Munich II? A Moral Inversion on Ukraine

This post was originally published on this site

Let us not be tempted to rewrite history in a headlong attempt to dodge it — or repeat it. Working to end the war in Ukraine is a rational policy goal. Blaming the Ukrainians for being invaded is something else. 

That’s what Donald Trump appeared to say yesterday, and it’s not the first time he’s suggested it. Trump has tried to arrange peace talks with Russia but appears to have frozen Ukraine out of the process. Volodymyr Zelensky has canceled his trip to Saudi Arabia to protest what amounts to an ex parte proceeding. When asked about it, Trump responded:

“Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it—three years. You should have never been there. You should have never started it. You should have made a deal.”

Been where? In their own country? And what deal did Putin offer them, except subjugation to Moscow?

Now, we can have a long debate over whether Ukraine has some political fault in its dealings with its ethnic-Russian population, and whether pursuing closer economic and military ties to Europe was a bad idea. However, none of those issues negates the fact that Russia conducted a full-on, unprovoked military invasion with the intent to conquer all of Ukraine three years ago, and have conducted themselves like a barbarian horde during the entire “special operation.” 

My friend John Podhoretz — no fan of Trump anyway — is understandably outraged over this moral inversion:

You should never have started it. What madness, what cravenness, what repulsive factitiousness, is this? Volodymyr Zelenskyy offended him by raising the perfectly logical problem of a negotiation that included him out, and so Trump began talking about Ukraine’s leader as though he were Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, who hasn’t permitted a vote on his leadership in two decades. “Well, we haven’t had an election there,” Trump said by way of explaining why he is insisting that Ukraine go to the polls as part of the peace deal Ukraine is not even involved with! We all assumed this was a Putin condition, but no, Trump said it was his idea. Zelenskyy became president of Ukraine in 2019. He was elected to a five-year term. The Russians invaded in February 2022. Generally speaking, it’s very difficult to hold an election when your country is fending off a near-genocidal action against it, and in any case, there was no requirement that there even be an election under peacetime Ukrainian law Yes, the U.S. had an election during World War II, but we weren’t a battleground.

Anyway, what does Trump care whether there are elections there or not? His claim is effectively that Zelenskyy is illegitimate; according to Trump, Zelenskyy has a 4 percent approval rating. That’s a near-psychotic lie. The last poll, for whatever a poll in the middle of a war is worth, had the Ukrainian leader at 52 percent. Trump wants an election there because he feels Zelenskyy is standing in the way of his effort to see that people stop being killed in this war. 

My friend John Hinderaker at Power Line is a big fan of Trump, and he also asks, “What’s going on?” John can’t quite grasp why Trump is acting as though Ukraine was the aggressor in this conflict either. John looks at the terms that Trump proposes to impose on Ukraine and concludes that they are worse than the Versailles treaty that the Allies imposed on their enemies:

If this draft were accepted, Trump’s demands would amount to a higher share of Ukrainian GDP than reparations imposed on Germany at the Versailles Treaty, later whittled down at the London Conference in 1921, and by the Dawes Plan in 1924. At the same time, he seems willing to let Russia off the hook entirely.

Ukraine has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties in resisting the Russian invasion, and its economy is a shambles. Most observers (including me) would say that Ukraine represented the West in its defensive war against an aggressor. So, why such a punitive attitude on the part of the Trump administration?

Meanwhile, President Trump has been negotiating with Russia without consulting Ukraine. Why? Many observers are asking, whose side is he on? President Zelensky has canceled his trip to Saudi Arabia as a protest against Trump’s purporting to settle the future of Ukraine without consulting Ukrainians.

John’s question is easier to answer. Trump resents the vast amount of American resources that went into Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion (and he’s not alone in that either), and he wants to claw as much back as possible. A lot of those dollars got spent in the US, though, as the support mainly came from shipments of materiel rather than cash. 

That smells a lot like Munich 1938, in which we sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler for some worthless guarantees of peace. The Brits and the French sidelined Czechoslovakia in those talks too, and treated them as the problem rather than the victim of Nazi aggression. The UK and France forced them to sign what turned out to be their death warrant by threatening to end their security arrangements altogether if the Czechoslovakians refused. Six months later, the Nazis invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia, and the West didn’t lift a finger to save their ally — and the strategic position it occupied, which would have been very useful in the war that came six months after that. 

This is dangerous ground for another reason. In 1994, we guaranteed Ukraine’s sovereign territorial integrity in the Budapest Memorandum in exchange for the transfer of nuclear weapons back to Russia. We didn’t explicitly commit to US military intervention, but we didn’t exclude it either. At the time, we worried that the former Soviet republics would start selling those weapons on the black market to groups like al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and countries like Iran and North Korea to resolve hard-currency crises.  Caving to Putin on Ukraine would undermine our already-shaky credibility on mutual security arrangements and encourage other bad actors to invade first and ask questions later. 

This has nothing to do with whether Ukraine is corrupt or Zelensky should have held an election last year. It has to do with keeping our word when we benefit from an exchange, and having the moral clarity about who invaded whom in this war. (Trump has been notably clear on that reality in Gaza and with Hamas, thankfully.) That shouldn’t keep us from trying to find a negotiated solution that will provide an end to this conflict while ensuring the security of the combatants; in this case, because of the realities on the ground, Ukraine is not going to get a return to status quo ante. That’s hard enough without pretending that Ukraine started the war so as to get a deal with the real aggressor at any cost necessary. 

We don’t need another Munich. And we don’t need a moral inversion to settle the war — and if we did, then the war wouldn’t end anyway, as Munich I taught us.