Putin 15% of Ukraine, Zelensky 85%: Thank you, Trump

The contrast in circumstances this week in Alaska with the last meeting seven years ago between President Trump and President Putin could not be more stark. President Trump at that time was accused of “treason” by the former director of the Central intelligence Agency, John Brennan, who is now under criminal investigation for deliberately corrupting his agency in representing the Steele Dossier, a pastiche of lies and defamations of Donald Trump commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign, as authentic intelligence and inserting it into the 2016 election campaign, as well as for lying under oath to Congress.

Where Trump was the head of a storm-tossed administration struggling through the Covid pandemic and fiercely denounced for inadequate condemnation of Putin’s attempt to influence the 2016 US presidential election (which has now been exposed as a fiction), he is now solidly in office at the head of a popular and thoroughly accomplished government. In barely six months, he has stopped the invasion of the United States across the southern border by more than three million illegal immigrants a year, many of them dangerous criminals, and is deporting them in hundreds of thousands. Having pledged to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear military power, he has done so without sustaining a single American casualty. He has already eliminated more than half of the American trade deficit and a substantial part of the American budget deficit and the dire predictions of his adversaries of economic disaster have been proved to be nonsensical. And he has shaken the NATO alliance by its eyeteeth and transformed the “alliance of the willing,” a freeloading operation in which most of the so-called allies would graciously accept a US military guarantee but contributed practically nothing to their own defence, into a serious and well-funded geopolitical enterprise.

For his part, Vladimir Putin plunged into Ukraine claiming he was liberating that country from the oppressive ineptitude of a government of “Nazis and drug addicts” and restoring it to its rightful place as a province of greater Russia. This would have repealed the largest single element in the bloodless Russian defeat in the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. As Putin huffed and puffed and sabre-rattled, the Biden administration quavered about the extent of Putin’s invasion and offered Ukrainian President Zelensky asylum while the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff predicted that Russia would occupy all of Ukraine within a month. The Russian army has been exposed as a shower and has been substantially humiliated by a much smaller country. Russia has suffered over a million casualties and more than 50,000 desertions and has been reduced to reliance on mercenary forces from private-sector gangster organisations and the North Koreans as well as supplies of drones from the medieval pseudo-theocracy of Iran, which has just received, to the relief and pleasure of practically the whole earth, a severe military thrashing from the Israelis and the Americans.

The Russian economy and population are shrinking and, in his desperation, Putin has consigned the eminent Western, though Eurasian, civilisation of Tolstoy’s Holy Mother Russia to a pitiful state of vassalage at the bidding of the People’s Republic of China. Trump deserves credit for being practically the only Western statesman to recognise that in the Ukraine War the West has two objectives. First, it must not tolerate the subjugation of Ukraine and the exposure of the Western Alliance as a paper tiger and must end the conditionality of the independence of the principal former republics of the Soviet Union, and establish the unquestionable sovereignty of Ukraine. Second, this war must be ended in a way that is not so humiliating of Russia that it is unable to preserve its self-respect and re-engage with the West. Ultimately, Russia must be confirmed as a Western and not an oriental nation. The one nightmare scenario is that Putin’s Mussolini-like pursuit of empire could reduce Russia to such a state of weakness that the Chinese would export 30 or 40 million of surplus people to Siberia to exploit the resources of that region for the first time, paying a royalty to the Kremlin and transforming China for the first time into a resource-rich country.

The Western objective must continue to be to move the Western world to the East until it girdles the globe between Vladivostok and Vancouver in both directions. Prior to the end of the Cold War the Western world ended 150 miles east of the Rhine at the East German border. It has  moved 800 miles east to the eastern border of Poland and it must move a similar further distance to include Ukraine. But ultimately the West must help tip the balance within Russia between the Western emulators initially led by Peter the Great over the nativists, culturally distinguished though some of them, such as Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn, have been.

Putin has bungled the diplomatic side of his war in Ukraine as badly as the military aspect. Because Trump did not want to humiliate Russia and wanted to help extract it from the potentially lethal embrace of China, he somewhat equivocated between the Russians and Ukrainians in order to make American good offices effective. Where seven years ago there were still echoes of the nonsense about his supposed infatuation with Russia, it is now clear that he was not only pursuing the only method of producing a peace that would achieve both objectives of the West in this war. He was giving Putin the opportunity to preserve his and his country’s dignity in a resolution of the conflict. This is the last train leaving the station: If Putin continues to masquerade as if he is actually winning this war, the world will shortly see a demonstration of the vastly uneven correlation of forces between the United States and its former rival. By persuading the other NATO countries sharply to increase their defence budgets, Trump is able to sell to them, at no cost to American taxpayers and with no grumblings from his own isolationist followers, the military hardware that will familiarise the civil population of Russia with the nature of this war as the Russians have thoughtfully inflicted upon the civilian population of Ukraine. And he will also demonstrate that there is not one single country in the world, with the possible exception of Belarus, that would not rather trade with the United States than with Russia. President Trump has the ability to reduce Putin to mendicancy.

Putin will have to accept 15 per cent of the Ukraine loaf and Zelensky will have to accept 85 per cent of the loaf of a confirmed and secured, sovereign and legitimate Ukraine, enjoying serious military guarantees, and not the worthless and cavalier promises given by the major powers when Ukraine, along with Belarus and Kazakhstan, gave up the nuclear weapons inherited from the Soviet Union in 1994. Peace should be about to break out and as with a number of other positive results of the reassertion of self-confident American strength, the world will have that unlikely benefactor, President Donald Trump, to thank for it