It was just Thursday that we noted former National Security Advisor and former Ambassador John Bolton and his criticism of President Donald Trump’s phone call to Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, concerning Russia’s war in Ukraine. That seems to be a constant theme among the ‘neocons.’ They think it’s horrible, just horrible, that Ukraine might lose the war to Russia, and I agree, it’s horrible.
But you know what they don’t tell us? They don’t tell us how Ukraine can actually win.
Trump’s appeasement of Putin is a betrayal of Ukraine and European allies
In a shameful phone call Tuesday, Donald Trump flat out accepted the Kremlin’s dismemberment of Ukraine, without a word of criticism for Vladimir Putin.
by Trudy Rubin | St Valentine’s Day, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST
MUNICH — On Thursday, I stood for long frozen moments in the icy rain outside a handsome gray stone building, looking up over a pillared portico and at a row of arched windows.
The building housed Adolf Hitler’s Munich offices in the 1930s. Behind those windows, in Hitler’s private study, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain negotiated the notorious Munich Agreement, in which the führer was allowed to bite off a chunk of Czechoslovakia. Accepting that aggression was supposed to end Germany’s passion for land grabs, supposedly to feed the needs of the German people.
That deal, which came to be called the “great betrayal,” was done without any Czech participation in negotiations. Chamberlain claimed it would bring “peace in our time.” Instead, it was the precursor to World War II. The prime minister’s name has been forever linked with the appeasement of despots, even though he genuinely, if foolishly, thought he was saving Europe.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump did Chamberlain one better, betraying Ukraine to Russia’s Vladimir Putin in one shameful phone call. I think history will be far unkinder in its description of the U.S. president’s appeasement because he is so totally indifferent to the fate of Europe and Ukraine.
“History,” huh? Let’s talk about history. You know who wasn’t present at the Munich Conference? President Franklin Roosevelt was not present. Adolf Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland, a heavily German part of Czechoslovakia, was a European problem, to be solved by Europeans. When, several months later, when der Führer started making threats about Poland, the Poles were given an absolute guarantee of assistance, by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Édouard Daladier. President Roosevelt was once again not involved. When The United Kingdom and Republic of France declared war on Germany following the Third Reich’s invasion of Poland, can you guess which country didn’t declare war? That’s right, the United States did not declare war on Germany. Despite Mr Roosevelt’s sympathies for England, the American people did not want war, did not want to send its sons to die on European battlefields, and the President was well aware of that.
After the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt went to Congress for a Declaration of War against the Empire of Japan. Against which country did Congress not declare war? You guessed it: we did not declare war against Germany. Three more days passed, and then Adolf Hitler declared war against the US.
The British and French guarantee to Poland wound up being useless: neither nation was in any position to actually defend Poland, and when they could have struck Germany from the rear, they did nothing.
Staring up at that window, I wished I had some magic to save Ukraine, Europe, and the United States from the foreign policy disasters Trump is so eager to commit.
I came to Germany to attend the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of top U.S. and European officials who are set to discuss the need to stand up to Putin and enable Ukraine to achieve a just and secure peace. There was even talk that Trump’s special emissary for Ukraine, retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, might unveil a peace plan at the conference.
Just before I arrived, there was a terrorist attack quite near my hotel by a young Afghan asylum-seeker who plowed a car into a union demonstration, wounding dozens. That will undoubtedly feed into Sunday’s German elections, where the Alternative für Deutschland party has risen to second place in the polls. Elon Musk has called the far-right party the only one that “can save the country,” which gives a good idea of his politics.
There’s a lot more at Mrs Rubin’s original, excoriating President Trump, calling him a “patsy” for Mr Putin, and mocking the President’s desire to stop the killing:
“We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together,” Trump wrote. “But first, as we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths in the War with Russia/Ukraine.” Note Trump never mentions those deaths were caused by Putin’s unprovoked invasion, and that he seems sublimely ignorant of how Putin has continued for years to flatter him — an effective strategy now recognized by other world leaders.
You can follow the link embedded in the title of Mrs Rubin’s opinion column, and find even more of her complaints that the President’s policy is a short-sighted failure, but there is one thing you will not find: you will not find anything from Mrs Rubin, or Ambassador Bolton, or anyone else telling us how we can help Ukraine actually win the war with Russia.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has already said that the only way his country can win what has been a stalemate for three years now is with NATO membership, which would put all of the NATO nations at war with nuclear-armed Russia, or if NATO gives Ukraine nuclear weapons.
So, what would Mrs Rubin have us do? The NATO nations and we gave a great deal to Ukraine over the last three years, in money and war materiel, and still all that has been achieved is a bloody stalemate. We documented this in December, citing The Washington Post, and noting how many Ukrainian soldiers are in their forties and fifties:
But most Ukrainian military personnel acknowledge that soldier shortages are now just as critical as the weapons deficits. Some specialized jobs in the 33rd — such as a driver for armored personnel carriers — were down to just one person in a battalion, soldiers said, complicating logistics to transport troops safely back and forth from trench positions.
“Do we even have infantry?” said 37-year-old Denys, a drone operator. “It’s down to a couple of guys, and they’re over 50 years old. What are they going to do?”
Felix, 39, who is responsible for providing logistical and moral support for his unit, said fighters are simply exhausted. He hoped Trump’s January inauguration would mark a turning point in the war toward negotiations because it could provide soldiers with a much-needed break.
A war of attrition does not favor the Ukrainians, in that Russia has thrice their population.
To me, it’s simple: if you want the war to continue, because you believe strongly in Ukrainian independence, you have to have some idea about how Ukraine could actually win, some idea how to help Ukraine win.
That’s what the neocons have failed to give us, a plan to win. Thomas Meaney wrote, two years ago:
The trouble is that Ukraine has only one surefire way of accomplishing this feat in the near term: direct NATO involvement in the war. Only the full, Desert Storm style of deployment of NATO and U.S. troops and weaponry could bring about a comprehensive Ukrainian victory in a short period of time. (Never mind that such a deployment would most likely shorten the odds of one of the grimmer prospects of the war: The more Russia loses, the more it is likely to resort to nuclear weapons.)
In the subsequent almost two years, the West has tried just about everything short of that, and the British and French have at least talked about sending their troops to Ukraine to fight, but nothing came of such discussions. No one really wants to send their troops to fight Russia.
So, as the neocons fuss and fidget and scold about President Trump wanting to negotiate an end to the war, an end that gives Russia at least some of what Mr Putin wants, let them tell us how Ukraine fighting on leads to anything other than more bodies and more blood in a stalemated war. Until they can do that, they’re just wasting noble sounding words while the blood continues to flow.
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