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It’s easy for Trump’s enemies to crow that the president fumbled his meeting with Vladimir Putin. The president didn’t get the cease-fire he wanted, nor deployed the “consequences” he earlier had threatened if Putin’s rejected it––new sanctions on Russia’s oil customers. Moreover, in a Wall Street Journal editorial, the White House allegedly leaked a report that was helpful for Trump’s ever-eager critics fond of slurring him with “appeasement,” and Putin with Hitler-class evil.
The leakers claim that Putin promised during the negotiations that “in return for Donetsk, he’ll stop his assault and won’t invade other countries”–– whether purposely or accidently, a reprise of Hitler’s big lie in 1938 after the Munich fiasco, when he announced, after berating Poland, that it “is the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe, but it is a claim from which I will not swerve, and which I will satisfy, God willing.” Whether Putin intended to paraphrase Hitler, the similarity is on the nosey for Trumpophobes.
Be that as it may, immediately blustering assaults on Trump’s actions and policies––however dubious such criticisms are––have filled the media with apocalyptic portents of doom that so far haven’t materialized. Take Trump’s policies and bold moves on tariffs. Hysterical predictions of economic disasters from recessions to inflation, rabid bear markets to currency collapses filled the media. Months later, the dire predictions haven’t materialized, while the economy is purring along. Even the Federal Reserve is bruiting a couple of reductions in interest rates this year.
Such predictors of Trump’s disasters are left with blatant lies, or calls of “just wait,” the eternal recourse of failed prognosticators. Of course, with enough time anything can happen. Even a blind squirrel can find an acorn occasionally. But good journalists and commentators don’t rely on future hopes to validate their skills. And as we’ve learned the last several months of Trump’s second administration, the President when negotiating usually has several more tricks up his sleeve that are not obvious to the TDS media desperate to enjoy Trump’s failures.
That’s why TDS Prog leftists lean heavily on Europeans for their Trump hatred, a product of the Dems’ bad habit of admiring Europeans as naively as a Yankee ingenue in a Henry James novel. The Euros have been particularly hard on Trump for his alleged admiration of Putin, and failure to excoriate him for his heinous crimes and those of other unsavory international miscreants. But the European’s American fans who criticize the speck in Trump’s eye ignore the log in the Europeans’ eyes. The Europeans are more culpable for Putin’s invasion, but the TDS Americans don’t seem to notice the Europeans’ hypocrisy.
Yet for all the Euros’ moral preening––despite knowing full well Putin’s publicized intention to restore as much of the Soviet Empire as possible, starting in 2014 with the occupation of Donbas and Crimea as a prelude to stealing all of Ukraine––Nato’s richest nations didn’t increase their military spending to Nato’s required miniscule 2% of GDP. Nor did the Europeans draw down their purchases of Russia’s wicked fossil fuels while they blew billions on “green energy” and plotted to reach “net-zero carbon energy.” When Trump during a European trip warned against the moral hazard of buying Russian oil, several European officials ostensibly laughed at him.
More astonishing, Nato and Dem presidents Obama’s and Biden’s foreign policy teams did nothing while Putin spent a year deploying his invasion force at Ukraine’s eastern border. For the Dems and Nato nations to criticize Trump while he’s attempting to stop the carnage they are responsible for recalls the hutzpah of the kid who murdered his parents, then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.
Most significant is the TDS critics’ aforementioned failure to ignore Trump’s track record of keeping his negotiating cards close to his vest as he sweet-talks his interlocutor rather than using him for a virtue-signaling prop. As Victor Davis Hanson pointed out, “Not calling Putin a ‘killer’ and ‘murderer’ at the summit is hardly appeasement but more like art-of-the-deal, speaking softly while carrying a big stick, rather than Biden-style loud rhetoric while carrying a twig. Who is the greater humanitarian—the inert and anemic blowhard who resorts to name-calling a “murderous thug,” or the president willing to meet face-to-face with a monster to explore costly ways of halting the mass slaughter?”
In the same vein, the Euros’ chastising Trump for not insulting Putin reflects a disgusting double-standard. As the Gatestone Institute reports, France and the UK have proposed the formation of a Palestinian state, “‘predicated’ on commitments from the Palestinian Authority (PA) to undergo critical governance reforms, as well as excluding the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group from a future Palestinian government.” For the Europeans to keep out Hamas, but invite the PA––with its long history of terrorist slaughter of Israeli civilians––suggests that for some in the West whose treatment of Israel for years has been objectively antisemitic, bespeaks a despicable hypocrisy.
There are many dimensions of Trump’s diplomacy that display possibilities for reaching an agreement. The Journal pointed out, at the meeting between European leaders and Volodymyr Zelensky, “Mr. Trump said publicly for the first time that the U.S. will participate in providing security guarantees to Ukraine as part of a peace agreement with Russia.” Moreover, concerning the Europeans, the Journal commented “it’s notable how much the Europeans praised Mr. Trump for making the effort to end the war. Mr. Putin will have to see that an alliance of nations with more military power and will is on Ukraine’s side.”
Similarly, Michael Goodwin of the New York Post also notes that several European nations “praised Trump’s meeting with Putin as setting the stage for the next step and pushed for a detailed plan to help Ukraine’s military, an effort being led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.”
And deftly balancing domestic politics and the needs of allies, “Trump, who smartly refuses to pledge American troops to foreign wars, said Tuesday on Fox that he’s open to providing US air support for European forces.” No doubt Trump’s fly-over of two B1 Bombers at his meeting with Putin––the massive ordnance that crippled Iran’s buried nuclear weapons facilities––was intended to reminded Vlad of America’s superiority in airpower.
Then there is more Trump good news from John Bolton, not exactly a fan of Donald Trump. After a precis of Trump’s various negotiating mistakes, Bolton admits an important good move the president made after leaving Alaska: “He wrote on Truth Social that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not hold up.”
This opinion is a “minority view,” Bolton says, which means the TDS “European view” usually is a sign that the President has made another rookie blunder. But Bolton “believe[s] Mr. Trump’s announcement is positive news for Kyiv, although not for the reason he gives.” As history shows, “When negotiations follow a cease-fire, particularly when accompanied by the deployment of peacekeeping forces, as has also been suggested, the cease-fire line often hardens. In short order, cease-fire lines can become de facto borders.”
Moreover, Putin’s “post-summit remarks emphasized that Russia’s aims—essentially re-creating the Russian Empire, hadn’t changed a scintilla . . . If a cease-fire line traces what Moscow now holds in phase two and negotiations drag on, Mr. Putin will gain time to restore his economy, rebuild and repurpose his army and navy, and prepare for phase three.”
In the end, we don’t know whether Donald Trump will achieve peace and end the Russo-Ukrainian war. But at least he’s trying. The TDS obsession with Trump creates simplistic and dangerous obstacles to the president’s foreign policy aims. Stunts like demonizing Trump for not insulting a significant world leader with a large nuclear weapon arsenal, while he works to achieve the difficult and complex task of ending a brutal war, is a dangerous juvenile exercise in seizing a partisan political advantage.
And when the Trump-haters take their cue from the Nato nations whose failure to maintain militaries able to check reckless adventurism––while buying Russian oil made necessary by their expensive “green energy” fantasies–– it takes stratospheric gall to blame the conflict on the one statesman who’s trying to end the carnage.
As the old saying goes, either give a hand or get out of the way.