Time for Trump To End Ukraine Conflict by Boosting Ukraine’s Ability To Wage War, Forcing Russia To Negotiate

 Conrad Black writes:

As events in Iran confirm, sometimes the only way to end a conflict is to escalate it judiciously.

It is time to force an end to the Ukraine War. President Trump has had a spectacularly successful relaunch. Practically his entire fiscal and social program has been enacted in the proverbially Big Bill, Iran’s nuclear military program has been shattered, and the president has made it clear that if further overflights are necessary to keep it in that condition he will not hesitate to order them.

Almost all of America’s tariff relationships are under review and the trade imbalance has been substantially reduced, while inflation and unemployment have declined. The fingers of the Obama-Biden green terror have been forcibly removed from the throat of the American economy.

The one area that has been a conspicuous disappointment, and is more or less constantly waved in the president’s face because of his overconfident promise to end it quickly, is the Ukraine War. Prior to Mr. Trump’s inauguration, it appeared reasonable that he would be able to agree with President Putin on what Moscow could take from the former borders of Ukraine, provided it was now understood that Ukraine was a legitimate sovereign country with the right to exist entirely independently of Russia, which would no longer be subject to debate. 

If Mr. Putin did not agree to reasonable terms, it would be a fairly straightforward matter of simply putting more powerful and longer-range weapons in the hands of Ukraine, so that they could familiarize the public of Russia with the war to a comparable extent that Mr. Putin had inflicted it upon the civilian population of Ukraine. Once that point had been reached, it was widely presumed, including by me, that it would be again a straightforward, if perhaps somewhat brusque matter of telling President Zelensky that this was the best he could get and he should settle for four-fifths of a loaf.

Then it would be a conceptually simple matter of assisting in the reconstruction of Ukraine from the war damage and flight of population it has endured and of preparing it for membership in the European Union. The issues at stake were extremely important: Russia’s claimed right to reassume the borders of Peter the Great or even of Stalin on the one hand, and on the other hand the rights of the Ukrainians — who, before 1991, had forged a separate nation only between 1918 and 1922 — to be a sovereign country if they wished, along with most of the other so-called republics of the late Soviet Union. 

Also at stake was the right of the Western Alliance to retain the principal elements of its great and bloodless strategic victory in the Cold War, as Ukraine was the largest single jurisdiction, along with Poland, to escape from the yoke of the Kremlin. This question also would answer the inference that had been incited by the general enfeeblement of the Biden administration that the Western Alliance was now a paper tiger and America had lost the will to attempt to exercise any influence even on the defeat of aggression in central Europe.   

Though it was uneven and fluctuated, the Western European response was in general much more robust than anyone had anticipated. With the election of a new and more purposeful government in Germany, and the recent agreement by NATO to double or even triple their national commitments to defense matters, augurs well for a level of assistance to Ukraine that will materially prevent a Russian victory. Spain, for the time being governed by a socialist eco-infatuated delusionist, is not in step but there is always at least one laggard in an alliance of 32 countries.

The surprise is Russia. This war has been a disaster for Russia. It believed, and the belief was shared by the chairman of America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, that Russia would overrun all Ukraine within a month. It has been effectively stalled for well over a year, having occupied perhaps 15 percent of Ukrainian territory, roughly corresponding to the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, which from all accounts would prefer to be in Ukraine than Russia anyway, and Mr. Putin has graciously conferred over 1 million casualties on his countrymen by his aggressive invasion of Ukraine.

Desertion rates are alarming and as the Wagner mercenaries demonstrated when they abruptly defected last year and purported to march on Moscow to considerable popular enthusiasm, Mr. Putin’s attempt to turn Ukraine into a showcase of Russian military strength has been an unmitigated fiasco.

Russia has a GDP smaller than Canada’s and while high oil prices made the sanction regime ineffectual for a time, Russia is now plunging headfirst into economic recession. The Slavonic masses of that country are legendarily patient and only resort to outright revolt infrequently, but they appear to be prodigiously unmoved by Mr. Putin’s attempt to represent this as a great patriotic war. What is almost inexplicable is why Mr. Putin has not grasped the olive branch that Mr. Trump has offered him. 

Mr. Trump has even exempted Russia from his tariff reforms, presumably in order to make a comprehensive arrangement with Russia that will give it something in Ukraine to reflect its historic interest, give Ukraine unconditional independence and sovereignty, and create the desirable conditions for inducing Russia out from under the smothering wing of Communist China and resuming its place as a Western rather than an Oriental state with opportunities for improved relations with the West. Any settlement should enable any Ukrainian to live in Russia or Ukraine, and assist them in relocating if necessary.

No serious person had uttered a word about peace in Ukraine prior to Mr. Trump but Mr. Putin has shown an inexplicable and shortsighted stubbornness. Surely the time has now come to endow the Ukrainians with the ability to make the war more intolerable for Russia on the firm understanding that as soon as Russia advances or accepts reasonable terms, the war will end.

Apart from the initial goals of securing Ukrainian independence and proving the viability of the Western alliance, and as Mr. Trump is one of the few Western statesmen to have recognized, the other important goal for the West was to help emancipate Russia from its status as a Chinese vassal, particularly as this could ultimately lead to a greater Chinese access to the unexploited resources of Siberia than would be convenient to the West.

As events in Iran have confirmed, sometimes the only way to end the conflict is to escalate it judiciously. We seem to have reached this point in Ukraine. Victory has become Mr. Trump’s habit, and Ukraine is the logical next place to demonstrate it

https://www.nysun.com/article/time-for-trump-to-end-ukraine-conflict-by-boosting-ukraines-ability-to-wage-war-forcing-russia-to-negotiate