Trump Makes His Hostility to Ukraine’s Cause Clear

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, September 26, 2024

 

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky stepped in it when he and his advisers allowed Democratic elected officials to use him as a political prop. Dan and Michael both have made this inarguable point. Indeed, Zelensky’s own interests are imperiled if his country’s continued sovereignty becomes a partisan wedge issue. Democrats will not always be in power. And yet, for those who do not view the conduct of American foreign policy as a proxy theater for the prosecution of domestic political grievances, Zelensky’s photo ops should have no bearing on the conduct of America’s strategic initiatives overseas.

 

Dispassion may be too much to ask of the political class five weeks before a general election. But the cars in which Zelensky travels in the United States and his joint appearances with Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro at a Scranton-based weapons-manufacturing facility have no relation to whether it’s good or bad for America if Russia swallows up more of Ukraine and closes in on NATO’s borders. And if we’re all just deferring to our human frailties here, we cannot begrudge Zelensky his own. It was certainly imprudent of him, as Dan noted, to criticize J. D. Vance’s disparagement of Ukraine’s case in an interview with the New Yorker’s Joshua Yaffa. But if Vance can (and regularly does) appeal to isolationist-flavored sentimentality to popularize his utter disregard for the preservation of the U.S.-led world order in Europe, it’s hard to resent Ukraine’s president’s emotive distaste for those remarks.

 

Alas, we don’t live in an ideal world. The mismanagement of Zelensky’s schedule during his travels will increase the incentives for Republican lawmakers to pander to the cynics in their coalition who are hostile toward Ukraine’s independence. We’ve already seen evidence of that from prominent Republican lawmakers, but the best evidence of this effect comes from Donald Trump himself. The former president has all but dropped the ambiguity he cultivated around his outlook toward Russia’s war of territorial expansionism. On the stump in recent days, Trump has made his skepticism of Western efforts to help Ukraine beat back the Russian onslaught plain.

 

“Every time Zelensky comes to the United States, he walks away with $100 billion dollars. I think he’s the greatest salesman on Earth,” Trump said this week to his audience’s jeers. “But we’re stuck in that war unless I’m president. I’ll get it done. I’ll get it negotiated. I’ll get out. We gotta get out.”

 

He mocked Joe Biden’s promise to support Ukraine until it achieves victory. “What happens if they win?” Trump asked. “That’s what they do is they fight wars. As someone told me the other day, they beat Hitler, they beat Napoleon. That’s what they do: They fight.”

 

That “someone” did Trump a disservice by failing to emphasize the fact that the Red Army is long gone. Russia has not turned in an especially impressive performance against a far less capable adversary in Ukraine. As Commentary’s Abe Greenwald wrote in a stellar essay based on his own impressions from a recent sojourn to Ukraine, Moscow’s warfighting acumen has atrophied over the decades. It is waging a terror campaign against Ukraine’s civilians because “Vladimir Putin’s Russia is better at being monstrous than victorious.” The model it has applied to Ukraine is one it deployed in Syria and Chechnya before — one that compensates for its soldiers’ poor training and equipment and its non-commissioned officers’ inflexibility through the liberal application of brutality.

 

Nor can it be honestly said that the Biden administration has given its all to Ukraine’s fight but come up short nonetheless. Anyone not out to mislead their audience must acknowledge that the Biden administration has only reluctantly and haltingly followed up on its own rhetorical commitments to support Ukraine. “Indeed,” I wrote in this month’s issue of National Review, “throughout the course of Russia’s war, Biden-administration officials cited a variety of inviolable Russian red lines that they had wholly imagined”:

 

The U.S. couldn’t possibly supply Ukraine with long-range rocket and artillery systems, tanks and half-tracks, fixed-wing aircraft, or cluster munitions. How would Russia respond? Only when Ukraine’s position deteriorated did Biden relent. And when he did, he found that Russia’s threats were a hollow scare tactic.

 

Ukraine’s recent incursion into Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod Oblasts is a function of Biden’s dithering and the perception that the American political class would eagerly throw Ukraine under the bus by negotiating a cease-fire along the present lines of contact. Capturing and holding Russian territory is a safeguard against the West’s inclination to gift Russia a frozen conflict in Ukraine that it can thaw out at its leisure. “Only when Russia finally began to retake its own territory did Biden see the value of lifting restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S. weapons platforms,” I wrote, “which is to say, too late.”

 

“Biden and Kamala allowed this to happen by feeding Zelensky money and munitions like no country has ever seen before,” Trump insisted in a subsequent rally. But it was all for naught. “Ukraine is gone. It’s not Ukraine anymore,” he insisted. “Any deal, even the worst deal, would be better than what we have right now. If they made a bad deal, it would have been much better. They would have given up a little bit, and everybody would be living, and every tower would be built, and every tower would be aging for another 2,000 years.”

 

What a profound misreading of a war, which, in its second year, should be better understood by even disinterested observers. Who would benefit from a “bad deal” that would compel Ukraine to “have given up a little bit?” It wouldn’t be the Ukrainians. They’ve followed closely the experience of their fellow citizens who suffered under the Russian yoke in Crimea and the Donbas after 2014. They saw their countrymen executed en masse with their hands bound, their children shuttled off to reeducation camps deep inside Russia, their language and culture criminalized.

 

It wouldn’t be good for the Western powers. The prospect of renewed fighting (the “deals” to which Russia submits only ever end thus) would destabilize the alliance as nations closer to the threat prepare their own defenses in ways more insulated powers farther West regard as provocative. It wouldn’t spare U.S. tax dollars from being committed to additional defense spending, and it wouldn’t save U.S. troops from permanent deployments closer to the locus of violent Russian revanchism.

 

Such a “deal” benefits no one but the aggressor in this conflict, and rewarding aggression begets more aggression. That intuitive conclusion likely explains the durability of the American consensus around the need for Ukraine to emerge from Russia’s war of conquest and subjugation stable and intact.

 

All this may be just a lot of hot talk from Trump. But the measurable uptick in the former president’s hostile rhetoric toward Ukraine is valuable insofar as it clears away the fog surrounding his views on this conflict. If Trump cannot see through what he regards as a personal slight to America’s permanent interests overseas and the value of their preservation, it represents a clarifying moment in this campaign.