by John Davenport
Russia’s total war on Ukraine’s people is reaching its third anniversary. With many parts of Ukraine’s eastern and southern cities looking like parts of Gaza or Aleppo, Ukraine’s leaders are now faced with defeat, because President Trump feels entitled to give away large chunks of their nation to the worst tyrant the world has seen since Adolph Hitler. Indeed this dictator, Vladimir Putin, is hoping that a deal on Ukraine with Trump will help to cement his suzerain influence over more of southeastern Europe as well.
As young schoolchildren, Americans are introduced to a poignant, if somewhat misleading, collective story. There once was a young nation that had to fight a foreign dictator to separate their country from his imperial domination. That tyrant threw everything he had at these brave souls inspired by the dream of a free republic based on the promise of equal rights and democratic collective decisionmaking. He tried to turn some of their own provinces against these liberty-loving rebels, destroyed much of their property, occupied some of their cities, and even sent foreign mercenaries against them. But, with help from foreign allies, these revolutionaries hung on longer than anyone thought they could. Their victory ultimately inspired democratic revolutions in many other nations in the next six decades.
Here’s the irony: that is Ukraine’s story, from 2022 until now, more clearly than it is America’s own story, given the original sin of slavery that tainted the American revolution.
Three years into the Ukrainian war of independence, led by a commander whose personal bravery and determination has surprised and inspired millions, and supported by allies in Europe and North America, Ukrainians are hanging on, despite all the casualties they have suffered – over 43,000 killed and 370,000 wounded.
There is another striking parallel. In spring 1781, a few months before Washington’s decisive victory at Yorktown, nobles in France, Russia, and Austria conspired to end the war with the British still in control of “parts of New York and Virginia, as well as the Carolinas and Georgia.” Their goal was to “impose a peace” that would freeze British control of some American lands in place (see Joseph Ellis, Quartet), and thereby weaken the American challenge to aristocracy.
It is hard to imagine what a disaster that “truce” would have been for the new American states, which might never have become a great continental nation. And yet, this is precisely the failure that Donald Trump now hopes to impose on Ukraine by rewarding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war of blatant aggression with not only Crimea and the Donbas, but possibly also some of Ukraine’s Black Sea cost – over a quarter of Ukraine’s territory – combined with sanctions relief.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is rightly worried that supplies of military hardware and other material aid from western allies is about to nosedive. Trump has already suspended all US aid to Ukraine for 90 days, which is a huge encouragement to Putin. And America’s military weak European allies, who have handicapped Ukraine’s efforts to fight Russia effectively at every stage since late 2021, may now force Kiev to accept a “compromise” that freezes in place a gigantic injustice. This, as Robert Kagan has argued, would be a catastrophic defeat not only for Ukraine but for the safety and hopes of democratic peoples everywhere.
Moreover, Trump and his foreign policy team seem to have no idea that in 1994, after the Soviet Union disintegrated, the US with European partners negotiated the Budapest Memorandum, a treaty by which Ukraine handed over all of its nuclear weapons materials to the new Russian Federation in exchange for the latter’s promise to recognize and respect Ukraine’s borders at the time – which included Crimea and all of the Donbas region in the east. In other words, we promised to defend Ukraine so that Ukrainians did not need to retain a nuclear deterrent. Trump is set to show the world that such guarantees from the United States mean nothing – just at Putin hopes.
How did we reach this point, when NATO nations now led by an American president with little historical knowledge are about to repeat the same failed strategy of appeasement that gave Hitler the green light to invade Poland and start of World War II?
The answer is isolationist ideology spreading on both the right and left-wings of U.S. politics, which helped carry Trump back into the White House. Despite his recent bluster and threats, Trump has a weak negotiating position with Putin. Putin has proven effective at sanctions evasion, partly by using the cryptocurrencies that Trump now foolishly supports. And Putin knows that Trump’s base is sold on the isolationist illusions personified in some of his close advisors, such as Tulsi Gabbard, who scare even Mitch McConnell.
Renewed isolationist sentiments, combined with a media ecosystem that reports little foreign news, ensures that few Americans understand the enormous stakes in Ukraine. Many Europeans have also been schooled ever since the botched 2003 US-UK intervention in Iraq to fear only quagmire and Putin’s nuclear threats rather than the existential dangers posed by the resurgence of tyrannical regimes across the planet, who are following Putin’s example.
