OPINION: Trump’s Ukraine Peace Strategy Illustrates US Weakness

After years of promising never to abandon their close allies following peace talks with South Vietnam in Paris in January 1973, and the Government of Afghanistan in Doha in February 2000 Washington did just that. This month’s meeting between the US and Russia about Ukraine in Saudi Arabia has the same feel and aroma about it.

In those two earlier wars, the US had contributed years of blood and cash to prop up its ally. In both these “peace” processes – because a just peace was not the outcome – the ally was not even present as Washington negotiated the terms and set the pace of its exit from those conflicts, despite their prior investment.

The war in Vietnam cost America 58,000 lives at its conclusion at an estimated cost of $1 trillion in today’s money; Afghanistan $2 trillion, or $300 million per day over 20 years, and 3,468 coalition military and 3917 contractor deaths. This pales against the extent of local casualties: 600,000 excess deaths in Iraq, for instance, 170,000 in Afghanistan and 3.4 million during America’s phase of the war in Vietnam, if nothing else an indicator of the commitment on both sides.

In Paris and Doha, the American administration agreed terms and a timetable to leave the country. There were side assurances to their allies, a nudge and a wink to stay the course.

“You have my absolute assurance that if Hanoi fails to abide by the terms of this agreement, it is my intention to take swift and severe retaliatory action,” Richard Nixon told South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu in writing at the time of the talks on Nov. 14, 1972. Saigon fell to Hanoi’s forces in April 1975

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Russia Launches Missile Attack on Ukraine Hours After Summit Marking War Anniversary

The latest attack comes a day after the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine which has killed tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides in the Kremlin’s eleven-year-old war.

“No, it is not,” President Joe Biden said when asked on July 8, 2021: “Is a takeover of the Taliban now inevitable?” This was just five weeks before the collapse of Ashraf Ghani’s government in Kabul, when it was clear to those of us in Kabul that without international support, the government would fold.   

Biden made a similar pledge to Ukraine: “You remind us that freedom is priceless; it’s worth fighting for as long as it takes. And that’s how long we’re going to be with you, Mr. President - for as long as it takes,” he said to Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on the first anniversary of Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion.

So far, the Ukrainian war has cost, President Zelensky recently admitted 43,000 military deaths and 198,000 wounded. Russian casualties are estimated at over 800,000, with the dead numbering perhaps a quarter of this grisly tally. International assistance to Ukraine has so far topped €267 billion, or €90 billion annually. This is without the hundreds of billions of dollars in physical destruction and expected reconstruction bills.

America’s war in Vietnam was, as Neil Sheehan puts it, an era so rich in characters, events, mendacity, cover-ups and other galumphing institutional nonsenses, so much like those in a work of fiction, that one is reminded of Philip Roth’s observation: “it is difficult to be a fiction writer in America because reality is always outdoing the novelist’s imagination.”

This characterization seems more apt than ever. In a Truth Social post on 19 February, President Trump said:

“A modestly successful comedian … A Dictator without Elections, Zelensky better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only ‘TRUMP’ and the Trump Administration can do. Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring Peace, and Zelensky probably wants to keep the ‘gravy train’ going. I love Ukraine, but Zelensky has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died – And so it continues ...”

Some of Sheehan’s “bright, shining lies,” employed by four American administrations from Dwight Eisenhower to Richard Nixon, including Nixon’s “secret” bombing of Cambodia - which was, of course, no secret if you were Cambodian or Vietnamese - would be harder today, given the relative transparency of modern media, though such lies today might be bolstered by “fake news” narratives.

As the Afghanistan Papers published in 2019 showed, the tendency of US presidential administrations to lie to the American people and of military officers to go along with failing strategies due to a misplaced “can-do” attitude seems an enduring feature of the environment. What has also not changed today is the marginalization of the real victims of war - both foreigners and Americans - and the way that leaders default to “duck and dive” responsibility.

Trump may just crudely (as is his wont) be trying to publicly bully Zelensky into being compliant. This is likely to be a difficult journey for which Trump does not have all the keys. Several traps lie ahead.

The first is in his mistake to sideline Europe, and in particular Turkey. Ukraine’s geographic position and size as the second-largest country on the European mainland (after Russia itself) at the heart of the continent puts it at the heart of both regional and global security, unlike Vietnam or Afghanistan, the former which relied on the flaky “domino theory” to justify external support.

A second mistake is to overstate (again, not an uncommon trait) US power. While its military remains the steel backbone of NATO, this is not the Western alliance seen at Munich in 1938, another ominous parallel that has been played and replayed.

Contrary to his arithmetic, European aid to Ukraine now outstrips that of the US. Moreover, these volumes need to be disaggregated to provide a reasonable perspective not permitted by social media hyperbole. Around half of donor support goes to military assistance (much of which is spent by the donors themselves, of course), some 44% to financial support, and 7% towards humanitarian aid.

And relative to the likely costs of Ukrainian collapse, the investment is small, so far too small to stop Russia.

Germany, the UK, and the US, for example, have mobilized less than 0.2% of their GDP per year to support Ukraine, while other rich countries like France, Italy and Spain allocated just 0.1%, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy’s Ukraine Support Tracker.

