Trump Is Only Western Statesman Who Wants Peace

On Donald Trump's unique aversion to killing.

Over the last quarter of a century, the West has become a really weird place in which virtue signaling has almost completely replaced actual virtue in the public forum, and the most brutal sentimentality has largely replaced genuine feeling. For years in the West, we have been strangely bereft of real men in public affairs—the sort of guys who emanate the natural authority that comes from competence and from habitually choosing to be governed by reason instead of emotion.

Because of Trump’s somewhat checkered past and bombastic personal style, he has struck many as an improbable character to take on the mantle of a strong and wise man who will lead mankind out a dark time of childish and destructive folly.

However, as far I as I can see, he appears to be doing just that with respect to the Russian-Ukraine catastrophe. This morning I read reports of Secretary of State Rubio’s meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in Saudi Arabia. The following bit jumped out at me:

Russia wants Nato to disavow 2008 promise to Ukraine

Russia wants Nato to disavow its 2008 promise to one day give Ukraine membership of the US-led military alliance, Russia’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday.

Nato membership for Ukraine is unacceptable for Russia but a simple refusal to accept Ukraine into the alliance is also not enough either, a spokesman said.

“It is worth noting that a refusal to accept Kyiv into Nato is not enough,” a spokesman said. “The alliance must disavow the Bucharest promises of 2008.”

At a summit in Bucharest in April 2008, Nato declared that both Ukraine and Georgia would join the US-led defence alliance - but gave them no plan for how to get there.

I was living in Central Europe in 2008 and I carefully followed the Bucharest NATO summit to which Vladimir Putin was invited to give a talk.

I remember perfectly reading the news of how NATO proposed Ukrainian membership at that time, and it struck me as a deliberate provocation of Putin. Moreover, when he stated that he was indeed provoked, and would not tolerate Ukrainian membership, he signaled to the West how precisely he could be baited into invading Ukraine.

I have long suspected that the Machiavellians in Washington wanted Putin to invade to indulge their fantasy of turning Ukraine into an Afghan-style quagmire for Russia. Hilary Clinton even said as much.

The totality of circumstances indicates that the West was butt-hurt when Putin ended the Yeltsin era of allowing western banks and their oligarch cronies in Russia to loot the country’s natural resource assets.

In 1996, when it appeared that the wild party was going to end because of Yeltin’s increasing unpopularity, the Clinton administration helped Yeltin to get reelected. By what means this was achieved remains unclear, though the event was celebrated on the cover of Time magazine.

In 1996, life expectancy for Russian men was 60. Putin came to power in 1999. Starting in 2003, Russian life expectancy started a steady ascent, reaching 68 in 2019.

During this period, we in the West were constantly told that Putin—with his Russian natural resource economy smaller than that of Texas—aspired to restore the glory of the Russian Empire in Eastern and even Central Europe. At the same time, Putin’s friendly relationship with former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was excoriated in the western press, as was their consummation of the Nord Stream Pipeline for supplying Europe with cheap Russian natural gas. Washington hated it that Germany and Russia were apparently becoming pals, and the Nord Stream Pipeline was regarded as an odious symbol of Russian-German cooperation.

For my part, I never found western media messaging about Putin plausible. Again, it has long seemed to me that the West was simply sour grapes that Putin wanted to make Russia great again. Remember, this is the same media that is sour grapes about Donald Trump’s aspiration to make America great again.

Now we find ourselves in a situation in which President Trump is the only major leader in the West who seems genuinely interested in working out a deal for peace, even if it means recognizing that Russia is a country worthy of respect that has legitimate security concerns.

And yet, why wouldn’t Russia have security concerns? The country suffered unspeakable catastrophe when Napoleon invaded in 1812 and when Hitler invaded in 1941. The German armed forces, combined with supply disruptions to major Russian cities, caused the deaths of millions of Russians, by some estimates over 25 million. Why should Putin trust the French or the Germans now?

Note that Trump is literally the only leader in the West—apart from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban—who publicly laments the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian and Russian men.

The Biden administration and the leaders of Western Europe were perfectly comfortable with keeping the killing going. The only time I heard Biden officials reference dying Ukrainian men was to lament that the age of conscription wasn’t lowered from 25 to 18 so that the youngsters could serve as cannon fodder as well.

We often hear about Putin being a bad guy, and maybe he is. However, if there is evidence that our western leaders aren’t totally depraved, I’ve still not seen it.

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban expressed optimism that Trump and Putin would work out a peace deal. When Carlson asked him why he is optimistic, he replied: “Because strong men make peace. Weak men make war.”

I hope that Trump and Putin will soon make peace.