The speed with which the Trump administration has hit the ground and heaved executive orders and ultimatums at domestic targets and foreign states has been breathtaking. We’ve seen threatened tariffs, threatened takeovers of Greenland and the Panama Canal, the re-naming of the Gulf of Mexico/America and the freezing of all payments from key US bodies.
But the most important and far-reaching announcement President Trump has made so far is the statement that he had held an hour and a half telephone discussion with President Putin of Russia on the war in Ukraine.
What I found worrying in all of this isn’t just that Trump didn’t speak to Ukrainian President Zelensky first, but that in this conversation he casually conceded two critical points without getting anything from Putin in return. First the Ukrainian territory that Russia has seized, which many Ukrainians have died to defend, and second, potential Nato membership for Ukraine.
President Trump’s Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, at the same time in Europe, was correct to say that European nations have for too long ridden on the coattails of America. He is also right to insist that Europeans should take on responsibility for European security and right to criticise the fact that for too long European countries made themselves dependent on Russian oil and gas while defence budgets were raided.
Even though I agree that the US needs to shake Europe up over its failure to spend enough on defence, I don’t agree that the US should pull the plug on Ukraine. That will be a self-defeating position, and it will only increase the threat to the US, not diminish it.
To get this straight, Ukraine has never asked for US boots on the ground in their fight. Ukrainians have long realised it is their responsibility to fend off their brutal neighbour. What they have asked for and too often failed to get is the proper equipment to do what they must, without insane restrictions on its use. That the war has lasted three years is largely down to Western dithering and inconsistency. Ukrainian troops have been forced to fight with one hand behind their backs. The delays on everything from F-16 fighter jets and main battle tanks to 155mm artillery shells and ATACMS missiles have cost them dear in human losses and Russia’s incremental advances.
Having just returned from Ukraine, close to the Russian border in the Southeast, I have seen the effects of Western weakness first hand. I have also seen the incredible resolve and belief in democracy that have characterised the Ukrainian nation.
The real threat to the US is the rise of the totalitarian states. Russia, Iran, North Korea and of course China and their proxies across the world. You can see how coordinated these nations are, from Iran’s support for Russia and its attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah on Israel. North Korea and China’s support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also been significant, while Russia’s transfer of missile technology to North Korea is now increasing the threat to the US in the Indo-Pacific.
All these nations have watched the failure of the free world to step up when democracy has been threatened. From South Ossetia in Georgia through the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the disgracefully panicky abandonment of Afghanistan, we have shown that we are weak in the face of their ambitions.
Russia is determined to re-create the Soviet Union and China is equally determined to seize Taiwan – these ambitions are inseparable. Whether the incoming administration likes it or not, the road to Taiwan runs right through Ukraine. Abandoning Ukraine to the rapacious demands of Putin will make China’s demand for Taiwan even stronger, intensifying what the Trump administration sees as its primary foreign challenge.
In 1938, in Munich, Czechoslovakia was forced by France and the UK to hand over the Sudetenland to Hitler in the hope that Hitler would be appeased and end his further territorial ambitions. Sadly, like Zelensky today, the Czech Prime Minister was absent from the negotiation. Hitler went on to gobble up the rest of Czechoslovakia and then Poland. The subsequent war led to 60 million dead.
Today, as with Germany in the 1930s, China and Russia’s territorial ambitions are undiminished while – as in the 1930s – the West looks divided and Irresolute. If the US President forces Ukraine to accept the loss of its territory Putin will have won. History will be repeated and we will have learned nothing from the past, for Putin will re-group and come back for the rest of Ukraine.
Chamberlain once said of Czechoslovakia that this is “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.” My worry is that the same sentiment is alive and well in the US at the moment, and that in the laudable pursuit of peace in Ukraine, justice is simply abandoned.
I ask President Trump to think again on his present course, otherwise he may well risk becoming our era’s Neville Chamberlain.
