It is not every day I am accused by the vice president of the United States of purveying “moralistic garbage” and “historical illiteracy,” and of being a “globalist.” But those were the charges leveled against me by J.D. Vance this morning.
I suppose I should not have been surprised by the onslaught. This week, President Donald Trump’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine took what struck me as a bad turn. Now, I am not one of those who objects to Trump talking to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Nor am I against the new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. A war that cannot be ended on the battlefield must be ended by negotiation, and peace talks do not get far if one combatant is excluded from the discussions.
However, in the past 10 days the Trump administration—which had up until this point been striking the right tone—made a series of unforced errors. The first indication of what was coming was at a NATO meeting in Brussels on February 12, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that Ukraine’s postwar borders were unlikely to be as they were before Russia initially invaded in 2014; that negotiations would not end with Ukraine as a NATO member; and that non-Americans would have to provide security guarantees.
As those were three of Putin’s negotiating objectives, it seemed to me simply bizarre for the U.S. defense secretary to offer them up as freebies in return for nothing. Of course, the Ukrainian government knows these concessions will likely have to be made. But there must be Russian concessions in return. I was relieved when Hegseth clarified his comments the next day, saying that “what concessions will be made or what concessions will not be made” would be up to President Trump. Even better was The Wall Street Journal’s interview with none other than Vance, who said that the option of sending U.S. troops to Ukraine if Moscow failed to negotiate in good faith remained “on the table,” and that there were “economic tools of leverage” as well as “military tools of leverage” the United States could use against Putin. “We do care about Ukraine having sovereign independence,” Vance said. I cheered.
I cheered too soon. On Tuesday, President Trump unleashed a tirade against the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Responding to complaints that Ukraine had not been present at the U.S.-Russian talks, Trump said, “Well, you’ve been there for three years. . . you should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
He went on to say that it had “been a long time since we’ve had an election” in Ukraine. He claimed that Zelensky’s approval rating with Ukrainian voters stood at 4 percent—which is untrue. And the next day, he called Zelensky a “dictator.”
The last straw was when I read in The Economist that “American officials are suggesting a different sort of peacekeeping force [in Ukraine], including non-European countries such as Brazil or China, that would sit along an eventual ceasefire line as a buffer.” Having torn strips off the eminent German national security expert, Wolfgang Ischinger, for proposing precisely that arrangement at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, I confess I hit the roof. I had not realized, I wrote on X, that the Trump administration’s idea of peacemaking was going to be a policy of appeasement.
On Thursday morning, I recalled George H.W. Bush’s famous words on August 5, 1990, after Saddam Hussein had invaded and attempted to annex Kuwait. “This will not stand,” he said. “This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.” And I asked what future history students would say when asked why Republican presidents had ceased to believe that aggression against a sovereign state should not stand.
The vice president, fresh from outraging the audience at the Munich Security Conference, shot back at me an angry tweetstorm. My criticisms were “moralistic garbage. . . the rhetorical currency of the globalists because they have nothing else to say.” Was I, he asked, “aware of the reality on the ground, of the numerical advantage of the Russians, of the depleted stock of the Europeans or their even more depleted industrial base?” Did I not understand that the Ukrainians never had “any pathway to victory”? It was “lazy, ahistorical nonsense to attack as ‘appeasement’ every acknowledgment that America’s interest must account for the realities of the conflict.”
Fighting words for a peacemaker. But I would expect nothing less from the author of Hillbilly Elegy, who has lived the American dream by rising up from a dysfunctional family in the Midwest to being a heartbeat away from the highest office in the republic and the most powerful job in the world.
That said, as I told Vance when I first met him eight years ago—I wonder if he remembers that dinner in San Francisco—I come from a city that was doing Rust Belt dysfunction back in the 1970s, while Ohio was still booming. A Glaswegian can take it, and dish it out.
Having visited Ukraine every year but one since 2011, I think I have an informed and realistic view of the conflict. I have seen the graves of the victims of Russia’s war crimes at Bucha. I have spoken with men who have lost eyes and limbs defending their country and with women tortured and raped by Putin’s orc army. I know what Ukraine is up against. And I know that they are outmanned and outgunned and holding the current line across the east of their country with a combination of guts, heroism, technological skill, and—yes—foreign aid, much of it American.
I know Russia’s position, too. Having failed in his bid to seize Kyiv three years ago, Putin has been reduced to fighting a brutal war of attrition that has been costing the lives of as many Russian soldiers in a month as America was losing in a year at the height of its involvement in Vietnam. His war economy relies on a gray fleet of sanctions-breaking ships that transport his oil to Asia and a huge inflow of dual-use material from China as well as arms and ammunition from Iran and North Korea, the latter of which also sent men to fight the Ukrainians in Kursk last year.
I have never had any illusions about this war.
I repeatedly criticized the Biden administration for its failure to deter Putin in 2021. I warned that the Russian president was serious about invasion when I was in Kyiv in September of that year. I repeated my warning right at the beginning of January 2022. When the Russian invasion happened, I made it clear that history did not offer much encouragement for the Ukrainians.
