Betrayed by Immoderation

 Yesterday, Trump appears to have moved from tongue-lashing Ukraine to actively trying to undermine their efforts to defend themselves. He has already pulled most forms of military aid from the country. Now, he seems to have gone even further, apparently blocking Ukraine from a key Pentagon platform for intelligence sharing (though U.S. officials deny anything has formally changed). 

In the past few days, Trump delivered a major form of diesel sanctions relief to Russia—overriding the clear intent of Congress in their recent bipartisan sanctions legislation—in exchange for no concessions whatsoever from Putin. Trump proceeded to blame our Ukrainian allies for being invaded. He also exerted verbal pressure on Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian energy infrastructure. 

Ukraine complied with these demands. Putin, for his part, proceeded to ignore Trump's proclaimed "energy ceasefire" by continuing to attack Ukraine's power supply, causing sweeping blackouts. Then, instead of punishing Putin for violating the ceasefire, the Trump administration appears to have punished Ukraine—even though they are the ones still abiding by the ceasefire's terms. 

It's hard to understand the psychology of someone who still thinks Putin wants peace at this point, in spite of all the evidence of one's senses. But, let us recall, effectively the same thing happened in the 1930s. 

I was reading A.L. Rowse's classic personal account of Neville Chamberlain's foreign policy, Appeasement: A Study in Political Decline (the book has a slightly different title in the UK). Rowse is typically gossipy and self-serving in his account (per usual, Rowse was always right; everyone else was always wrong); but this short book makes for a powerful critique nonetheless. 

Rowse charts the full progression of events by which anyone with eyes to see and ears to listen ought to have known the true nature of Hitler's intentions: his 1932 election, his repression of domestic opposition, the Night of Long Knives, the militarization of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the Sudetenland agitation, Munich, the occupation of Prague, the invasion of Poland, the fall of France....

How could anyone watching this sequence of events not get the message that Hitler was intent on war and conquest? Yet, at every turn, influential elements of British opinion insisted otherwise.  We can "reach an understanding with Hitler," they said. "The peace of the world depends on our getting into right relations with Germany," one of the appeasers tells Rowse. "Germany wants equality, not war." 

Over the past decades, Putin has essentially followed the same sequence. He had his own protracted "Night of Long Knives" in which he steadily eliminated all potential forms of domestic opposition or rivals for power through a series of assassinations and suspicious deaths: Boris Nemtsov (d. 2015), Yevgeny Prigozhin (d. 2023), Alexei Navalny (d. 2024), the list goes on. 

Putin had his own version of the Anschluss in Crimea in 2014. He had his own Sudetenland crisis in his disingenuous posturing about Russian-speaking minorities in the Donbas. And—at last—he had his own occupation of Prague when he defied the predictions of all his Western apologists by staging an outright full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. 

Nevertheless, no matter how many times Putin has confirmed the worst suspicions of all his critics, one still hears ghosts of the same appeasement arguments from the 1930s. Russia, we are told, doesn't want war or conquest, it just wants a "security perimeter." It just wants to ensure that its nearest neighbor does not enter NATO. 

But here we are, four years into Putin's attack on Ukraine, and he could long since have gotten his guarantee of no NATO membership for Ukraine or even a few new Russian-occupied territories in the Donbas that he illegally seized and annexed. Yet, he continues to press his war to the hilt anyway. Apparently, conquering parts of the Donbas is not enough "living space" for Putin's Reich. 

As Rowse quotes a fellow British critic of appeasement in the 1930s: "I thought that after Hitler had reoccupied the Rhineland he had admitted that Germany had achieved Gleichberechtigung [equality of rights]. But now I read that she has still not got it." 

So too, the "realist" international relations theorists told us at the start of Putin's invasion that he didn't want war, he just wanted "security" and a "golden bridge" so that he could claim victory. Now, U.S. negotiators have effectively offered him all that and more. He is not even interested in re-engaging in peace talks to get it. 

As with Hitler in the 1930s, no matter how much territory Putin conquers and steals, the goal post of what will constitute an adequate "security perimeter" can just keep getting moved. 

Ultimately, though, this same tactic proved a mistake for Hitler—because it made it impossible for his British apologists to make excuses for him indefinitely. If Hitler had managed to stay content with simply annexing parts of the Sudetenland and walked away from war, the appeasers could continue to treat Munich as a triumph of diplomacy over force. 

"If Hitler had the decency to hand back a simulacrum of independence to the Czechs, he would have had the British government eating out of his hand," writes Rowse; "he could have gotten away with Danzig, without opposition; he could have had Poland at his mercy[.]" 

So too, if Putin had just taken a "golden bridge" offer or two, Trump could hail himself as a great peacemaker. Putin could have walked off with the territory he now occupies (at the cost of relentless horror and despotism for its Ukrainian inhabitants) in the country's east. He could have obtained a permanent ban on NATO membership for Ukraine. 

All he would have had to offer in exchange for such a sweetheart deal would be some "simulacrum of independence," to borrow Rowse's phrase, for Ukraine. He just would have had to accept some limited U.S. security guarantees for what remains of Ukrainian territory and some recognition in principle of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity. 

But no, he "will not, he must still / Wrest his neighbor to his will." (Housman) In truth, he "wanted not a mere revision of frontiers: he wanted the lot," as Rowse wrote of Hitler. To borrow a line from the poet John Davidson: "If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take, / He would take it, ask for more, and eat them all."

In the end, writes Rowse, "evil men are betrayed by immoderation more than anything." We have "reason to be grateful," in Rowse's telling, that Hitler's "greed and immoderation overreached themselves." 

So too, Putin has in the end betrayed himself by immoderation. He has resisted all of the efforts of his own apologists and appeasers in the West to give him what he wants. As another character in Rowse's study puts it: he "won't take yes for an answer." This has forced Putin's would-be appeasers in the White House to put themselves in an ever-more morally untenable position as well. 

Such that they now appear to be all but fighting Putin's war for him...