Prolonging the Ukrainian quagmire won’t defend the West or Israel
Trump was wrong to say Ukraine started the war with Russia. But the main threat to the United States is the woke left, Islamists and China, not Moscow.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Feb 21, 2025
Even by President Donald Trump’s standards, this one was a whopper. He often plays fast and loose with the truth when trolling opponents or engaging in wild exaggerations to distract the press. But his claim that Ukraine started the current war with Russia was not a garden-variety Trump gambit.
Unlike most of Trump’s jibes that send his critics into hysteria, this one was a self-inflicted wound. It was both egregiously wrong on the facts of the conflict and undermined a key U.S. policy initiative.
Whatever might have led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022—and however hard Trump loyalists want to spin his statement—there’s no doubt that it was Moscow that attacked Kyiv and not the other way around. It pumped some life into the old Russia collusion hoax that his foes have never quite let go. But far worse than that, it has distracted the public from the plain fact that his effort to end that pointless and destructive war is not only the right thing to do; opponents who are having such a good time lambasting him for doing what they claim is the dirty work of Russian President Vladimir Putin have no rational alternative.
Had he stuck to his basic position on the war, Trump would have been on safe ground. But infuriated by the pushback that he’s been getting from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his international media cheering squad, Trump characteristically unloaded on the Ukrainians. He wrongly said they had started the war by not making concessions to the Russians before it began and accused Zelenskyy of being a dictator. He said not a word of criticism about Putin, whose brutal and illegal actions are, without question, the reason for the war.
This set off not only a tsunami of criticism. He was accused of destroying American foreign policy and reversing 80 years of efforts to contain and deter Russia. Trump was also blamed for unfairly abandoning the Ukrainians by cutting them out of the talks in Saudi Arabia that he initiated with Putin.
Misleading arguments
More troubling, it put some steam behind efforts to link support for prolonging the war with opposition to the rise of right-wing parties in Europe, who oppose open borders immigration policies that have brought millions of Muslim and Arab immigrants into the continent, undermining its identity and making it far more anti-Israel as well as anti-Jewish. Indeed, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens sought to falsely link the two issues by claiming that Germany’s AfD party was comprised of, in addition to their other obvious flaws, Russian agents.
In this way, Stephens and other Trump-bashers want to somehow turn an effort by the administration to point out—as Vice President JD Vance did last week—the way our erstwhile European allies have abandoned the defense of free speech into a defense of Nazis and antisemitism. Another egregious example of this appalling tactic came when Margaret Brennan, the host of CBS’s “Face the Nation,” was pushing back at U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s defense of the Trump and Vance positions. Brennan also claimed that “free speech was weaponized” by the Nazis in order to commit the Holocaust.
That was as wrong as anything Trump has ever said. As historian Andrew Roberts wrote in The Free Press in response to what he correctly labeled as a “new low in historical ignorance,” the Nazis didn’t weaponize free speech, “they crushed it.”
In this manner, Trump’s opponents think that they can derail Trump’s peace effort by, as Stephens egregiously tried to do, analogizing Trump to Hitler appeaser Neville Chamberlain. Their goal is to revive the pro-Ukraine coalition of liberal Democrats and establishment Republicans that worked so effectively under President Joe Biden to give Zelenskyy more than $175 billion (and not the $350 billion figure that Trump wrongly used) to fight Russia and keep the war going.
But while Trump deserves the drubbing he’s getting for his misstatements about the start of the war, his policy won’t be stopped by that. Nor should it be. And those disingenuously trying to tie his effort to antisemitism or the appeasement of Nazis know it.
A war that should be ended
More than 1 million people, soldiers and civilians, have been killed or wounded on both sides in the war between Ukraine and Russia. And, as even the Biden administration, which claimed the war should continue “for as long as it takes,” admitted, it’s turned into a bloody World War I-style stalemate since the failures of Russia’s initial offense in 2022 and the U.S.-aided Ukrainian counter-offensive in 2023.
Since then, the United States has continued to pour more money into Ukraine than an embattled Israel has gotten throughout decades of conflict. Biden also stripped the strategic reserves of arms and ammunition of the U.S. armed forces (including those arms that had been pre-positioned in Israel and could have helped the Jewish state fight Hamas after the terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023) and tossed them into the furnace of this war so as to prop up Ukraine.
