George Rebane
I am distraught and shaken at the news of what President Trump is planning for ending the war between Ukraine and Russia. It’s taken a few days for me to gather the gumption to get my thoughts down for the record. Readers know that as the best of available alternatives I have supported Trump’s candidacies and general policies through three elections. My support has been interleaved with generous dollops of criticisms, especially when he has shot from the lip and acted like a third-grader throwing a tantrum on the playground. But now in power, he has really shown a new side of himself in the foreign policy arena – he is acting as if he’s never studied history and knows nothing about how international thugs and dictators (especially of the communist stripe) respond to opposing their atrocities.
Putin is a low-life, rank-and-file KGB agent who struck it rich in Russia’s chaotic aftermath during the collapse of the USSR. To view him as anything other than a murderous thug and liar is to embark on the wrong course regarding any dealings with him. To that we must add his newfound embrace of becoming the self-aggrandized heroic figure who will reconstitute the old Communist empire and return Russia to its never-was glory days.
It boggles the mind to discover why Trump set up the meetings with Russia and excluded Ukraine’s president Zelensky from the undertakings. Last time I looked, the war was between Russia and the Ukraine with America and the allies providing war materiel support on an unreliable schedule that so far has favored Putin. It is Zelensky who has used every legal means (according to Ukraine’s constitution) to administer the state and conduct a decidedly one-sided war to save his country from a criminal invasion and conquest.
And in response Trump not only excludes Zelensky from the negotiations, but gratuitously attacks him personally for no apparent reason, culminating with the patently absurd lie that Ukraine started the war. Putin and Lavrov are laughing their collective asses off watching Trump go off the rails. Any C- student of history knows that Moscow’s thugs are playing for time with all the cards stacked in their favor viz no return of conquered Ukrainian territories and Ukraine permanently banned from NATO. What in hell is there left for the west to negotiate?
Having successfully expanded Russia’s boundaries through bullshit negotiations with the west, Putin will just wait for the next opportunity to again invade convenient neighbors, be it the Baltics, or the rest of Ukraine, or … . And, of course, China is watching Trump’s screw-ups with keen interest as it prepares for its next moves on Taiwan.
The best source of Trump’s wrong thinking that I can muster is his proudly claimed expertise as a New York real estate negotiator. Trump, like most western business people, has grown up in the belief that capitalism under liberal governments provides ideal environments for win-win negotiations and deals. However, the deep-rooted culture of most of the rest of the world, especially Slavic Russia, is that the fundamental nature of negotiations and resulting deals is a zero-sum game – if he’s winning, I must be losing, and vice versa.
So now Trump is trying to engineer a laudable win-win outcome with Putin and present the results, take it or leave it, to Zelensky. There is absolutely zero chance of that happening. Putin’s political AND personal survival depends on his being able to continue reconstituting Mother Russia to at least its czarist days. If he fails in this endeavor, they may not even hold a state funeral for him.
Oi Weh!
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