VDH UltraUkraine Peace—So Far Away and Still So Close
Victor Davis Hanson
After the recent dustup with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance in the White House, Volodymyr Zelenskyy should have taken a lesson from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Like Ukraine, Israel too is similarly in an existential war—in fact against four adversaries. And likewise, it is dependent on U.S. financial and military aid.
But Netanyahu realizes that it is a client of the United States and often a guest at the White House—and never ends up arguing publicly with his patron and host!
Yet Zelenskyy did both.
Or more unfortunately, he began lecturing Vance on the realities of Vladimir Putin’s untrustworthiness—as if the U.S. did not know that Russia feared to invade its neighbors only during the deterrent Trump administration of the last four American presidencies.
In truth, the U.S. had been far harder on Israel than it ever was on Ukraine. Zelenskyy has had no arms embargo comparable to the Biden administration’s suspension of shipments of key munitions to Israel.
He has not been coerced into an unfavorable ceasefire in the manner America strongarmed Israel to grant pauses to Hamas.
He has been under no pressure to form a wartime, bipartisan cabinet in the manner of Israel that would not have dared to cancel opposition media and political parties and cancel elections.
No one lectures Zelenskyy about the need to avoid collateral damage as the Biden administration warned Israel.
More importantly, Zelenskyy does not understand that those who idolize him and with whom he is most comfortable—the Europeans and the American Left—now have no real power to help him.
Europeans can talk tough but carry a twig. Democrats in the media and academia worship Zelenskyy. But they do not have the White House or Congress to reify their empty rhetoric.
In contrast, those whom Zelenskyy does not particularly like—Trump, Vance, and the MAGA movement—alone can save Ukraine, engineer a ceasefire, deter Putin, and establish the foundations of a lasting peace.
After losing 500,000(?) dead and wounded Ukrainians to Russia’s aggression, Zelenskyy has plenty of reasons to be wary of Russia and any who persuade him to compromise for peace.
But again, he assumes that Ukraine’s noble cause is exactly America’s own. And it is not quite exactly. First, the U.S. does not want to stumble into an existential proxy war in Ukraine with a nuclear rival Russia—in the manner Nikita Khrushchev almost did just that by aiding Cuba to challenge the U.S. in its backyard.
Second, for the last half-century, a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy was to ensure that neither Russia nor China becomes friendlier with one another than each is with us. Such balance-of-power triangulation ensures that the two hostile nuclear powers do not align together against the U.S., NATO, and Western allies.
Yet, the Ukraine war has brought both together against the West—something Trump wishes to disrupt.
The irony of the disastrous Zelenskyy visit is that Ukraine is far closer to a stable ceasefire and a possible permanent peace is closer than ever.
All the former sticking points have been mostly resolved: Ukraine has now a more powerful and deterrent military than almost any NATO country, and yet by general consensus will not be a member of NATO.
No one believes Ukraine has the military wherewithal—or will receive it from the West—to recapture either the Donbas or Crimea, absorbed by Russia in 2014 during the Obama administration.
So, the remaining issues are now only two: one, how far eastward can Russia be made to withdraw toward their 2022 borders? And two, how can Putin be deterred from invading again?
The answer is that a Ukraine-American concession to develop mutually lucrative development projects in its eastern regions will not just help pay for the rebuilding of Ukraine and U.S. aid. Such agreements will also serve as a de facto tripwire to deter Putin. It will be hard for Russia—having bled a million casualties—to invade a vibrant, joint American-Ukrainian industrial corridor near its border without a strong response from a militarily superior U.S.
Far from being a Putin puppet, Trump was harder on Russia during his first term—blasting the Wagner group, exiting a bad Russian missile deal, sending offensive weapons to Ukraine, opposing the Nord Stream II pipeline—than any American president of the last quarter-century.
Finally, lost in all these geostrategic questions, is a humanitarian catastrophe—a deadlocked Stalingrad that has consumed 1.5 million Ukrainian and Russian dead or wounded youth.
What is next?
Ukraine and the U.S. despite their public fireworks will likely return to negotiations, stop the killing fields, formalize commercial relationships, and deter Russia leading to a détente, as the U.S. pivots to the much greater China challenge.
The truth is that the louder and longer Zelenskyy and Trump argue, the farther they grow apart, the more it is clear there is still no alternative to a peace in what has become something surreal between Verdun and Stalingrad.
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