The Russian army failed miserably in its initial efforts to seize Kyiv. And though the Ukrainians earned the admiration of the world by foiling the initial Russian invasion, their efforts—aided by American arms and U.S. intelligence—to win back the territory in the Donbas region and Crimea that Putin seized in 2014 have collapsed just as miserably.
Since the summer of 2022, the war has been a contest about whether Russia would hold onto its 2014 gains and not whether Ukraine would be independent. There is an argument to be made for considering the maintenance of that country’s independence to be a principle the United States should defend. But the question of who controls the Donbas or Crimea has nothing to do with American national interests or those of the free world.
At this point, the only sane plan of action involves negotiations that will lead to a peace settlement giving each side some of what they want.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth probably shouldn’t have been so candid when speaking of those terms recently, but it’s not as if everyone didn’t already know that the war will almost certainly be brought to a close along those lines. Russia will likely keep the lands, which are largely inhabited by people who are not Ukrainian, it took in 2014, and the West will promise not to bring Ukraine into NATO—the factor that probably did the most to motivate Putin’s illegal invasion. Ukraine’s independence will be guaranteed, and the West will ensure that it can defend itself against Russia in the future while contributing to its reconstruction.
That’s the only rational path forward. Yet the response to Trump’s call with Putin and his demand that Ukraine pay back some of what it owes the United States by paying it with a deal to help develop its mineral resources has been nothing short of hysteria.
As far as the Europeans and the U.S. foreign-policy establishment are concerned, America’s role in this conflict is to just shut up and pay for it while doing nothing to bring about peace.
Trump’s critics say Russia is allied to China and Iran, and so must be opposed at all costs. But that doesn’t mean that wasting more Western resources on a war that can’t end well is a good idea or will aid efforts to prevent aggression from Beijing or Tehran.
Nor can anyone define what they mean when some, like Biden did, demand “victory” for Ukraine. The notion that Kyiv could conquer a nuclear-armed Moscow is a fantasy.
Whose interests are furthered by propagating such myths?
One is the Zelenskyy government. Calling him a “dictator,” as Trump did, wasn’t helpful even if the claims that he is democracy’s champion are, at best, an exaggeration. Once the war ends, the Ukrainian leader will be forced to change out of his signature G.I. Joe outfit, cease pretending to be the Winston Churchill of the 21st century and be reduced to the leader of what remains among the most corrupt and anti-democratic governments in Europe.
The NGO archipelago
The other big loser, if peace were to be reached in Ukraine, is what some wags have dubbed the “NGO archipelago.”
Ukraine has long been the special interest of federal boondoggles like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that Trump is seeking to dismember. Its many partners in the nonprofit world have feasted on the dubious project of transforming a corrupt former Soviet republic into a Jefferson democracy while pulling it into the West’s sphere of influence. Like their efforts to aid the war against Israel being waged by Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups, the Ukraine war is a nonstop gravy train for the international community’s multilateral agencies.
None of those whining about Trump’s rough treatment of Europe or willingness to pressure Zelenskyy to make peace has a better idea other than continuing the war indefinitely. That would not be in the interests of the Ukrainian people, who continue to suffer from the continuation of the war.
More importantly, it would not be in the interests of the United States, allies like Israel, or the real struggle for freedom and democracy, which requires the European nations that are complaining the loudest about Trump to confront their own problems.
So, although he was wrong to depict Ukraine as the aggressor, Trump is just doing what any statesman not drunk on myths about exporting democracy or Cold War nostalgia would do.
Settling the war won’t be easy, but Trump deserves credit for jump-starting talks with Russia to end it—something Biden refused to do. Isolating Moscow in the manner that Biden pursued didn’t make it less dangerous or hostile. Once the shooting there stops, the United States can pivot to defending its interests against the real geostrategic threat of the 21st century from which Ukraine has been a costly distraction: China. And a wealthy Europe will be compelled to pay its fair share of the costs of its defense, and hopefully, stop ganging up on Israel.
Trump deserves criticism for his statements about Ukraine. But the policy he is pursuing is far more realistic as well as better-suited to help defend the interests of America and its allies than a continuation of this hopeless quagmire. Those pointing out this obvious truth are not Putin’s stooges or agents, nor are they isolationists. That’s something that those wailing about the president’s bad history would acknowledge if they were not so blinded by their hatred of Trump and their embrace of a questionable cause.
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