I then criticized the Biden administration for failing to negotiate an end to the war while Ukraine still had some leverage, as it did at decisive moments in 2022, when the Russian army threatened to crumble—even at one point to mutiny. How far peace was attainable in the first year of the war is a matter historians will debate for many years to come, and it is still too early to be sure. But the one thing I repeatedly told people in both Washington and Kyiv was that the war had to be ended sooner rather than later, because the longer it went on, the more Russia’s economic and demographic preponderance would matter.
I have argued over the past three years that the war would not have happened if President Trump had been reelected in 2020. I supported his campaign for reelection last year, consistently predicted his and Vance’s victory, and welcomed the “vibe shift” that victory represented. I have also supported Trump’s previous calls to negotiate peace between Russia and Ukraine. So I hardly qualify as a “globalist.”
In fact, I agree with all five of the points Vance made in his reply to me. Yes, the Europeans have been feckless. Indeed, last week in these pages I praised Vance’s Munich speech criticizing the censorship and immigration policies of the European governments. Yes, the Russians have a massive material advantage in the war now—not least because their allies supply them with substantially more hardware than Western countries have ever provided to the Ukrainians. I agree, as Vance said, that the United States has leverage over both parties; that it needs to talk to the Russians; that there cannot be an open-ended diversion of U.S. resources to Ukraine.
Yet, precisely for these reasons, I simply cannot understand the logic of this administration beginning a negotiation this difficult by conceding so many crucial points to Russia. As I understand it, before negotiations have even begun, NATO membership for Ukraine has been taken off the table and the loss of 20 percent of its territory has in effect been conceded. Instead of serious military guarantees, the Trump administration is talking about Brazilian or Chinese—Chinese!—peacekeepers. And to cap it all, President Trump accused Ukraine of having started the war, and casts doubt on the legitimacy of Zelensky’s government.
It’s as if Henry Kissinger, after less than a month as Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, had agreed to the unilateral withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Vietnam and accepted that the Saigon government had to be replaced—in other words, acceded to the key demands of the North Vietnamese negotiators.
It is not “moralistic garbage” but a hard and realistic lesson of history that wars are easy to start and hard to end.
As for “historical illiteracy,” here are some facts. It took one year, 10 months, and 25 days for Woodrow Wilson to negotiate an end to World War I (it helped that the Allies won); two years and 17 days to negotiate an end to the Korean War; three years, five months, and 24 days to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War; and five years, five months, and one day to negotiate peace between Israel and Egypt.
I fervently hope that the Trump administration can negotiate a swifter end to this war. But if we end up with a peace that dooms Ukraine first to partition and then to some future invasion, it will be a sorry outcome. Ukraine minus Donbas and Crimea but with European security guarantees (in other words: soldiers), has a shot at being South Korea. The alternative is South Vietnam.
Vance and Trump campaigned last year with a slogan that dates back even further than George H.W. Bush’s words that I quoted in the tweet that so enraged the vice president. That phrase was “peace through strength.”
For a year, I have tried to persuade Republicans to understand the dangerous situation the United States finds itself in, not least thanks to the blunders of the last administration. Washington faces a new Axis that unites China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. They cooperate closely in both the economic and the military domains. Two of them are fully fledged nuclear superpowers; the others aspire to have nuclear missiles. They threaten American allies and interests not only in Ukraine but also in the Middle East and the Far East.
Crucially, the United States lacks the fiscal room to maneuver easily to respond to these threats. Last year, for the first time since 1934, it spent more on interest payments than on defense.
As Vance rightly says, American resources are not infinite; the United States is constrained both fiscally and in terms of military-industrial capacity. But that is precisely why handing the Axis an easy win in Ukraine—beginning with its partition and possibly ending with its annexation—would be to repeat the blunders of appeasement, which was also a policy rationalized on the basis of fiscal constraints.
Despite our little spat, I am rooting for the Trump-Vance administration to succeed. And I will give them the benefit of the doubt. We are just one month into this administration, and many key positions have yet to be filled as the nomination and confirmation processes grind slowly forward. The latter process will allow the many senators who share my concerns to voice them.
It is not moralistic garbage, historical illiteracy, or globalism to say that the fall of Kyiv to Russia is an event no president and vice president should wish to occur on their watch. The fall of Kabul was an event that permanently damaged President Biden’s standing. The fall of Saigon was an event from which Gerald Ford’s presidency never recovered. And it was Jimmy Carter’s misfortune to see not only Kabul fall to the Soviets but also Tehran to the ayatollahs.
These were the reasons why Reagan spoke of “peace through strength”—and why Bush Senior insisted the invasion of Kuwait would not stand. Their arguments had a moral dimension, it is true. But a realism wholly uncoupled from morality ultimately lacks credibility abroad—and soon loses legitimacy at home. That is a lesson it is better to learn from history books than from bitter experience.