Slow-Motion Munich

 Ever since Trump came back into office, people have been warning that it seems like he is planning to betray Ukraine. But, no matter how inevitable it seemed that Trump would eventually pull a Neville Chamberlain and cut a deal with Putin to hand our ally over to the country that was invading them, the decisive moment never quite came. Instead, Trump would at times appear to suddenly and radically undermine our relationship with Ukraine; but then, the next day, he would backpedal. And so the cycle would continue. 

For all we know, Trump's remarks yesterday may not have been his final word on the subject either. Mere days from now, he may patch things up with Zelensky yet again and pivot to offering another round of halfhearted praise for our ally. Whatever Trump may do from day to day, however, the larger pattern is unmistakable at this point: he really is walking away from Ukraine, by whatever fits and starts. He may be acting less precipitously than Neville Chamberlain did in 1938—but this is still a Munich in slow motion. 

Consider Trump's actions over the last few days. He has already ended most forms of direct U.S. military aid to Ukraine. He has explored a variety of business deals with Russia and made no secret of his personal desire to penetrate the Russian market. On Friday, he announced a major deal with Putin to sell Russia's diesel—offering Putin major sanctions relief in exchange for no concessions whatsoever from him on the other side. Putin's government didn't even commit to restart peace negotiations. Then, Trump proceeded yesterday to blame Zelensky for the war.

Zelensky's government has now repeatedly offered to agree to an immediate ceasefire along current battle lines. Putin is the one who has refused to say yes. Ukraine has offered extremely bitter concessions for the sake of peace. Putin has never made remotely clear what he would tolerate as an acceptable end to hostilities, since it seems obvious his real goal remains the total dismantling of the Ukrainian state—something Ukrainian people cannot accept unless at the cost of their survival. 

Yet, Trump never seems to blame Putin or put any of the onus on him for ending his invasion. Instead, he blames Zelensky for getting invaded. He said, of Zelensky, "he wants to make problems for the world," and "he could have had many deals, and for some reason he never does." What "deal" could Zelensky have agreed to, at any point in this conflict, that would not have involved Russian tanks rolling through Kyiv and his own neck in a noose, or in front of a firing squad? Trump is offering a totally fantastical version of the conflict. 

The reason why he does this is fairly clear: Trump is tired of the inconvenience of Ukraine's death throes. He wants to get around to making a profit with Russia. He sees in Putin's regime a potential business partner who can help him bring down the price of diesel in an election year. If that means that Ukraine has to be strangled out of existence, then why can't the latter just hurry up and die already? 

As E.E. Cummings mordantly put it, in his poem about the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956—and the tepid response of the other great powers to this blatant act of aggression: be quiet little hungary / and do as you are bid / a good kind bear is angary / we fear for the quo pro quid.

As Arthur Koestler once wrote of the mentality of Munich—which he saw reflected likewise in the Western response to Russian expansionism in Eastern Europe after the war as well: there was in both cases "the same impatience with the annoying victim who refuses to be murdered in silence, and the same desire not to antagonize the aggressor; there were the same symptoms of uneasy conscience and the same veiled admissions that small nations and big principles have sometimes to be sacrificed in the interests of peace between the great powers." 

A blogger I follow wrote on his Substack last year that: "a good friend and fellow pundit texted me to say, in so many words, that if the best pro-Ukraine voices can do in response is shout 'Munich!' a few more times then they deserve to lose." But perhaps the reason people keep making this comparison to Munich is because it stares anyone with a knowledge of history in the face. Trump, in his Russian diesel deal is playing exactly the same game that Chamberlain did at Munich: namely, that of "save my skin and damn my conscience," as Louis MacNeice put it. 

Of course, Ukraine is not even the first Munich Trump has pulled off, in less than two years back in office. He also betrayed our allies in Venezuela's pro-democracy movement, encouraging them to back his lawless venture to depose the country's head of state—and then proceeding to back Maduro's own chosen successor while she continues to cement authoritarian rule, this time as head of a U.S.-backed quisling government. He betrayed the people of Iran too—encouraging them to "rise up," and then repeatedly leaving them to be slaughtered. 

Trump's move here is rather like Stalin's during the Warsaw uprising, when he first encouraged the revolt, brought the Red Army up to the very gates of the city, while the Polish underground resistance was putting their lives on the line—and then denied any aid, so that the Nazi butchers could relieve him of a dangerously independent-minded ally. As Dwight Macdonald described Stalin's goal: "he saw a chance to let the Nazis do his dirty work for him. Every Warsaw fighter killed by the Germans was one less for his own firing squads to liquidate." 

Trump, it is clear, has been playing essentially the same game with our allies around the world. He first encouraged the Venezuelan opposition, so long as they were useful to him in undermining Maduro. But now that Maduro is gone, Trump turns to his own top lieutenants in order to betray the Venezuelan pro-democracy movement. A genuine democracy in Venezuela, after all, might prove independent of U.S. control. Trump can't have that. 

