Save My Skin and Damn My Conscience

 Okay, so let me see if I'm following along accurately here. In the last few days, Trump has announced a major form of sanctions relief for Russian diesel in exchange for no concessions whatsoever from Putin. He then proceeded to blame Zelensky for the war, even as Russian bombs killed more Ukrainian civilians. He then declared a bilateral "energy ceasefire" between the two nations, which Putin proceeded to violate within hours. 

And still, Trump does not appear to be interested in applying any pressure on Putin to end his invasion of Ukraine. Instead, all he seems to want to do is to blame Zelensky for being invaded and to unwind whatever shreds of U.S. support are still in place for Ukraine. 

"Trump is trying to save his own skin ahead of the elections," as the New York Times aptly quotes one Ukrainian activist—referring to the fact that Trump's only real purpose here seems to be to try to lower diesel prices by any means, to relieve some of the political pressure he is facing about the cost of living in the midterms (most economists, meanwhile, say that Trump's own attack on Iran is by far the biggest factor behind the recent run-up in diesel costs). 

Trump is indeed trying to save his own political skin with this diesel deal. It's the old game of "save my skin and damn my conscience," as Louis MacNeice wrote of the Munich agreement, in his Autumn Journal—that is, the pact by which the British handed the Czechs to Hitler in 1938, much as Trump appears to be handing Ukraine to Putin today. 

And negotiation wins, MacNeice goes on;

If you can call it winning, 

And here we—just as before—safe in our skins;

Glory to God for Munich.

And stocks go up and wrecks

Are salved and politicians' reputations 

Go up like Jack-in-the-Beanstalk; only the Czechs

Go down and without fighting. 

Trump is pulling a Munich toward Ukraine, that much is clear; except that really, we're way past Munich at this point. At Munich, Hitler pretended to only want to hive off the portions of Czechoslovakia that had a German-speaking population. 

In our present example, by contrast, the Trump administration more or less already offered Putin the eastern Russian-speaking provinces of Ukraine that he has already occupied, if he would rest content with that. 

As Michael Foot and others charted in their classic polemic against appeasement, Guilty Men (which I've been reading this week), "For a long time German propaganda had been directed to fomenting discontent and violence among the German minority inside Czechoslovakia. Hitler had constantly said [...] that the Sudeten Germans must be restored to the Reich." 

They go on: "On September 12, Hitler made a speech at Nuremberg saying that the German army was mobilised on the Czech frontier and that he supported the Sudeten Germans in their demand for freedom."

Putin had pulled the same stunt in 2022, making a lot of pretextual and unsubstantiated claims about the alleged persecution of Russian-speaking minorities in the Donbas, as he lined up his troops along the Ukrainian border. 

Since the Trump administration came back into office, U.S. negotiators essentially called him on his bluff. They more or less offered Putin the eastern provinces he already occupied. He could have walked off with large parts of the Donbas and claimed a victory, if any of his cant about "Russian-speaking minorities" had been remotely genuine. 

Putin had his off-ramp. He had his way to claim victory. He had his "golden bridge" and everything else that all the "realist" IR theorists were telling us he needed in order to end the war. 

And still, Putin refused. Putin is the one who rejected that sweetheart offer. He is the one who gave the game away that he was never doing any of this because he actually cared about minority populations, Russian-speaking or otherwise. All of this was pretext: just as it was for Hitler at Munich; just as it was for Russia in the early Cold War. 

As Arthur Koestler wrote in an essay from the 1940s: "The same flimsy arguments about ethnic minorities (Sudetan-Germans in the first, Ukrainians and Belorussians in the second case) were invoked to mollify an act of conquest by terror and military might."

The Ukrainians have even shown themselves willing to swallow the bitter pill of losing some of their own territory and citizens to Putin's occupation in the eastern provinces, if the U.S. would only guarantee the safety of the parts of the country that remain. 

(The British gave the Czechs the same promise at Munich, as Guilty Men recounts; that went out the door as soon as Hitler invaded. The U.S. also made the same promise to Ukraine at the dissolution of the USSR. That went the same way after Putin's tanks rolled in.)

Putin has made clear that he would not even halt his war at this obscene compromise—which would itself reward aggression and be more than enough of an international disgrace on its own terms, even if Putin had accepted it. But he didn't. He wanted more! He wanted the total dissolution and destruction of Ukraine! 

Putin is the one continuing this war. Not Zelensky. Not the Ukrainians. Not even the Russian people, who I'm sure hate the war as much as any of us, but do not have the luxury we still preserve (for now) in democratic nations of being able to vote out our rulers when they land us in ruinous and murderous wars of aggression. 

Putin is to blame for this invasion. No one else. 

It goes against my nature and instincts to attribute one-sided blame in this way. I always think that as a thoughtful person I ought to be able to see more than one side of things. 

But as Julien Benda once wrote (Aldington trans.), sometimes the "frenzy of impartiality" can be as much a distortion of the truth as a frenzy of partiality. "Between two fighting nations one of which had attacked the other contrary to all its pledges while the other was only defending itself," he wrote—there is no moral equivalence.