Peace In Our Time, Again
Well, Donald Trump has staged another of his great summits with a tyrant, in which the only clear purpose, as usual, was to legitimize and normalize the tyrant’s brutality while belittling The United States of America and marginalizing her Western “allies.” This time, most impressively — if you agree with me that unmitigated gall and civilizational suicide on a grand scale can be impressive in their way — Trump invited Vladimir Putin to meet on American soil, ordered the U.S. military to lay out the red carpet for the red menace, and clapped for Putin like a clown while accepting the humiliation of waiting alone on that carpet until the diva from the Kremlin was good and ready to descend from his airplane and deign to offer his hand to the slavering puppy who was dutifully acting out his role in this bit of reality TV agitprop.
Neville Chamberlain may have made himself one of history’s most elaborately decorated dupes, but at least his infamous meeting with Hitler, in which he carved up a sovereign third party nation in the name of achieving “peace in our time,” actually resulted in a piece of paper signed by the tyrant — that is, in something tangible which could later be cited as evidence against that tyrant. Trump got absolutely nothing in Alaska, mainly because he insisted on nothing. Putin, on the other hand, used Trump, as usual, to claw back in one perfectly planned photo opportunity all the global credibility that he had sacrificed in recent years, all the optics of being a legitimate “world leader” with a right to sit at the table with his “peers.”
Which brings us to the ultimate absurdity of Trump’s clapping seal routine for his master over the weekend, namely this: Chamberlain was fooled by Hitler before Hitler sent in the troops and started dropping bombs. That is, there was still some hope of averting war, and some faith (at least among the terminally foolish) that Hitler might accept a sweet deal in exchange for non-aggression. Trump, by contrast, is pulling the same appeasement-at-all-cost routine — though not in benighted good faith like Chamberlain, but in cynical self-promotion like the born carnival barker he is — three and a half years after Putin sent in the troops and started dropping bombs. After he had purposefully destroyed massive amounts of Ukraine’s infrastructure, ordered his military to engage in mass rapes and summary executions to instill maximum terror in the civilian population, and systematically abducted untold thousands of Ukrainian children, for which he has been formally charged with war crimes and had a warrant issued for his arrest — a warrant which Trump formally and pointedly scoffed at by inviting this war criminal to meet on American soil, rolling out the red carpet for him as though he were a particularly worthy foreign dignitary, rather than a particularly hostile opponent of the civilized world. To be clear, even an evil man might be given such honorable treatment as a matter of diplomacy in the process of seeking to avert war; but to give him this treatment when he is, in both his own mind and Trump’s, already on the verge of succeeding in the first stage of a lawless military aggression against Europe, is beyond any rational measure of diplomatic pride-swallowing. This is legitimizing the tyrant’s ongoing actions, in effect giving him a presidential pardon for his war crimes even while he continues to commit those crimes.
There is nothing new under the sun here. No great insights or revelations. Trump works for Putin. Putin controls and manipulates Trump. Zelensky remains on the outside, reduced to a desperate beneficiary of whatever is left over from Trump’s mercenary grifting, as he sells weapons to Europe in order that Europe may then donate them to Ukraine. By the standards Trump has set over the past ten years, and greatly reinforced over the last few days, Neville Chamberlain was a great hero of unblinkered negotiation and rational judgment in the cause of freedom and civilization. At the very least Chamberlain did not despise freedom and civilization.
Putin got what he wanted, which is one more step towards permanent control of most of Ukraine, and respectful acknowledgement from the United States of his desire for more favorable conditions for his future efforts to swallow up the rest. Trump got what he wanted too, of course, which was whatever Putin wanted, though with an “America First” sticker on it to fool the perpetually fooled. And if both parties in a negotiation between a tyrant and his appeaser got what they wanted, it does not take any great insight to understand who did not get what they wanted: those who were not present, namely the representatives of the victims of the unprovoked aggression, along with all who still have the taste for civilization and decency.
