Blood, Sweat, and Tears versus Appeasement -- The War in Ukraine

 

Economics Without The B.S.**: 

[**  Double entendre intended.]

AP article out today:

Trump warns Zelenskyy to quickly negotiate war’s end with Russia or risk not having a nation to lead

There is a war going on in Ukraine, with Ukrainians, not Americans, dying.  And Trump is negotiating an end to the war in Saudi Arabia, but will not have the Ukrainians present at the negotiations.  What is the analogy here?

Some would make a comparison to Kissinger negotiating with the North Vietnamese to end the American forces involvement in the Vietnamese War.  President Nixon looked at the American involvement in the Vietnamese War as a distraction from pursuing our national security objectives vis-à-vis Russia/Soviet Union.  

The Paris Peace Accords were finally signed in January 1975, which allowed the U.S. to withdraw troops from South Vietnam; and the North Vietnamese agreed to withdraw their involvement in South Vietnam and leave the fighting between the South Vietnamese and Vietcong.  That latter part was violated by North Vietnam after the American withdrawal, and South Vietnam fell quickly right after that.

But that did allow Nixon to negotiate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) with Russia just before that.  And just after that was the Helsinki Accords which ushered in a period of détente between the Western Alliance and Russia.  Nixon’s détente replaced the prior policy of containment against the growing influence of communist aggression after World War II. 

But is that what we have here in Ukraine?  What is to be gained with Putin’s Russia in ending this war in the manner Trump is pursuing?  Russia is not the power she was in the Cold War.  Putin has shown his own ineptitude in combat.  By being tied down in Ukraine, Putin has  been unable to pursue larger goals elsewhere – in the Middle East, Syria in particular, being disruptive to European democratic movements, although the Right Wing populist movements have had a life of their own,  thwarting NATO expansion along his border, keeping the state of Georgia in check along his southern border, let alone the reordering of the Russian economy to a military posture to prosecute the war in Ukraine while the Russian people lost part of their consumer economy and have experienced shortage of goods, higher inflation, and higher interest rates.  In effect, the Ukraine War has neutered Putin’s ability to misbehave elsewhere.

I think the proper analogy of Trump’s attempt to settle the Ukraine War is the Munich Agreement of 1938 which came to be known as appeasing the dictatorial ambitions of Hitler.  Hitler invaded part of Czechoslovakia and annexed it to Germany.  The principals at the negotiations were Britain and France vis-à-vis Hitler’s Germany and not the Czechs; and Britain’s Chamberlain caved in to Hitler’s  aggression.  Chamberlain’s “Peace For Our Time” appeasement turned into Churchill’s “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” to prepare Britan for battle.

Are we going to let Putin nuclear blackmail us?  Ask Estonians, who have a border approximately 40-miles from the suburbs of Saint Peterburg; they have provided military support to Ukraine before the 2022 invasion.  Ask Finlanders who petitioned to join NATO after the 2022 invasion, but said nothing of NATO membership when Putin first invaded Ukraine in 2014.  Why was the Russian aggression of 2022 more threatening to Finland than the aggression in 2014?  Who is the real nuclear power?

With some Americans saying that Trump is a threat to democracy, but their opposition to him has been ineffective, could it be that a little man in Ukraine would be the unravelling of Trumpism?  Like Churchill, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, fighting for his country's very existence, saying that the American president is trapped in a “disinformation bubble”, has put Ukrainian blood, sweat, and tears to stand in opposition to another aggression in Europe, an aggression that should be recognized for what it is, a threat to world order and not just to Ukraine or Europe.  Whatever problems we have can be reversed for the better.  The American  Experience has shown us to be resilient and able to recover from past mistakes and to renew our strength based on universal values.