The Zelenskky Implosion

Finally, finally, policy matters more than politeness

The car crash Zelenskky Oval Office meeting has predictably divided opinion. Most of you will have seen it already, and most of you will only have seen the heated disagreement that ended it rather than the forty minutes of much blander stuff that preceded that.

What is clear is that the Trump administration were ready to do a deal. Trump’s signature is that he is always ready to do a deal, provided that he thinks America is getting a good deal.

After 8 years of being like this, of a businessman’s approach to politics, it still totally confuses the political establishment and most professional commentators. They try to find different explanations. They try to impute sinister motives. Or if they are the howling Robert Reich types, they tremble in impotent rage and just scream ‘Nazi’.

It still bewilders them that a man could genuinely be looking for a good deal for his country (note-not for vested interests, not for personal enrichment, not for a specific complex, but for his country) and that this describes everything he is doing.

The Ukraine War sickens and disgusts Trump on two levels. It disgusts him on a simple moral calculation-he looks at it and says ‘hundreds of thousands dead on both sides, and for what?’ while accurately knowing it could all have been avoided. People who are intensely smug and intensely stupid are certain that Trump has no morality.

They are wrong. Unnecessary suffering and death disgusts him much more than it disgusts them. His first instinct is to prevent it, to stop it, if he can. This is a key motivation behind his general aversion (consistent for forty years or more) to military adventurism and interventionism. It’s the key motivation behind both his insistence on strong borders and his avoidance of foreign wars.

Trump thinks that killing people when you don’t need to is morally obscene, and he thinks that risking the military lives of the most patriotic Americans when you don’t need to is equally obscene.

He can’t comprehend why others want wars that are avoidable. These wars ruin nations. Trump is a builder. What the hell are you doing? You’re killing your people. They’re dying in hundreds of thousands. You’re spending all your money. You’re wrecking your economy. Look at the devastation. There’s rubble everywhere. You have wrecked it.

Or as he said to Zelenskky you’re risking World War Three.

Now if Trump was not prepared to use force when necessary, and if Trump was a genuinely weak man who buckled under pressure, this very simple moral framework would really be an expression of cowardice. But the man who does a fist pump and shouts ‘fight, fight, fight’ as an instinctive reaction to being shot is not a coward. The man who walks alone into North Korea is not a coward. The man who has endured the most sustained campaign of hatred and multiple assassination attempts and still refused to give up is not a coward.

It’s said that it takes a weak man to start a war, and a strong man to end it.

I’m no pacifist, and I don’t think Trump is either. But he loathes the waste of war. He shakes his head at the toll of death, and he means it. As both a moralist (a term rarely if ever applied to Trump even by his supporters, but true here) and as a builder of things, wanton destruction strikes him as pointless.

Even if he supports a war, as he has supported Israel in Gaza, he is thinking about two things: how to end the conflict for good, and how to build something that lasts afterwards. And it’s not purely a financial calculation.

The bottom line is moral as well as financial. It’s stupid to make money by bombing somewhere for no good reason and then building it back again and then repeating that on an endless perpetual war cycle that’s been set in foreign policy stone since World War Two and has made a military industrial complex rich but devastated the world.

What a waste of lives, American and otherwise. What a waste of resources that could have gone straight to building things and improving things, or stayed in tax payers pockets where at least they don’t start wars with bullshit excuses. This is what I mean by Trump being disgusted by the Ukraine War on two levels. Morally, disgusted by the waste of life. Pragmatically, as a businessman, disgusted by the cost and wreckage.

With the Hamas use of Gaza, Trump sees that there is never going to be an end to the cycle of violence unless there’s a radical change. He sees that there needs to be a winner and a loser, and that morally and economically (having built something other than terror tunnels and terrorist facilities) Israel is the winner. Ok, how does it now end? 80 years of backing the Palestinians and Israelis at the same time hasn’t worked. Do something new.

With Ukraine, Trump sees that the war never ends while America and Europe keep propping up the side that has lost. All it becomes is the ultimate perpetual war. Ukraine can’t win on its own, and it probably can’t win even with huge western support, which already runs into trillions if you count not just the 350 billion US dollars assigned directly to the conflict but the negative self harms of imposing sanctions on Russia that do more damage to Germany (for example) than Russia itself.

It can only win via World War Three. Western troops, western boots on the ground, the US and NATO going in with real force and real numbers and fighting Russian forces directly. Which would precipitate if that went badly for the Russians a nuclear response.

Trump looks at this trajectory, and with total moral and businesslike clarity which is the complete opposite of grasping schemes wrapped in pious declarations from war whores and neocons, says what the hell are you doing!?

There has to be peace. And the only peace comes from accepting that Ukraine can’t win except at a cost where everyone loses.

I have no doubt at all that all of this was privately explained, at length, to Zelenskky before the public, filmed Oval Office meeting. Trump and Vance would have been as transparent and honest with Zelenskky as they have been with the voting public. The Trump administration position-you can’t win, we can’t keep backing this forever, we have to end the deaths and get a deal, you’re going to have to accept that Russian speaking and Russian ethnic areas you bombed and Russia now holds are now lost, and you’ve got to start looking to how the rest of Ukraine, divided by that loss, now survives and rebuilds. Without the provocation or risk of NATO membership.

