When the United States made itself the only member of the G-7 club of industrialized nations to oppose and, ultimately, derail a resolution condemning Russia for its bloody Palm Sunday strike on Ukrainian civilians in Sumy, the administration insisted it had a good reason.
Acknowledging the two ballistic missiles that killed 35, including children, and wounded 117 other civilians — just one of the countless Russian guided-missile strikes on civilian targets inside Ukraine seemingly designed to produce the maximum amount of death and destruction — might undermine peace talks. “President Donald Trump’s administration told allies it couldn’t sign the statement denouncing the attack as it is ‘working to preserve the space to negotiate peace,’” Bloomberg reported. Accepting the evidence of our own eyes would not advance U.S. interests.
It would be comforting to conclude that the administration is deluding itself in observance of a strategy. We could sleep better if we assumed that the White House seemed willing to concede whatever leverage it had over Moscow (in exchange for nothing at all) because it was following a plan. But the White House and its functionaries are too willing to endorse Russia’s hallucinatory versions of events, too eager to avert its gaze from the atrocities Moscow so regularly commits, to maintain that happy rationalization.
What does it gain the United States that the president seems committed to the lunatic notion that Ukraine was the aggressor in Russia’s war of territorial conquest? That outlook is reflected in the president’s rhetoric and policy. When the president bends over backward to assign this latest mass casualty attack to a Russian “mistake,” what are our rewards? When the president takes the opportunity presented by the slaughter of innocents to castigate Ukraine’s leadership — “You don’t start a war against somebody that is 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles,” he said this week — whose goodwill are we courting? Are we generating a return on the credibility we’re mortgaging?
To judge from Moscow’s eagerness to exploit the administration’s naïvete, the answer is not much. Indeed, even asking these probing questions of the administration’s principals risks inviting a theatrical and emotive display of feigned offense.
This week, Volodymyr Zelensky had the temerity to notice the administration’s commitment to unreality as it relates to its members’ perspectives on Russia and object to the extent to which their outlook licenses the mass murder of his people. Speaking to reporters from the site of a Russian strike on a playground, which claimed the lives of ten adults and nine children, the Ukrainian president mourned the extent to which “Russian narratives are prevailing in the U.S.” Zelensky’s elementary powers of observation irritated JD Vance, who said the Ukrainian president’s claim was “not productive” and insisted that the administration is only trying to “understand what are [Russia’s] strategic red lines.”
That claim would be more plausible if the administration seemed remotely inclined to test Russia’s red lines — or, really, any of its commitments to Vladimir Putin’s bloody and expansionist ambitions. The administration has gotten nowhere near them. Rather, it has repeatedly shown how willing it is to give Russia everything it could ever want and more, up to and apparently including territorial acquisitions inside Ukraine the Russian military couldn’t even take by force.
Those within the administration who protest too much would like us to believe that critics of its approach to peace talks are outsiders, wholly uninformed of the administration’s strategic objectives or too ignorant of geopolitics to recognize them. But the criticisms are now coming from inside the house.
“Several senior aides to President Trump are advising him to be more skeptical of Moscow’s desire for peace with Ukraine,” the Wall Street Journal reported of a group that includes Trump’s top diplomat and his hand-picked envoy to the conflict. “Trump, however, is still siding with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff,” the report continued, “who thinks Putin wants to make peace after meeting with him twice in Moscow, the officials said.”
The Journal noted that, in Trump’s remarks castigating Ukraine over the degree to which it presents itself as a tempting target for forcible dismemberment, the president did demonstrate a “rare” bout of insight into the conflict by acknowledging that Russia started it. While a welcome development, baby steps in the direction of our shared version of reality won’t cut it.
The administration appears inclined to adopt Russia’s wholly fictionalized version of the facts of this war. Thus, there will be no peace because Russia doesn’t want a durable peace. To internalize the Kremlin’s worldview is to conclude that war in its “near abroad” is inevitable and desirable. Indeed, if Moscow is pressing the pliant Mr. Witkoff for additional territorial concessions from Ukraine, it has not abandoned its battlefield objectives. The Putin regime thinks it can secure those goals via diplomacy today, but it will not stop short of war to achieve them eventually.
If the president and his courtiers believe they must sacrifice truth only to secure a political victory, they will likely get neither. Truth is not the enemy of peace; the enemy is the enemy of peace.