Can you defend Trump on Ukraine?

Some on the Right are looking past the craziness. But do they have a point?

Trump: A very stable genius? (picture: DonkeyHotey)

The best argument in favour of Donald Trump’s position on Ukraine goes something like this. Set aside the bizarre claims about Volodymyr Zelensky being a dictator, starting the war and stealing American dollars and the strategic picture makes sense.

The conflict, which veered so dramatically back and forth in the early days — remember the Russian convoy getting stuck in the mud? — has clearly ossified. Putin keeps feeding men into the meat grinder, including North Koreans. Kyiv, meanwhile, is able to hold the line but at great human and economic cost.

If true victory was the goal of the war, the Nato powers would have given Zelensky the tools to finish the job. Instead, they sent him enough weapons to prevent his country from being overrun by the Russians but not enough to secure the peace; the Joe Biden administration led a policy to prevent its weapons being used to attack Russian soil, which made the current status quo inevitable.

Given that a favourable end to the war has never been on the table, is it really humane to keep fuelling the flames at a low level, costing thousands of lives with no clear goal in sight? Sometimes — as when fighting an enemy with limited resources or a finite window of time for operations — attritional warfare can be a strategic choice. In this case, however, the war is simply stumbling blindly on.

Tim Stanley made this argument very cogently in the Telegraph this week. He wrote: “To those who reject Donald Trump’s approach to Ukraine, I ask: what is your plan? More fighting? More death? Perhaps another summit – cocktails with Klaus – at which Western leaders can pledge their support for a cause they were never quite prepared to pay for.”

This means concessions to secure a ceasefire. I get that. As much as commentators like me wanted Kyiv to be given the support necessary to finish the job, that didn’t happen in the real world. It may even be true, as historian Stephen Kotkin argued, that stopping Putin would be impossible without taking Moscow.

Moreover, given that I (tentatively, depending on the detail) looked favourably upon Trump’s Gaza intervention, it’s tempting to give him the benefit of the doubt on Ukraine and see this latest episode as an expression of his “very stable genius”.

But I don’t buy it. Here’s why.