All of it based on the pragmatism of accepting reality, of accepting the manpower difference and the resource difference and the military capability difference between Russia and Ukraine. Zelenskky is the crooked fight manager who won’t throw in the towel, and Trump and Vance look at the face of the fighter and know he’s had enough. I’ve no doubt that if the Ukrainian populace were asked, especially the ones on the frontline, if they would accept the new borders as the cost of peace, they would now take that deal.

It’s disgustingly easy to, with a pretend morality, grandstand on this and say that dictators should never be appeased, the West should back Ukraine for a 100 years, you can’t let Putin win and all the rest of the moralising gumph that comes from people who aren’t doing the dying.

But a morality that avoids reality is no morality at all. Because lives are lost, nations wasted, and nothing actually gained in the ruined wake of that sweeping contempt for the consequences of your sanctimony. Like a giant wrapped in a trailing gold cloak, the western neocons, war mongers, Globalists and naive supportive voters hopped up on media versions of morality all stride across the planet saving one nation after another, without apparently noticing that their cloak of protection sweeps the ground, flattening buildings, sweeping tides of turned earth over thousands of screaming victims, and doing as much damage as the alleged evils they confront.

Trump and Vance, less poetically perhaps, will have expressed this to Zelenskyy.

And Zelenskky acted with a petulant teenagers refusal of reality. The vast expense, the vast loss of life, the obvious disparities between Ukraine and Russia in terms of their capabilities, even his own chances of any kind of political survival, could not get through to him.

The slap down was impolite. It wasn’t diplomacy as normal. But the irony is that the mainstream, standard voices horrified by the display as the discussion turned heated and Trump and Vance broke convention by laying out plain facts for all to see no matter how much these offended their guest, don’t want ACTUAL diplomacy. It’s Trump who was asking for ACTUAL diplomacy, which means negotiation and agreement ending conflict, negotiation and discussion with BOTH sides.

By diplomacy, Trump means talking to Putin and ending the war. The West has to do that, and Zelenskky or whoever replaces him as the Ukrainian representative has to do that too.

By diplomacy, western media and Zelenskky mean talking politely to Zelenskky, then giving Ukraine more money, more arms, more of the support that has failed, and of course boots on the ground.

One kind of diplomacy aims at the end of the conflict and the restoration of peace, even if it’s not polite or proper etiquette or good form to take that route.

The other kind of diplomacy means very politely, very smilingly, with no disagreements, remorse or regret, with impeccable civil accord in Oval Office meetings, throwing generations more into a meat grinder for no real purpose.

We have really been reduced, from the mainstream, Trump hating side of things, to putting a smiling agreement on endless spending and Death above an honest pursuit of peace. We have put the pious declaration of protection above the reality of protecting Ukrainians from further pointless slaughter.

The Ukraine War started as a conflict deliberately provoked by western globalists to draw Putin into a quagmire, regime change Russia just as Ukraine was regime changed first, and steal Russia’s resources just as Ukraine’s were waiting to be plundered too. It began as a CIA, neocon, BlackRock hostile takeover. That’s what really pushed the Russians, that and the fear of NATO on the doorstep, as they constantly warned us.

But it continues as something even worse, something even fouler and even more ignoble and hypocritical than that.

It continues, thanks to propaganda, as the ultimate Virtue Signal, a claimed good that does evil, akin to the similarly psy-op generated COVID response. It is literally the most soulless, least moral, least caring, most comfortably removed from the conflict people in the West insisting that the death and destruction continues for the satisfaction of their moral buzz. Because it makes them feel good.

Hundreds of thousands of lives are to be wasted, and millions more risked, on the altar of Doing the Right Thing, when actually all that does is make somebody a thousand miles away feel good about themselves. It’s Munchausens Syndrome By Nation. We will sacrifice you in the name of protecting you.

Western Globalists are already planning the new Ukraine, and telling everyone that to make up the manpower shortages caused by the war and millions being moved to other nations, Ukraine needs to import millions of Africans and Middle Easterners. This is not a sick joke. This is what the EU and others are telling Ukraine it needs to do next.

Does Zelenskky think, does anyone think, that Ukrainians wanted to die for THAT?

This is the proper context for the Oval Office argument. If you really sincerely prefer more deaths to honest slap downs of rude guests, there is something deeply wrong with you. Everything Trump and Vance said was accurate. I don’t give a flying fuck if it was rude or unusual to say it, to actually argue back when Zelenskky interrupted and interrogated them.

You do not come into a man’s house as a beggar he sustains, making fresh demands without a word of thanks and publicly questioning his wisdom and intent. Once you do that, when there was almost certainly a deal on the table for you if you just kept it polite, you are a fool. The disaster is of your making. You aren’t dealing with smiling polite liars anymore. You aren’t dealing with people who, like you, want the war to keep going forever.

You are dealing with real men. Men strong enough to want the war to end.