Finally, finally, President Donald Trump just might get a peace prize that would secure his place in history. Unfortunately, though, it is not that Nobel Peace Prize he so covets. It is the ‘Neville Chamberlain Peace Prize’ — awarded by history to the leader of the country that most flagrantly sells out
its allies and its values to an aggressive dictator.
This prize richly deserves to be shared by Trump’s many secretaries of state — Steve Witkoff, Marco Rubio and Daniel Driscoll — who together negotiated the surrender of Ukraine to Vladimir Putin’s demands without consulting Ukraine or our European allies in advance and then told Ukraine it had to accept the plan by Thanksgiving.
To all the gentlemen who delivered this turkey to Moscow, I can offer only one piece of advice: be under no illusion. Neither Fox News nor the White House spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, will be writing the history of this deal. If you force it upon Ukraine as it is, every one of your names will live in infamy alongside that of Chamberlain, who is remembered today for only one thing: he was the British prime minister who advocated the policy of appeasement, which aimed to avoid war with Adolf Hitler’s Germany by giving in to his demands. This was concretised in the 1938 Munich Agreement in which Chamberlain and others in Europe allowed Germany to annex
parts of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain boasted it would secure “peace for our time”. A year later, Poland was invaded, starting
World War II and leading to Chamberlain’s resignation — and his everlasting shame.
This Trump plan, if implemented, will do the modern equivalent. By rewarding Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine based on his obsession with making it part of Mother Russia, the United States of America will be putting the whole European Union under Putin’s thumb. Trump’s message to our allies will be clear: don’t provoke Putin because as long as I am commander in chief, the US will pay no price and we will bear no burden in the defence of your freedom.
Which is why, if this plan is forced on Ukraine as it is, we will need to add a new verb to the diplomatic lexicon: ‘Trumped’ — to be sold out by an American president, for reasons none of his citizens understand (but surely there are reasons). And history will never forget the men who did it — Trump, Witkoff, Rubio, Driscoll — for their shame will be everlasting.
As an editorial on The Wall Street Journal put it: “Mr. Trump may figure he can finally wash his hands of Ukraine if Europe and Ukraine reject his offer. He’s clearly sick of dealing with the war. But appeasing Mr. Putin would haunt the rest of his presidency. If Mr. Trump thinks American voters hate war, wait until he learns how much they hate dishonor… A bad deal in Ukraine would broadcast to U.S. enemies that they can seize what they
want with force or nuclear blackmail or by pressing on until America loses interest.”
Mind you, I am not at all against a negotiated solution. Indeed, from the beginning of this war, I have made the point that it will end
only with a ‘dirty deal’. But it cannot be a filthy deal, and the Trump
plan is what history will call a
filthy deal.
Even before you get to the key details, think of how absurd it is for Trump to strike a deal with Putin and not even include Ukraine and our European allies in the negotiations until they were virtually done. Trump then declared that it must be accepted by last Thursday, as if Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who has a Parliament that he needs to win acceptance from, could possibly do so by then, even if he wanted to.
As my Times colleague, David Sanger, observed in his analysis of the plan’s content: “Many of the 28 points in the proposed Russia-Ukraine peace plan offered by the White House read like they had been drafted in the Kremlin. They reflect almost all Putin’s maximalist demands.”
Ukraine would have to formally give Russia all the territory it has declared for itself in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The US would recognise these as Russian territory. No NATO forces could be based inside Ukraine to ensure that Russia could never invade again. The Ukrainian military would be capped at 600,000 troops, a 25% cut from current levels, and it would be barred from possessing long-range weapons that could reach Russia. Kyiv would receive vague security guarantees from the US against a Russian reinvasion (but who in Ukraine, or in Moscow, would trust them coming from Trump?).
Under the Trump plan, $100 billion in frozen Russian assets would be put toward US-led efforts to rebuild and invest in Ukraine, and the US would then receive 50% of the profits from that investment. (Yes, we are demanding half of the profits generated by a fund to rebuild a ravaged nation.)
Trump, facing blowback from allies, the Congress and Ukraine, said that this was not his “final offer” but added that if Zelensky refuses to accept the terms, “then he can continue to fight his little heart out”. As always with Trump, he is all over the place and as always, ready to stick it to Zelensky, the guy fighting for his country’s freedom, and never to Putin, the guy trying to take Ukraine’s freedom away.
What would an acceptable dirty deal look like?
It would freeze the forces in place but never formally cede any seized Ukrainian territory. It would insist that European security forces, backed by US logistics, be stationed along the ceasefire line as a symbolic tripwire against any Russian reinvasion. It would require Russia to pay a significant amount of money to cover all the carnage it has inflicted on Ukraine — and keep Moscow isolated and under sanctions until it does — and include a commitment by the European Union to admit Ukraine as a member as soon as it is ready, without Russian interference.
This last point is vital. It is such so that the Russian people would have to forever look at their Ukrainian Slavic brothers and sisters in the thriving European Union while they are stuck in Putin’s kleptocracy. That contrast is Putin’s best punishment for this war and the thing that would cause him the most trouble after it is over.
This would be a dirty deal that history would praise Trump for — getting the best out of a less-than-perfect hand by using US leverage on both sides as he did in the Gaza Strip.
But just using US leverage on Ukraine is a filthy deal — folding our imperfect hand to a Russian leader who is playing a terrible one.
There is a term for that in
poker: sucker.
New York Times News Service
