#WTH Making the world safe for cocktail parties

Ukraine version

Everyone has an opinion about Friday’s showdown at the Oval corral. I have written two posts on this already, #WTH Trump, Vance, and Zelensky, and #WTH Has Trump Joined Team Putin? But in reading what others have to say — including foreign leaders — a few things have become clear:

• The conventional wisdom, chin stroking, diplomatic cocktail party crowd is more irrelevant that ever: These are the organizers and denizens of international confabs, the editors of newspapers and magazine “of record,” and the professors at Ivy League universities. They are uniformly outraged with Trump and Vance and uniformly on Team Ukraine (rhetorically, that is), but also uniformly clueless about how to end the war, except they agree Trump can’t be trusted to do it. Of course, they want Ukraine to emerge intact, but they don’t want to break any china on the road to victory. They are the ones who told us Putin would use nuclear weapons (in what world?), who insisted that only Biden’s way would secure success for Kyiv (it did not), and rumbled repeatedly about the risks of Ukraine joining NATO (yeah, they did). These are the people who muttered about Ukraine’s corruption in 2014, who deemed Ukraine not worthy of sacrifices by Europe (What? Not buy Russian oil and gas? Suspend a pipeline between Russia and Western Europe? Never!), who ignored the commitments of the Budapest Memorandum (assuring Ukrainian security if it forswore nuclear weapons post Soviet breakup), who ignored the terms of the Minsk agreements (seeking to end Russia’s war on Donbas), who in 2012 applauded Obama for labeling Romney a Cold War nostalgic after he called Putin a threat, and who, btw, insisted to us that Donald Trump was a Russian stooge, that Hillary’s reset with Moscow was a great plan… and on and on. These are the people who are egging Zelensky on, pumping their fists in the air for his show of swagger, and who are, apparently, indifferent to whether Ukraine can survive the loss of American weapons.

• We need to recognize that among the enemies of Ukraine are politicos in Washington who are using Zelensky to score political points for themselves, not to support Kyiv: You know who they are… the Chris Murphys (D-CT) of this world, much of Biden’s White House national security team, House and Senate D leadership. (Check out this excellent piece laying out the whole sordid story.)

  

  Yes, there are great Ds who really believe in the need for Ukraine to win, and who used their status to lean on Biden to do more for Ukraine. But the majority of those leaning on Biden to do more for Ukraine were Republicans in Congress. Others tolerated the fact that Biden would insistently stagger or delay weapons deliveries to Kyiv for fear of “escalation,” and would refuse to deliver decisive weaponry (ATACMS, HIMARS etc) until they were of less use to Kyiv. Any doubt in your mind about D willingness to manipulate Zelensky to score points on Republicans should be allayed by the disgraceful election-time Zelensky trip to PA in which the Ukrainian leader was ambushed with political meetings that angered Republicans and empowered isolationists in the GOP. With friends like these in Donald Trump’s Washington, Zelensky doesn’t need enemies

• Lies are being told about European capabilities: Even if the Euros had the political will that former diplomats and military leaders have been suggesting — and where’s the evidence of that? — Europe’s defense industrial base has collapsed over the last three decades. Europe is all butter, no guns. A military friend tells me that if the Europeans gave Zelensky all the equipment their units currently hold, it wouldn’t be enough to hold the line. And European soldiers haven’t got the readiness, training, or leadership to add the necessary value. We saw that in Afghanistan. More recently, we saw it in Libya. Has everyone forgotten the cement bombs the French were forced to drop when they ran out? The UK running out of ammo? NATO having so little lift, more than 60 percent of missions had to be flown by the United States? Yeah, Europe will save Ukraine.

• Zelensky’s inner circle doesn’t get Trump: I’m not an intimate of the Ukrainians, but over the last few years, I have spent a lot of time with people who want the Ukrainians to win, and worked hard to help them. There’s a lot at stake for Kyiv right now, and Zelensky needs to maneuver adroitly. We saw the price of grandstanding and posturing in Trump’s first term, when our Euro allies felt it was more important to signal their own manhood (womanhood?) than it was to preserve ties with their most important ally. Sure, we all understand that democratically elected leaders have to play to multiple audiences, and that Trump makes that difficult. But it’s not that difficult. Japanese premier Shinzo Abe got it. Macron and Merkel didn’t. Donald Trump doesn’t care about making the world safe for cocktail parties; he wants something out of America’s relationships. You can agree, disagree, hate it, love it; whatever. The point is that for four years, he gets to be president, and for our foreign friends, “resist” is not the right motto. “Manage” is the right motto.

  What does this have to do with Volodymyr Zelensky? He has an ambassador in Washington who has neither shielded him from Democratic political machinations (see above), nor accelerated the delivery of weapons before Trump came to power. She neither strategized about alternative means of Ukrainian payment for defense articles, nor prepared her boss for Trump’s ascent. She may be the greatest person on earth, but Z was not ready when he came to Washington. And the same goes for an inner circle that didn’t — or tried and failed — to prepare their boss for his meetings with Trump. Perhaps “don’t get in a fight in the Oval Office in front of the press” wasn’t on their bingo card, but it’s not hard to lay out a playbook to manage a president and vice president whose track records are well known.

I like a diplomatic cocktail party as much as the next guy, but at a certain moment, you’re there because you want to achieve something. What is it that all of the characters above have sought to achieve? How have they advanced the prospects for Ukrainian victory? How have they advanced American interests? What imagination have they brought to the challenge as it is, not how we wish it would be? How are they making the world a better, safer place right now?