Since Vladimir Putin’s brutal and unprovoked attack upon Ukraine more than two years ago, America has helped defend the Ukrainians from annihilation. With the election of Donald Trump, the U.S. foreign policy is at a crossroads. Will we support people who have demonstrated that they could repel the Russians, with military aid, and back them joining NATO?
Or will our leaders turn their backs on Ukraine, wash our hands of the matter like Pontius Pilate, and allow Russia to slaughter the people whose only crime was being Ukrainian, allowing Putin to fulfill his long-held dream of rebuilding the Soviet Union?
There are those who have good reason to doubt that Donald Trump is the man to stand up for Ukraine, for an independent American foreign policy… not one that supports Putin, either from admiration or from fear of the ex-KGB agent whose great skill seems to involve killing political rivals and smashing domestic dissent. There is no shortage of those people in America, or throughout the world, dazzled or cowed by Putin.
But here’s where incoming President Donald Trump can benefit from defending Ukraine, standing up to some in his party, as well as a few on the Left who mistake peace for quiet.
1) Putin is not America’s friend, nor Trump’s friend. Russian media is gleefully trumpeting that Trump is “destroying America.” One cannot make America “great again” by being a sycophant.
2) Trump does desire a “Nobel Peace Prize,” but he won’t get it by selling out Ukraine with a cheap deal that one can easily see will lead to a future massacre of a people. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize for the Doha Deal with the leader of the Taliban. That terrorist-supporting organization later used that ill-fated agreement signed in Doha to crush the Afghan government and repress Afghan people, as Amnesty International reports.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain didn’t receive a Nobel Peace Prize for the Munich Pact, because most people recognize that peace does not mean appeasement.
Currently, there are those in the GOP who support a plan where Ukraine is forced to surrender territory, and never be allowed to join NATO. This would set the stage for a second Russia-Ukraine War that would enable Putin to finish his plans for a bloody annexation. Should that happen, everyone would know who was responsible for such a Holocaust, no matter what propagandists in Russia and America would trumpet.
3) Trump could make his mark in another way. In Kuwait, they have a statue dedicated to President George H. W. Bush for rescuing the country from Saddam Hussein in Operation Desert Storm. My students and I used to meet in Parque Kennedy in Costa Rica, where a green bust of President John F. Kennedy stood for his support of the Alliance for Progress plan which helped protect democracy in Latin America. There’s one in Peru too.
Trump may never get a Nobel Peace Prize, but I bet he would love to be memorialized in the center of Kiev. He can get that with strong support for Ukraine, shutting down critics who claim that he’s Putin’s puppet, forging a foreign policy that doesn’t cower from tyrants abroad but stands up to aggression against innocent people.