Stupid and Very Dangerous

Shameful.  That’s the only way to describe yesterday’s debacle in the Oval Office.  Shameful and perilously dangerous.

One of two things happened on Friday:  either the meeting was an ambush, carefully planned and executed by people who knew beforehand that Volodimir Zelinsky would react as he did and used the opportunity to softened the man up so that he would be more tractable to the territorial concessions he would have to make to Vlad the Terrible to get peace in Ukraine; or…

Or it was a completely unexpected and spontaneous blowup fed by a clash of outsized egos. 

I don’t know which is worse.  But I do know that both bring this world far closer to a World War than it was on Thursday last, not least because it was exposed live on television, for all the world so see, including our enemies..  So let’s unpack both.

The unexpected blowup, if that’s what it was, indicates a dangerous lack of preparation for the visit, and a foolish belief that Zelinsky would jump at any chance to enter an agreement with the Trump administration, no matter how assiduously it avoided the security guarantees for his country he has always sought.  Worse, there was a preliminary meeting before the public debacle. So they completely failed twice to take the measure of the man who, on the eve of the Russian invasion the Biden administration invited, was offered asylum in the US to which he responded:  “I need weapons, not a ride.”

If he had received what he requested then, the war might have taken a completely different course.  But he did not, yet his country fought.  And has fought, against outsized odds;  against a better-armed, bloodthirsty and unscrupulous foe with international allies willing to provide whatever was necessary.  They have fought on under the Russian blitz, much more devastating than that undertaken by the Nazis against Britain. They have fought on under inhuman conditions and with casualties that have hollowed out the youth of their country. They have fought on because they remember what life was like in the former Soviet Union, and will die before they return to it.  They fight on under the banner that should be familiar to all Americans:  “Liberty or Death.”  Alas…

So let’s hope the miscalculation hypothesis is wrong;  the implications of willful blindness and immoral indifference are far too grave.  Which brings us to the Ambush theory.

From the “America First” point of view there are several advantages to the beatdown and breakup that followed.  The thinking probably ran as follows:  Zelinsky, after being thrown out of the White House, will probably take a little time to come to the realization that he has no options.  The Europeans will be sympathetic, but are both unwilling and unable to give him the aid necessary to battle the Russians to a standstill and keep them there until they are ready to talk on equal terms.  He will then come back chastened and do as he is told.  Or his successor will.

The spectacle of President Trump and Vice President Vance browbeating President Zelinsky for the temerity to demand the security guarantees his people both want and need, however tactless his request – remember, English is not his first language, nor etiquette his long suit – would doubtless also have been thought to put the wind up the Europeans, which it has.  Perhaps this is all part of a Trumpian long game to make Europe’s approximately 510 million people take a more active role in protecting themselves against Russia’s 141 million. But as noble as such a goal might be it is a very, very dangerous gamble, because Ukraine, the US and Western Europe are not the only ones in the room.

Russia has already taken note, upping its claim on Ukrainian territory.  Putin is doubtless drawing his plans against other European targets, Estonia, for example, following the collapse of Ukraine.  Will the US stand by if a NATO ally is attacked?  What if the Estonians, as they undoubtedly will, invoke Article five when the first bullet flies?  Will Trump’s America walk away from its international commitments?  Friday’s meeting was a suggestion that it might, and believe you me, ears pricked up in Peijing, in Pyongyang, in Tehran, as murderous tyrants looked with covetous eyes at their now much more uneasy neighbors.

In this atmosphere, President Trump was wrong when he lectured President Zelinsky about “having no cards.”  In fact he holds a very high card; one which, if played, has the potential to make the international situation much worse for us, and for peace.

In 1994 Ukraine, Russia, the US and the United Kingdom, along with several other nations signed the “Budapest Memorandum” in which Ukraine’s borders and security were guaranteed by the other three aforementioned parties in return for Ukraine surrendering its nuclear weapons – at the time, the third largest such arsenal in the world.  On Friday, Zelinsky refused to throw that card, with the public suggestion that, since Russia had already broken the treaty with the 2014 seizure of Crimea and every action that followed, the remaining guarantors were bound by treaty to come to its aid.  Or to ask publicly why the US was complaining about having to live up to its treaty obligations.  Trump would do well to appreciate his forbearance, which at least preserved the fig leaf of the President’s “freedom of action.”

The twentieth century witnessed two of mankind’s most murderous and destructive wars. One was precipitated by miscalculations of the intentions and resolution of monarchs;  the other by appeasement of a dictator whose intentions were well-known. At the moment, the latter seems far and away the more probable as a trigger to a third general conflict.

If there are any of us left afterward to categorize such things, or anything at all.