Trump has to be the worst dealmaker of any president. He's utterly incapable of making deals, both in his first administration and now.
No deal to limit North Korea's nuclear threat. No deal to replace the effective Iran nuclear deal that Trump pulled out of. No deal to end the Israel-Hamas war. No deals with any of the countries he's imposed tariffs on. And no deal to end the Russia-Ukraine war.
All of these failures concern me. But Trump's abject failure to make any progress on ending the Russia-Ukraine war is particularly outrageous, because there's an extremely clear distinction here between the bad guy, Russia, and the good guy, Ukraine.
Every reasonable person understands that Russia invaded Ukraine for no reason other than a desire to reconstitute the former Soviet Union. That invasion was preceded by Russia taking over Crimea, which is part of Ukraine, along with about 20% of Ukraine's territory on its border with Russia.
Trump made a campaign promise that he'd end the Ukraine war before he even was inaugurated. It's now been about three months since Inauguration Day. Trump has made essentially zero progress toward brokering a deal between Russia and Ukraine.
The main reason is the same one that makes Trump such a horrible dealmaker. He can't be trusted, and he doesn't understand that a deal requires opposing parties to each feel that they're gaining something, while not getting everything each party wanted.
Trump, though, wants to give Putin, the Russian dictator who invaded Ukraine, everything he desires, while giving Zelensky, the democratically-elected Ukrainian president who has valiantly defended his country, nothing he desires.
The headline of a New York Times story today pretty much says it all. But I'll also share some excerpts from the story.
President Trump and his top aides demanded on Wednesday that Ukraine accede to an American-designed proposal that would essentially grant Russia all the territory it has gained in the war, while offering Kyiv only vague security assurances.
The American plan, which would also explicitly block Ukraine from ever joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was rejected by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, whose long-running dispute with Mr. Trump broke into the open two months ago in the Oval Office. The proposal also appears to call for the United States to recognize Russia’s 2014 takeover of Crimea, a region of Ukraine.
“There is nothing to talk about,” Mr. Zelensky said. “This violated our Constitution. This is our territory, the territory of Ukraine.”
...It was not clear whether the U.S. announcements were part of a pressure campaign to force Mr. Zelensky to make territorial concessions or whether they were designed to create a pretext for abandoning American support for Ukraine.
But the United States is essentially settling on a deal that favors the aggressor in the war, one that forces Ukraine to accept the forcible rewriting of its border and give up its hope of eventually joining NATO, as other former Soviet republics have.
European allies, who in recent weeks have been promising more military and economic support for Mr. Zelensky, have charged that Mr. Trump is essentially switching sides in the war, and that his real goal is to cast Ukraine aside and to find a way to normalize American relations with Moscow. Mr. Trump and his top aides have already begun discussing the prospect of lifting sanctions on Russia, and striking energy and mineral deals with Mr. Putin.
Whatever Mr. Trump’s motives, what happened on Wednesday signaled the possible abandonment of the American commitment to Mr. Zelensky that the United States would never engage in talks that excluded the country from determining its own fate.
Putin can't be trusted. A BBC story describes all the agreements and truces related to Ukraine that Russia has broken, starting all the way back in 1997.
By invading Ukraine in 2014, Russia violated the Agreement on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between the two countries signed in 1997. Article 2 said the sides "respect each other's territorial integrity and confirm the inviolability of existing borders between them".
Given that long history of Russian deception, it's completely understandable why Ukraine is demanding that a security guarantee be part of any agreement to end the current war. Otherwise Putin will reconstitute his depleted army and invade Ukraine again when he feels the time is right.
However, Trump is demanding that Ukraine give up on ever becoming a member of NATO and refuses to have the United States guarantee Ukraine's security. No wonder Zelensky has rejected the Trump administration's proposal to end the war by giving Putin everything he wants.
Hopefully European countries will step up and do their best to replace United States support for Ukraine if Trump and Vance follow through on their threat to withdraw from peace talks if Ukraine doesn't go along with surrendering territory to Russia with no security guarantee.
China must be watching what's going on with glee, since if the United States gives a green light to Russia to annex the Ukrainian territory it now controls, this will send a clear sign to China that if it invades Taiwan, the United States won't stand in China's way.
Comments