Depth Perception
Donald Trump says that Volodymyr Zelensky is the primary obstacle to peace in Ukraine. Elon Musk, in one of those pot-calling-kettle-black moments that have defined the Trump era of the Republican Party, has called Democratic Senator Mark Kelly “a traitor” for daring to disagree with the Trump-Vance-Musk deliverance of American foreign policy to the Kremlin, and in an ant-calling-lion-little moment, replied to doubts about the reliability of Musk’s Starlink service in Ukraine — which Poland is paying for — from Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, with the words, “Be quiet, small man,” a personal insult worthy of Trumpworld, though falling short of even Trump’s very low standard of “wit.” And now Sikorski’s wee American counterpart Marco Rubio, who used to be able to do a semi-plausible impersonation of a Tea Party conservative, is playing Trumpian moral equivalency games by insisting that the Ukrainians must make territorial concessions as a matter of fair play in negotiating with the tyrant who invaded their country.
“The most important thing that we have to leave here with is a strong sense that Ukraine is prepared to do difficult things, like the Russians are going to have to do difficult things to end this conflict or at least pause it in some way, shape or form,” he told reporters, according to the New York Times.
If you want to understand the meaning and purpose of moral equivalency reasoning in the most straightforward way, just consider the implications of Rubio’s insistence that Ukraine must be “prepared to do difficult things, like the Russians are going to have to do difficult things” to end the war. Let us compare what kind of “difficult things” the Trump administration is expecting each of these parties to do. Ukraine must cede large swaths of its sovereign territory to Russian control forever, merely because Russia has demanded it with violence; and Russia, for its part, must be willing to accept these large swaths of Ukraine’s sovereign territory which it has illegally and brutally invaded, without forcibly demanding control over all the rest of Ukraine, at least for the time being.
If a mugger beat you to a pulp to steal your wallet, would you consider it a fair resolution of the conflict to agree to give up your wallet in exchange for the mugger agreeing not to continue beating you unto death?
Many people are pointing out these days that the Trump administration is reversing America’s founding principles, not to mention the basic tenets of Western morality, by openly adopting the position that peace bought at the price of freedom and justice still counts as a proper peace. This new principle, adopted as foreign policy and taken to its logical extremes — which is exactly where Donald Trump and his bootlickers are explicitly taking it — means that tyrannical hegemony, the systematic sacrifice of all fights to all thugs, is the legitimate and proper aim of international politics. Now who, which is to say what kind of people, would adopt such a principle?
Two kinds: absolute thugs and absolute cowards. I leave it to the reader to decipher which individuals in the current scene fall into which category. It ought to be noted here, however, and this is becoming a significant category problem in moral judgment, that as a civilization we are desperately in need of much deeper barrels, in order to be able to use the old phrase “bottom of the barrel” without seeming to understate the depth of corruption, and the extent of diminution, that we are witnessing.
