By Abe Greenwald
Monday, February 24, 2025
We don’t like to talk about it much, but there’s a
right-wing version of most bad liberal ideas. There’s a right-wing identity
politics, a right-wing version of big government, right-wing grievance and
cancel cultures, and so on. For every limousine liberal there’s a country-club
Republican. For every Soros, a Musk. And in the age of Donald Trump, there is
of course a right-wing version of the left’s longstanding charge that the U.S.
is, on balance, a terrible place. In some areas, as evidenced by the nomination
of RFK Jr., for example, the right-wing iteration fuses with its left-wing
predecessor. Donald Trump has hastened this melding of left and right among the
disgruntled.
Trump is now validating a new right-wing counterpart to a
terrible left-wing idea: pursuing peace by exerting pressure on a blameless
American ally and asking nothing of its barbaric enemy. This weekend was thick
with headlines about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s response to
Trump’s insults and policy proposals. After Zelenskyy objected to Trump’s
excluding him from negotiations with Russia, he also rejected Trump’s demand
that Ukraine pay the U.S. $500 billion from Ukrainian natural-resource revenues
while getting no security guarantees in return.
This is reminiscent of how the Biden administration
sometimes approached “peace” in Gaza. At times, former Secretary of State
Antony Blinken sounded as if Hamas had nothing to do with the war it started
and that ending it was entirely up to the obstinate Jewish state. Just as we
had endless stories about Benjamin Netanyahu’s supposed lack of interest in
this aid demand or that cease-fire proposal, we now get stories about
Zelenskyy’s intransigence.
The very fact that this is now the lead story about the
war demonstrates how fully the Trump administration has swallowed the Kremlin’s
narratives. Which indicates that Trump has borrowed another page from the left:
letting foreign thugs directly shape the U.S.’s position. Just as Joe Biden
echoed Hamas’s casualty numbers and lies about starving Gazans, Trump accepts
Vladimir Putin’s pretend theory of the case that Zelenskyy is a dictator who
started the war.
We have no idea what, if any, concessions Trump has asked
of Putin at this point. For the record, Russia should pull out of Ukraine
entirely. That’s the only just outcome and one that any leader of the
free world should pursue. Obviously, we’re way past that now. So how about
Trump drills down on land concessions? Are there any Russian-held areas that
Putin is being asked to give up? And at the very least, can we demand the
release of the thousands of Ukrainian prisoners of war taken illegally by
Russia? How about freeing the estimated 20,000 Ukrainian children who have been
kidnapped and reprogrammed as Russian soldiers. (It’s notable that the deeper
you get into Putin’s crimes, the more they seem like Hamas’s.) Or can we get a
promise that Putin will release some of the Russian political prisoners who’ve
been sentenced to decades in jail for speaking out against the invasion? We’ve
heard nothing.
All the pressure is on Ukraine, as if Russia—like Hamas
before it—isn’t responsible for starting a savage and unprovoked war.
Usually, the right-wing versions of left-wing ideas are
inconsequential. Right-wing identity politics is a sideshow next to the left’s
intersectional circus. The number of people on the right who still want to
expand the government’s role through, say, censorship of speech and private
behavior is vanishingly small. And when the right cancels one of its own, the
outcast usually gets to enjoy the embrace of the larger liberal culture.
But foreign policy is never insignificant. Ukraine, in
the end, will have no choice but to play things Trump’s way—which is also
Putin’s.
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