, or the Obama administration’s support for Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution in 2014. They did not begin in 2005 — a relatively halcyon period of Western-Russian relations — when Putin called the fall of the Soviet Union “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” They did not even happen with NATO’s enlargement, which, as Rahm Emanuel likes to point out, wasn’t a case of the Atlantic Alliance moving east but of the Eastern Bloc moving west out of a well-placed fear of Russia.
They began in 1989, when Putin, as a K.G.B. officer in East Germany, witnessed the collapse of Soviet power — his power — at the hands of people power. The organizing principle of Putin’s 25-year reign has been the restoration of the former at the expense of the latter. He has done this through the elimination of democracy, the assassination of opponents, cyberattacks on neighboring countries, military invasions, repeated violation of longstanding international agreements and illegal interference in the politics of Western countries.
Putin is not the aggrieved defender of historic Russian interests. He is a malign aggressor in pursuit of a deeply personal ambition. A victory in Ukraine won’t satisfy that ambition; it will whet it.
Second, whether the war in Ukraine is “winnable” in an absolute sense, Kyiv has already demonstrated that it could hold off a full-scale Russian invasion for three years despite painfully inadequate and tardy supplies of Western military equipment. In doing so, it has pioneered tactics that will prove vital to our own defense in future combat — a greater gift to our security than any amount of Ukrainian minerals. And it has destroyed a large percentage of Russian combat power, giving NATO critical time to rearm itself before the next Russian onslaught.
More important, the point of helping Ukraine now isn’t to retake Crimea; it’s to give Ukraine the ability to negotiate an end to the war from a position of strength — and thus to ensure that Russia isn’t tempted to restart the war once it regains its military might. Cutting off arms to Ukraine accomplishes the opposite: It makes a future conflict more likely, not less.
Third, Putin’s closeness to China isn’t a byproduct of the war in Ukraine. If anything, the opposite is true: It was after he announced his “no limits” partnership agreement with China’s Xi Jinping on Feb. 4, 2022, that he felt confident enough to invade Ukraine 20 days later. That partnership, already years in the making, was reaffirmed just days ago — despite Trump’s transparent efforts to appease Putin. The reason is simple: Whatever Russia’s long-term weaknesses vis-à-vis China, Putin and Xi are birds of an ideological feather, intent on overthrowing the U.S.-led liberal international order in favor of a revanchist autocratic order.
That means that the Trump administration’s abandonment of Ukraine won’t strengthen our hand against China: It will merely demonstrate to Xi that aggression ultimately pays and America eventually folds. This will do nothing to detach Moscow from Beijing; on the contrary, it will deepen their alliance and encourage other fundamental challenges to world order, perhaps by jointly helping Iran obtain nuclear weapons — a much surer recipe for World War III than continued support for Ukraine.
How does that sound to Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, or Mike Waltz, the national security adviser?
Fourth, the betrayal of Ukraine spells the likely end of NATO. The original purpose of the alliance, in the famous formulation of Lord Ismay, its first secretary general, was to keep the Americans in Europe, the Russians out, and the Germans down. Under Trump, it’s something like the opposite: America out, Russia in, and (the wrong kind of) Germans up.
This isn’t a recipe for getting Europe to shoulder more of the burden for the common defense. It’s an invitation to pandemonium. Some European states will try to preserve a semblance of the old liberal order; others will become clients of Putin; still others will freelance their foreign policy in unpredictable ways. Not least of the fatuities involved in JD Vance’s romance with the Alternative for Germany is that the party is anti-American: its leader, Alice Weidel, has compared Germany’s position to the United States to that of a slave.
Fifth, the idea that we can’t afford to support Ukraine is risible; our aid is a minuscule fraction of the federal budget, and Ukraine could fund its own weapons’ purchases if the U.S. and Europe gave it full access to Russia’s frozen funds. The more important question is this: How much more will we have to spend over decades to defend against a Russia-China-Iran-North Korea axis that feels emboldened by an advantageous end to the war in Ukraine?
Finally, it’s odd to think that a MAGA crowd that otherwise rails against progressives for failing to believe in America’s goodness and exceptionalism should take such a naïve view of the motives of our adversaries — or such an unrepentantly cynical view of the uses of American power. Our soldiers didn’t storm the beaches of Normandy for the sake of reaping profits from French vineyards or German coal. They did so to secure a freer world in which America could honorably thrive at nobody else’s expense.
Winston Churchill is often credited with some version of the line about America always doing the right thing only after exhausting all the available alternatives. Under the Trump administration, that wishful thought has never seemed more in doubt.