OUT ON THE HUSTINGS OVER THE LAST TWO WEEKS, Donald Trump has been speaking about Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Here are remarks he made at a rally in North Carolina last Wednesday:
Let’s pull out two sentences from this appalling jumble: “Any deal, even the worst deal, would have been better than what we have right now. If they made a bad deal, it would have been much better.”
As the intrepid Ukraine war reporter Tim Mak put it, “At its core, this is an un-American message. That it is better to live on your knees than to die on your feet. That is better to be alive and oppressed, than to fight for self-determination. To yield to the yoke without a struggle.” Or, in Patrick Henry’s ringing words from two and a half centuries earlier, “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
Trump’s dark outlook for Ukraine’s wartime prospects—“Ukraine is gone”—has not emerged out of thin air. Pessimism about Ukraine’s prospects is a story with a disturbing history, one that involves not only Trump and his minions, but also completely mainstream observers of the war
This defeatist mentality had been in place for years even before the 2022 invasion and figured prominently in decisions about whether and how to arm Ukraine in the lower-intensity war that had been raging ever since 2014 when Russia seized Crimea and part of the Donbas. Providing Ukraine with anti-tank weapons or air defense missiles was dismissed by analysts as insufficient to tilt the skewed military balance between the two warring countries, and hence “pointless.”
The same defeatist mindset continues to echo to this day. It is expressed in America’s self-deterrence, the consistently overwrought anxiety over provoking the ten-foot-tall and “genius” Putin into some sort of dangerous aggressive response—possibly nuclear—to our providing Ukraine with more powerful and longer-range weapons. But as the CSIS report makes plain, the fears have been misplaced.
President Joe Biden has been masterful in marshaling a great coalition of countries to aid Ukraine, but he has proved far less masterful—in fact, delinquent—in providing Ukraine with effective armaments in a timely fashion. Trump, of course, presents another category of failure entirely. If he is re-elected president, his predictions of Ukrainian doom will, thanks to his pro-Putin tilt, rapidly become a self-fulfilling prophecy.ARTICLE HERE