The obstacles are daunting, and Donald Trump has allowed as much.
“I settled six wars recently,” Trump told Fox News’s Bret Baier on Air Force One on the way to Anchorage for a summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. “The most difficult ones turned out to be easy. The easiest one, which should be this one, turned out to be the toughest.”
So much for the critics who say Trump never reflects, never introspects. Having so far settled varying degrees of armed conflict between Iran and Israel, between India and Pakistan, between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, between Azerbaijan and Armenia, between Cambodia and Thailand, between Kosovo and Serbia, and between Egypt and Ethiopia — that’s seven conflicts by my count — Trump realizes that this one, the Ukraine war, is by far the heaviest lift of all.
The president went into Friday’s summit seeking a ceasefire, but he didn’t get it. He gave a good flex in Anchorage with that B2 flyover, but instead of a ceasefire, he got some naked flattery from Putin, who confirmed what the president has maintained all along: that this war would never have started if he’d been in office instead of the Autopen President. Elections have consequences, though — especially rigged ones — and the consequences of Joe Biden’s disastrous term in office are perhaps a million dead and wounded Ukrainians and Russians. Remind your Trump-deranged friends of that statistic next time they start prattling on about Trump the Nazi, Trump the King, Trump the Oligarch.
Predictably, the self-discrediting organism otherwise known as the mainstream media has been screeching about Trump having failed to extract a ceasefire concession from Putin. Funny, but I don’t remember them ever chastising Biden for failing to secure a ceasefire during the war that started on his watch, the war that he practically encouraged with talk of a “minor incursion” and such.
Trump is doing his best. Which is better than anyone else’s best. As former CIA Russia station chief Dan Hoffman noted this morning: “This peace initiative has been entirely from the Trump administration. It’s not like Vladimir Putin came to Alaska and said, ‘Hey, President Trump, I’ve caused a million casualties in my own country … I’ve pushed Finland and Sweden to join NATO, I’ve caused a brain drain of roughly a million Russians who have fled my country. Please help me get out of this loser war with a good peace deal.’ He’s not doing that. Last night, Putin launched 140 drones and another ballistic missile attack indiscriminately targeting Ukrainian civilians. So that’s the challenge for President Trump.”
Indeed, it’s a helluva challenge. As for those murderous overnight strikes by Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who’s meeting with Trump at the White House right now along with European leaders, said: “Putin will commit demonstrative killings to maintain pressure on Ukraine and Europe as well as to humiliate diplomatic efforts. That is precisely why we are seeking assistance to put an end to the killings. That is why reliable security guarantees are required. That is why Russia should not be rewarded for its participation in this war.”
What’s it going to take? Probably some form of land-for-peace deal. The Crimea is gone for good, having been snatched by Putin during Red Line Obama’s eight-year apology tour. As Hoffman observed, Ukraine has some well-fortified positions in the mountainous and strategically vital Donbas region — positions that Putin hasn’t been able to take militarily — but the rest of Ukraine is relatively flat. So if Zelensky gives up those strategic positions in the east, Putin could have an easier time moving through the rest of Ukraine if his ultimate goal is to overthrow Zelensky and install a Russia-friendly puppet regime instead.
President Trump, though, might have something to say about that — especially if he decides to fully unleash America’s economic might.
Here’s another question. Is it incumbent on the victim, Ukraine, to make peace here, or is it incumbent on the aggressor, which is Russia? Or is it incumbent on Trump, whom the Left seems to think owes the world a peaceful solution that includes total capitulation by Putin?
Gimme a break. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it yesterday: “This is not our war. The United States is not in a war. Ukraine is in a war, and we’ve been supporting Ukraine. … If tomorrow the war continues, life in America will not be fundamentally altered. So I think that we have to understand that this has been a priority for the president because he wants to promote peace.”
Ultimately, as Hoffman concludes, Putin and Russia want to demonstrate to the world that Russia bows to no one in Eastern Europe, and that the U.S. can’t project its power there in Russia’s backyard. And remember: Putin is a menace and a breaker of treaties, and if he doesn’t like journalists, he does what KSM in Saudi Arabia does: He kills them. (In Putin’s defense, though, he doesn’t chop them up into little pieces.)
As for the Left saying that Trump got rolled in Anchorage, don’t believe it. The White House rejects this, reminding us that Trump met multiple times with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, and he’s still isolated. And he engaged with the Iranian regime on a peace deal and has since bombed them out and isolated them. Trump isn’t going to bomb Russia, but all this is part of his unpredictability. Vladimir Putin might think he has Donald Trump’s number, but perhaps he’ll think differently if and when Trump starts to squeeze Russia’s one-trick petro-economy.
Those are the geopolitical considerations, but there’s a historical perspective to this as well. Ronald Reagan will forever be known as The Great Communicator. But at the risk of getting too far over my skis, if Donald Trump can somehow pull this off, even the teeth-gnashing historians of the Left will have no choice but to call him The Great Peacemaker.
Think about it: He’ll have once again confounded his Trump-deranged critics while at the same time saving countless lives all around the world.
That’d be a pretty satisfying twofer.
