It’s a little tough to reconcile the bellicose blusterings of the Trump who has spent decades as a larger-than-life loudmouth to the ‘greatest peacetime president in several generations’… but here we are.
Obama — the guy who history will remember for droning American citizens — was given a Nobel Peace Prize before he’d finished his first year in office.
His record at the end of that term had the Nobel Prize committee themselves openly regretting that decision.
Meanwhile, Trump managed to negotiate peace deals all through the Middle East, most notably the Abraham Accords… and hardly anyone batted an eye. The Biden admin tried hard not to even mention the Abraham Accords by name, lest Trump get credit for it.
Biden’s team had a bad habit of leaving smoking craters everywhere they turned — Afghanistan, Ukraine, Gaza. Not to mention all of the embassies America fled from as one nation in his term after another destabilized.
Trump made big claims about how he was going to bring peace to Ukraine. He wasn’t going to approach this problem the way regular DC policy wonks would tell us to approach it.
He is applying a lifetime of experience in negotiating billion-dollar land deals where he would have to find the sweet spot of agreement between recalcitrant would-be business partners who might otherwise have almost nothing in common. Trump would have to listen — and actually HEAR — what the real underlying wishes of the various parties were, and get a sense of how far each party was willing to compromise on ‘y’ so long as their ‘x’ was satisfied.
The Art of the Deal, he calls it.
Zelensky was looking right at the solution he most wanted… and didn’t even know it. He tried to press Trump on ‘security guarantees’ but he was asking the wrong quesition.
What he THINKS he wants is for NATO to swarm in, boots on the ground, and chase Russia out of the country. Unfortunately for him, kicking off WWIII just isn’t a price most of us are willing to pay.
Trump has put his foot down, forbidding Ukraine to join NATO for exactly this reason. That doesn’t mean he’s out of ideas.
If Ukraine signs the minerals agreement, a few things happen.
First off, it kicks off a mining and manufacturing industry in a country that’s been shattered by war. This will go a long way to helping the rebuilding process, without America simply cutting a check.
Ukraine does not have the capital, materials, and expertise to launch all of these companies — not to mention the manpower shortage easily represented by the fact that their young males are being kidnapped by their own government like what would happen with the old British Navy Press-gangs.
You know… the manpower problem that JD mentioned in the Oval before Zelensky got all pissy? There are plenty of videos on social media out there for anyone who claims it isn’t happening. Some are faked, but not all of them. It’s a real problem.
But America has the manpower, the capital and the know-how. It can create the jobs, be a ready market for the materials (especially when China is threatening to cut off supply of some of the materials Americans need for their high-tech and military).
That, in turn, can give our military sector the latitude to supply arms that Ukraine and NATO might want to buy to defend themselves from military threats in the future.
Even the sticking point — the security guarantee — was implicit in the deal.
Russia was promised back in the GW Bush and Clinton days that NATO would not expand further and further toward Russian borders. They hated and feared us as much as we hated and feared them.
Even DEFENSIVE missiles in Eastern Europe make Russia skittish. If America puts boots on the ground in Ukraine — or worse, lets them join NATO — there will be NO peace deal to be had.
Like it or not, the only way to get a peace deal is if both sides — in this case, Ukraine/NATO/USA and Russia — walk away satisfied that the other side didn’t royally screw them over.
The beauty of this potential deal is that it puts an American presence in Ukraine — a tripwire of sorts — that gives USA real skin in the game that lets them tell Russia to back off — without creating a military escalation to which Russians will be obligated to respond.
Better still — Russians will understand that if Americans have a valuable asset like mission-critical mines in production there, they will have a vested interest in making sure the West doesn’t get trigger-happy either… lest we lose that important asset in the process.
Everyone gets something.
Better yet, we ALL get to go on living. And that’s gotta be worth something.
To put it in terms the left used to be able to grasp: ‘all we are saying, is give peace a chance.