“Even small domestic policy priorities are many times more expensive than what is being done for Ukraine,” Kiel notes. Germany’s tax subsidies for diesel fuel (so-called ‘diesel privilege’) cost taxpayers three times more per year than Germany’s military aid for Ukraine.

“When looking at the government budgets in most European donor countries, Ukraine aid over the last three years looks more like a minor political ‘pet project’ rather than a major fiscal effort,” Christoph Trebesch, head of the Ukraine Support Tracker notes. This lack of commitment to do the job is shared by both Europe and the US, however, as is the absence of a plan beyond keeping Ukraine on life support – with just enough aid to survive and not enough to win.

Other calculations show Ukraine is itself already meeting 55% of the costs of the war, Europe (and other non-US sources) some 25% and Washington 20%. If the US pulls back, the 20% will need to be shared between the non-US players, and obviously at least doubled. The threat of disconnecting Starlink is more problematic, but at least financially Europe could do it.

The most notable key difference between Ukraine, on the one hand, and Afghanistan and South Vietnam, on the other, is the will to fight. America is not fighting in Ukraine as it was in Afghanistan and Vietnam - it is merely enabling defense.

In September 1963, in response to a question posed by Walter Cronkite as to how the war in Vietnam was progressing, President JF Kennedy said: “I don’t think that unless a greater effort is made by the Government to win popular support that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis. It is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it - the people of Vietnam...”

More than half a century later, this rule still held. In 2015, then US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said of the post-Saddam Iraqi Army’s ability to fight the Islamic State: “We can give them training, we can give them equipment - we obviously can’t give them the will to fight.”

There is no doubting the Ukrainian will to fight and defend their homeland. This commitment was early on epitomized by Zelensky’s now-famous reply, to an offer of evacuation in the early days of the war: “I need ammunition, not a ride,” in stark contrast to President Ghani’s obvious weakness in Kabul.

Statistics about aid, as the journalist Anne Applebaum has noted, “can never fully describe what happened.” They explain, at least in Ukraine’s case, how history rewrites the present. Stalin’s crimes, include the terror famine of the Holodomor in Ukraine which cost around five million lives, something that never lies far below the surface and drives Ukrainians’ sense of purpose, is expressed in the extraordinary sacrifices made in this war.

The lesson of Afghanistan – for Afghans and the other allies and coalition partners of the US – was the same as for the South Vietnamese in 1975: don’t trust Washington. The US is too big and too self-centered to include its allies in its innermost strategic counsels as a consequence. The fact that allies were never privy to the side deals struck by US negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad with the Taliban is a case in point, just as the South Vietnamese were cut out of Kissinger’s deal-making with Hanoi.

The vagaries of Western support and the population’s predilection towards self-regard is a significant handicap in its foreign policy, not least in terms of stamina. The more unreliable Western support has become, the greater the political pressures inside Ukraine. While this may have a constructive effect, both on galvanizing the military and peace process, it threatens to fracture Ukrainian domestic political unity, the opposite to what Western supporters desire.

Western backing of Ukraine is not about charity. It’s about upholding international law, protecting democracy and stopping Vladimir Putin from putting back together the Soviet system of brutal imperial government.

Trump’s exaggerated language over Ukraine will not be cost-free. It will cost the free world’s respect. This is precisely the opposite goal the President seeks. It will undercut the view of US reliability and the practices of mutual benefit.

As Singapore’s defense minister Ng Eng Hen put it at the recent Munich Security Conference, America’s “image” abroad had “changed from liberator to great disruptor to a landlord seeking rent.”  It shakes hitherto sacrosanct principles of international relations around sovereignty, out of which a slew of other conflicts could well emanate, not least in Africa with its arbitrary and weak borders. It could also catalyze a new arms race, especially to gain nuclear weapons, non-proliferation another post-1945 tenet now under threat.

If the effect of Trump’s actions are to break the transatlantic relationship as epitomized by NATO, this would be an outcome that would suit Putin perfectly. It would also run counter to strengthening international systems to hold governments accountable for war crimes by effectively foreclosing on legal proceedings against the Russian forces who have committed, among other atrocities, acts of mass murder, rape, forced migration, ethnic cleansing, and child abductions. Washington’s early moves – including refusing the “war of aggression” language in the G7 statement - suggest that it is intent on closing down the war crimes issue.

While Trump likes to believe that he alone can make a deal, Washington may well discover that, on current form, Vladimir Putin is to be no more assuaged in his ambition to take over Ukraine than the Taliban were in Afghanistan or, for that matter, Hanoi with South Vietnam.

As such, the West might end up, if Ukraine were to implode, with the worst of all worlds: an alienated and emboldened Russia and a seething, anti-western Ukraine forced back within a neo-Soviet fold. The war is then likely to move to a different, unconventional phase. Ukrainians have learnt bitter lessons in entrusting their security to Moscow.

Whatever Trump may like to believe in his quest to cut a deal, the Western way of life, of democracy, liberal policy and the freedom of personal choice would be imperiled if Ukraine falls. If that were to occur as a consequence of his action (and inaction), Trump would place himself firmly on the wrong side of history.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.