There is another irony here, because most supporters of Trump and similar far-right politicians in Europe do not realize that the waves of irregular migrants arriving at their borders are partly driven by the reigns of terror and repression being carried out by dictators in Russia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Belarus, Sudan, Ethiopia, China, Hong Kong, Iran, and until last December, in Syria.
Things looked very different two decades ago when, in 2005, the UN Security Council adopted the collective Responsibility to Protect doctrine, and a trajectory towards universal respect for human rights still seemed possible. Democratic nations could have invoked this principle and intervened to stop the slaughter of over 500,000 persons in the Darfur region of Sudan between 2004 and 2016. That would have strengthened international law by upholding the norm that genocide will be prevented with hard power when necessary. It might also have convinced Putin to throw in his lot with the European Union.
Despite failing that major test, the world’s developed democracies could still have supported the diverse coalition of protesters in 2012 who marched to end the Assad family’s brutal Shia minority dictatorship in Syria. When Bashir al-Assad started leveling Sunni sections of Syria’s cities, using chemical weapons on his own people, and driving his opponents into the arms of hardline Sunni armed factions bent on theocracy, western nations could have joined Turkey’s call to strike back at least from the air, destroying Assad’s air force and artillery, and setting up safe zones within Syria. The world would then have been back on course to a day without savage totalitarian domination anywhere. Even China’s leaders might well have accepted this positive trend and chosen accommodation.
Instead, an isolationist backlash in August 2013 scuttled plans for military intervention in Syria, leading to the rise of the ISIS terrorist successor to Al Qaeda in 2014, which ultimately occupied large parts of northern Syria and northern Iraq. NATO nations had to mount an air campaign and Kurdish-led ground war to oust ISIS, killing over 100,000 people in the process.
Putin was emboldened by Assad’s survival even after his sarin and chlorine gas attacks on Sunni Syrians. So, a few months later, when pro-democracy Ukrainian protesters ousted Putin’s puppet kleptocratic ruler from Kyiv in early 2014, Putin decided to seize Crimea, steal Ukraine’s navy, and foment civil war in Ukraine’s two eastern provinces – betting he would get away with it both flagrant violations of international law. He did.
At that moment, bolder leaders on both sides of the Atlantic could again have drawn a line in the sand. For Putin had flagrantly violated not only the 1994 Budapest treaty but also the heart of the UN Charter by annexing Crimea and ginning up secession in Donbas province. NATO could have given Putin an ultimatum to withdraw at least out of the eastern provinces or face a ground war led by European allies. Failing that, NATO should at least have offered the newly reforming and democratizing Ukraine admission to NATO.
Instead, Germany, France, Britain, and the US chose more appeasement, and communicated to Putin in deed in not in word that they would never risk a conventional war with him out of fear that he might escalate to a nuclear response.
Such a foolish stance – telegraphing that we would never call his bluff – was a green light to any aggression that Putin’s immediate victims could not repulse. And he took full advantage of it — first with increasingly devastating cyberattacks and by killing tens of thousands of Assad’s enemies in Syria; then by helping Trump win the 2016 American election and backing Nicholas Maduro’s tyranny in Venezuela. Finally, Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 along with a relentless blitzkrieg of civilian housing and infrastructure in Ukraine’s cities, complete with “double tap” missile and drone strikes on emergency service units coming to help victims of an initial strike.
Even then, NATO powers chose a weak response, refusing not only to fight directly for Ukraine, but also to impose a no-fly zone that would have kept Russian bombers and missiles out of Ukraine’s airspace. At this juncture, a hard-power response – such as immediately giving Ukraine long-range missiles – could have greatly weakened Putin. That might even have convinced China to rethink its fast-tracked plans to invade Taiwan.
Trump now seems set to continue this downward slide with more appeasement, which he will call a great compromise. Given the long downward spiral described above, this could be the final death knell for the system of international law set up after W.W. II. China will surely then seize Taiwan, which is home to much of the world’s chip-making industry, before Trump leaves office. With his help, the arc of history is now bending towards in one ominous direction: the growth of tyranny across the entire globe.
That is ultimately what the isolationist spirit of our time is: the betrayal of all humanity, and all the generations of victims to whom we promised “never again.”
