Yesterday, the Trump administration unveiled their (ahem) "peace plan" for ending the war in Ukraine. As long feared, it essentially amounts to a one-sided capitulation to Putin's core demands. Under the Trump/Vance proposal, Ukraine would never become a member of NATO; they would also permanently abandon and cede large parts of their Eastern territory—essentially, any part of the country currently occupied by Russian forces (including the Donbas and Crimea).
In exchange for making these concessions, Ukraine would get basically... nothing at all. Some friends of Ukraine have tried to find a sliver of hope in the fact the agreement does not expressly limit the size of Ukraine's future military, or bar other Western countries from supporting Ukraine if they choose to do so. But it says nothing positively—at least according to initial reporting—about what concrete security guarantees Ukraine would receive so as to prevent Putin from invading again.
Of course, it's in the Trump administration's interests to pretend that Putin is incapable of ever doing such a thing. Members of Trump's team keep insisting that Putin only invaded in the first place in order to ensure Ukraine would never join NATO—and that he would be permanently satisfied so long as he had a guarantee that this would not take place. I am reminded here of a passage from Swift's The Drapier's Letters, which readers know I was just consuming this past weekend:
I will conclude all with a fable, ascribed to Demosthenes. [...] Once upon a time the wolves desired a league with the shepherds, upon this condition; that the cause of strife might be taken away, which was the shepherds and the mastiffs; this being granted, the wolves without all fear made havoc of the sheep.
Such, indeed, are all Vladimir Putin's proposals for "peace." Like the wolves to the shepherds, he says: "Oh sure, let's made peace. Just remove the cause of all the conflict—namely, Ukraine's defense capabilities, Western alliances, security guarantees, and the possibility of its joining any mutual defense pact with other countries." And what exactly do you think will happen once they do so? Pretty much exactly what happened to the sheep in the fable.
Maybe you're still not convinced. Maybe you still think that Putin only invaded to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. Well, let me ask: why did Ukraine want to join NATO in the first place? Because they feared a full-scale Russian invasion otherwise. Which Putin proceeded to carry out in 2022. It is a strange and lupine sort of moral logic to say: we had no choice but to attack them because otherwise they might have defended themselves against us; it was the shepherds that caused our war upon the sheep!
I do confess that for a long time I was one of these people who said—publicly and repeatedly, on this blog—that Ukraine should perhaps sacrifice some of its eastern territory for the sake of ending the war. This was not, however, because I ever thought that Putin's war aims were justified. The written record will show I never had the least sympathy for his disingenuous assertions that he was only making a "preemptive strike"—which were no better than other notorious uses of that abysmal doctrine.
The reason why I suggested compromise in the war was not because I thought there was any legitimacy to Putin's claims—but simply because I have a bias in general toward peace. In a conflict over land or law, I tend to think that human lives weigh heavier in the balance than mere abstractions such as the former.
As I've lived to see our country actually sell out our Ukrainian allies, however—something I scarcely thought possible three years ago—I've had cause to revisit that theory of mine.
For one thing, I understand much better now, after witnessing Putin's butchery, exactly why Ukrainians might be reluctant to simply sacrifice large numbers of their own citizens to perpetual life (or rapid death) under Putin's thumb. Given the war crimes he has committed in occupied territories, it turns out to be a bigger sacrifice than I had at first realized to simply dedicate large parts of the country to his rule going forward. The issue is not actually, then, one of mere land. It is one of people, after all.
But even if it were a question of mere land and territory, there is also the problem of appeasement to consider. If Putin is rewarded for his aggression—if he realizes that he can launch a pretextual invasion, and walk away at the end of it with more territory—then he will obviously have an incentive to keep doing the same. Indeed, this has been his pattern so far. Why would he not simply keep it up? The jurist Rudolf von Jhering, in his great essay, The Struggle for Law, makes the point eloquently:
[O]ne nation, let us suppose, has, contrary to law, taken from the other a square mile of barren, worthless land. Shall the latter go to war? [...] What signifies a square mile of barren land compared with a war which costs the lives of thousands, brings sorrow and misery into the palace and the hut, eats up millions and millions of the treasure of the state, and possibly imperils its existence? What folly to make such a sacrifice for such an end!
Indeed, this was essentially my perspective on this conflict for a while. Why sacrifice so many human lives for the Donbas?
This is obviously the Trump administration's view of the war as well—at least in public. Trump was talking yesterday once again about ending the "killing fields" in the war. He was again accusing Ukraine, the victim—rather than Putin, the aggressor, who refuses to back off, and who is the only party to the conflict who keeps declining to enter a ceasefire—of being the intransigent one who is prolonging the war by an unwillingness to concede.
Yet von Jhering has a fundamentally unanswerable rejoinder to this argument:
[N]o one would wish to give to the nation [this] advice [....] Everyone feels that a nation which looked upon such a violation of law in silence would have signed its death sentence. From a nation which allowed itself to be deprived of a square mile of territory by its neighbor, unpunished, the rest also would be taken, until nothing remained to it to call its own, and it had ceased to exist as a state[.] (Lalor trans. throughout.)
Indeed, that is Ukraine's fundamental point—and their fundamental fear. They of course rightly also wish to avoid condemning millions of their own citizens to permanent life under Putin's autocracy—especially when he has already made a point of killing civilians, torturing prisoners, and abducting Ukrainian children. But they also rightly do not wish to allow him to simply steal their territory unpunished—because if they did, what message would that send to the future?
Von Jhering is surely right: the message it would send, if Ukraine capitulates unilaterally now, is that the rest of their territory is up for grabs too. Even that all of Eastern Europe is there for Putin's taking. It would reinforce his core narrative that these are all vassal states who belong to Russia's natural and proper "sphere of influence," and who therefore have no rights that he need respect.
And indeed, as von Jhering wrote: a nation which accepted such a notion without a fight "would have signed its own death sentence." That is why Ukraine never will accept the unilateral deprivation of their territory in order to appease unprovoked aggression.
The United States should never accept it either—as, indeed, we swore not to, earlier, when we pledged never to recognize the illegal occupation and annexation of Crimea. But, alas, that does not seem to be the way this administration is trending. The Trump White House appears inclined to play the part of the shepherds in the story, and simply wash their hands of the whole thing. Indeed, they said multiple times this week that they are poised to "walk away" from the conflict entirely.
And the fable already told us exactly what will happen when they do so...
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