It is a profound expression of human perversity that the American far-left—of the "Red Star" faction of the DSA, e.g.—as well as "horseshoe theory" branches of the far-right—have gotten dangerously interested in reviving the reputation of the Soviet Union at the very time when both our own government and Putin's are recapitulating all of the worst crimes and betrayals of the Stalinist regime. 

Putin's government has never been more unsympathetic than it is today—yet its popularity among a younger generation of Americans, who seem to make up a growing "Red-Brown alliance" between the far-left and far-right, has never been greater. 

In case we needed more reasons than the bombing of civilians and forced child abductions in Ukraine to loathe Putin's regime—he handed us yet another one this past week. Viz. the incident in Siberia in which plague bacteria may have escaped containment in one of a network of germ warfare facilities that Russia reportedly maintains, in violation of international agreements. 

For years, Putin justified his invasion of Ukraine with false propaganda accusing the latter of housing "bioweapons" facilities. Our own government and Trumpified intelligence agencies, under the captive influence of people like Tulsi Gabbard, sought to lend an air of credibility to these unsubstantiated claims. 

It now appears that Putin's propaganda game here was simply the old trick of accusing the opposition of doing exactly whatever it is you are doing yourselves. In reality, it now seems, the Russian government, not the Ukrainian one, was the one conducting ongoing germ warfare research in contravention of international standards against bioweapons. 

As Edmund Wilson wrote of the bacteriological warfare research happening on both sides of the Cold War half a century ago: "The artificial cultivation of [...] epidemics, after the centuries when humanity has suffered from them and when cures and controls have at last been found, must be the most macabre irony of medical history[.]"

It should escape no one's attention that the same Trump administration that now blames Ukraine for getting invaded by Putin in the first place is also the one that appointed people with a long history of echoing Russian propaganda talking points—including but not limited to bogus claims about Ukrainian "bioweapons facilities"—to key supervisory roles in the intelligence community. 

As Dwight Macdonald wrote in a 1948 essay: "Compare, for example, 'America First' (1938) with the Wallace campaign (1948). The historical situations are similar: an 'unsatisfied', expanding young empire in conflict with the older, sated imperialisms of USA and England; totalitarianism against democratic capitalism; native movements which pretend to be seeking world peace, and enroll their mass following on that basis, but actually advocate a policy of appeasement of the imperialist competitor, whose leaders are, furthermore, not too unsympathetic with that competitor's government." 

Does it take any imagination at all to see that "America First" (2024) is simply the latest instance in the same series inaugurated by "America First" (1938)? Here, once again, we had a political movement that ran on a slogan of "no more wars," and did indeed "enroll their mass following on that basis" (see Vance's and Gabbard's repeated claims that a vote for Trump meant a vote against foreign interventions). And lo, Trump has started several wars at a faster clip than any of his predecessors. 

It becomes increasingly obvious that what Trump's team meant by "no more wars" was really not that they would refrain from bombing countries in the Middle East and Africa and Latin America (they have proceeded to bomb all these places with gusto). All they meant was that they would gradually align U.S. foreign policy with the goals of Russian expansionism in Eastern Europe. All they were really advocating, that is to say, is "a policy of appeasement of the imperialist competitor," and this administration's leaders are indeed, we must say, "not too unsympathetic with that competitor's government." 

Of course, the fact that Ukraine is fighting a defensive war for its life doesn't mean we should approve of everything it does in pursuit of survival. There is no excuse for Ukraine's terror bombing of civilian warehouses in Russia—no matter how much we may sympathize with the desperation and hopelessness about the possibility of reaching any end to the conflict that provoke it. The fact that Russia routinely commits far worse atrocities against Ukrainian civilians does not give our allies the right to bend the laws of warfare in retaliation. 

But even if we must condemn Ukraine's actions in this regard, we should not fall into that habit (and it's a temptation to which I myself am particularly prone) of what Julien Benda called "mystic pacifism" or of the "frenzy of impartiality"—that frenzy of the French writer who, Benda reports, "having to judge between two fighting nations one of which had attacked the other contrary to all its pledges while the other was only defending itself, could do nothing but intone 'I have a horror of war' and condemn[...] them both equally." (Alidington trans.) 

We have to keep always in mind that there is a real and unbridgeable moral chasm between Russia's expansionist and aggressive war aims in this conflict and Ukraine's merely defensive ones. Putin did indeed attack Ukraine, without provocation, and in violation of all Russia's prior pledges to respect Ukraine's sovereignty (including when Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons after the dissolution of the USSR), and we must never forget this. 

Moreover, we must also recognize that the U.S. government bears a significant share of blame for forcing Ukraine into such desperate and morally objectionable measures in the first place. Our government's gradually winnowing of aid, its repeated attempts to undermine Ukraine's leadership, and its total and complete failure to exert any pressure on Putin to end the invasion, all mean that Ukraine is running out of options if it wants to survive. 

The blood of innocent Russian warehouse workers is therefore on Trump's hands, as is the blood of the twenty innocent Ukrainian civilians, including three children, who were incinerated by Russian bombs yesterday in Zaporizhzhia—just a day after Trump announced his oil deal with Putin.

Behold the consequences of our slow-motion Munich!