A Possible Cease-Fire and the Putin Question

The other side of the Ukraine War ledger

Last week I offered an extended apologia (in “Munich 1938 vs. Munich 2025”) for what appears to be Trump’s grand strategy to reset American foreign policy wholesale, and reinvigorate European responsibility, through such shocking steps as Vice President Vance’s Munich speech, and Trump’s rough handling of Ukraine. Now that Ukraine has agreed to a 30-day cease fire pending negotiations with Russia, the ball is in Putin’s court.

And thus it is a good time to work the other side of the street, so to speak. First is the question of Ukraine itself. Many critics of our policy think Ukraine is corrupt, or in any case of little significance to American national interests. Second is the question of Putin. Some critics of the scene, such as Tucker Carlson, take a sympathetic view of Putin, while some think Putin’s territorial demands have merit. Let us take these in turn.

In my Munich piece, I cited Angelo Codevilla, from his posthumous book America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams, in support of the view that our foreign policy elite is corrupt and ideologically moronic, and has led to the enfeeblement of Europe. However, on the question of Ukraine, his thoughts (written before the launch of the all-out war in 2022, keep in mind), are worth taking in as well:

Russia effectively controls Ukraine’s eastern end and has exposed the West’s incapacity to interfere militarily in the former Soviet Empire. . .

As always, Ukraine is where Russia’s domestic and foreign policy intersect. With Ukraine (and the Baltic states), Russia is potentially a world power. Without it, much less. Post-Soviet Russia’s horizons have shrunk because the 20^th century’s events forever severed Ukraine and the Baltic states’ peoples from Russia. . . The [Clinton, Bush, & Obama] administration’s dishonest incompetence [in Russia relations] earned contempt from all sides. . . [It was] a mess of appeasement, provocation, insult, and enmity without much of an international point on either side—another lesson in the consequences of incompetence mixed with self-indulgence at the highest levels.

But what about America’s perspective and stake in the region?

Ukraine is the greatest practical limitation on Russia’s ambitions. Its independence is very much a U.S. interest, but it is beyond our capacity to secure. [John Quincy] Adams would see U.S. relations with Russia with regard to Ukraine as resembling U.S. relations with Europe and Latin America 200 years ago. Then, Adams knew that the Europeans realized (or that experience would force them to realize) that they could not control any part of the Western Hemisphere. By stating America’s intention to guard its hemispheric interests while forswearing meddling in European affairs, he encouraged the Europeans to think and act reasonably. . .

Adams would not hide the fact that U.S. policy, implemented by ordinary diplomacy, is to foster the Baltic States’, and especially Ukraine’s, independence. But he would know and sincerely convey to Russia that their independence depends on themselves, and that he regards it as counterproductive to try making them into American pawns or even to give the impression that they may be. He would trust in a Ukraine that had stopped longing for the borders Stalin had fixed for it in 1927 and Khrushchev augmented in 1954, in a Ukraine retrenching into its Western identity (as, for example, by asserting its Orthodox church’s independence from Russia’s), and that it is standing firmly on its own feet. He would trust in Russia’s actual acceptance of its inability ever again to control this Ukraine. This would be Adams’s Ukraine policy. [Emphasis added.]

If you approach the current moment in a calm frame of mind, Adams’s imaginary Ukraine policy sounds a lot like . . . Trump’s Ukraine policy. It is my understanding that Angelo’s book was actually produced at the request of the first Trump Administration, looking for a coherent account of an America First foreign policy. If you squint the right way, suddenly some of Trump’s seemingly shocking moves and statements toward both Ukraine and Russia make more sense.

So now the ball is in Putin’s court. I’m skeptical he will bargain in good faith, or that if he does reach an agreement, that he will honor it. To the people like Tucker Carlson who find Putin to be misunderstood or perhaps even a worthy leader, we should take in something the late Herbert Meyer, who was a senior aide to William Casey in the CIA in the Reagan years and who had some of the most sagacious insights into the dynamics of the late Cold War (most especially the decrepitude of the Soviet Union), wrote 10 years ago about Putin over at The American Thinker:

If there is any lesson to be learned from studying European history -- or from growing up in a Brooklyn school yard as opposed to, say, attending the most exclusive prep school in Hawaii -- it’s that thugs like Putin don’t stop because they’ve been punished or because they see the error of their ways. Thugs have a high tolerance for pain, and they are incapable of changing their behavior. They keep going until someone takes them out -- permanently -- with a knockout punch.

That’s why the objective of our sanctions strategy should be to get the Russians who’ve been keeping Putin in power, or tolerating Putin in power, to throw that knockout punch.

The key to forcing these Russians to act, and thus to making the sanctions strategy succeed, will be to rapidly widen the gap that already exists between their financial interests and Putin’s political ambitions. Russia’s corporate business leaders don’t really care about Ukraine, or about Putin’s lunatic dream of re-creating the old Romanov Empire. They fight in boardrooms, not on battlefields; they would rather launch a hostile takeover bid for Kaiser Aluminum than for Kiev. Russia’s oligarchs are among the most pushy, self-indulgent, thoroughly unpleasant bunch of billionaires in history; the old phrase nouveau riche doesn’t come close to evoking their ostentatious behavior. All they care about are their yachts, their private jets, and the blonde-bombshell-shopoholic mistresses they stash at their multi-million-dollar condos in London, New York, and on the Riviera, and like to flash around at swishy restaurants. . .

Are they really willing to give up all this for -- Donetsk? Or for Riga, or Tallinn? Are you kidding?

That’s why the sanctions will work if the president and his European counterparts will keep tightening the screws; if they keep making commerce more difficult for Russia’s serious business executives, for instance by blocking their access to capital, and if they keep making life more miserable for Russia’s playboy oligarchs, for instance by canceling their credit cards and denying landing rights to their private jets. And if the president and European leaders keep telling these Russians -- bluntly and publicly -- that all this will end the moment Vladimir Putin leaves the Kremlin for good.

Sanctions and the seizure of the megayachts of Russian oligarchs hasn’t moved the needle very much, but perhaps the carrot of relaxed sanctions if a peace deal is struck or the threat of tougher sanctions might change the scene. Above all Putin can’t be trusted.

As this matter goes forward from here, two things to look for are whether, in the event Russia refuses to make a peace deal, we are willing to impose—and enforce—significant additional sanctions on Russia, and secondly, whether the Europeans, suddenly more sober because Trump has alarmed and shamed them, will do so as well. As we learned recently, since the Ukraine War started in 2022, Europe has spent more to buy Russian energy (and other goods) than it has sent in aid to Ukraine. Nor has Europe curtailed its exports to Russia; they have cheated on a massive scale, trans-shipping through third countries, as you can see blow. To all those European nations attacking Trump for supposedly “selling out” Ukraine, they can just shut-the-you-know-what up.