Support Ukraine? It's complicated...
But maybe not so much if you can just remember 1962 and Cuba
In April 2017 I was sitting in a one-star open-air lounge along the shore of Lake Malawi, nursing a Tusker lager, when a couple strolled in and sat down at the next table.
Eventually, I was chatting up these two 20-something-year-old Americans. I learned they were spending a long weekend at the lake for a respite from their grueling and dirty work in neighboring Zambia.
Despite being thousands of miles from the United States, our conversation soon turned back home to newly elected Donald Trump, who had been in office all of three months. The couple’s disgust with our 45th President was quickly made evident.
“I’d like to shoot him,” said the woman, a New Jersey native.
“You actually want to shoot the President?” I asked.
“No, but I wish someone would,” she replied.
“But didn’t you just tell me you’re in the Peace Corps?” I asked/noted.
Fast forward to today. Trump has gone and come again, and I doubt the woman’s opinion has changed. She and a lot of other Americans see Trump as the incarnation of Adolf Hitler. And maybe she and a few other Americans see themselves as the incarnation of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a man of peace, but at some time in 1944 decided it was time to put away the bombast and go find a bomb.
(The bomb detonated at just the wrong moment, allowing Hitler to live and thus round up the holy would-be assassins, including Bonhoeffer who was executed just before World War II ended).
Trying to gently suggest to Trump-haters that Trump is no Hitler is generally ineffective, because seldom does a day pass when Trump doesn’t say or do something — like sign 87 executive orders between breakfast and lunch — that defies easy, that is, legal, explanation.
All I can add is that I have toured Germany’s Nazi Documentation Center in Nuremberg, which provides an almost day-by-day account of how Hitler took a broken nation and ever-so-gently in six years turned it into a rabid killing machine with an insatiable bloodlust for conquest and the genocide of Jews.
In Nuremburg, you need more than a full day to tour the Documentation Center and read every exhibit explaining how demonic Hitler was.
Trump, I am telling you, does not have Hitler’s focus and discipline, as evidenced by his weave of installing and uninstalling tariffs by the hour. (And if you think eliminating USAID is equivalent to what happened on Kristallnacht, you need to upgrade your reading material).
Still, Trump does manifest some of the same behaviors as Hitler, Joseph Stalin and, dare I write it, Teddy Roosevelt. They all liked punching down, i.e., beating up smaller opponents.
For Hitler, it started with Czechoslovakia, for Stalin it was Finland, and for Teddy Roosevelt it was the less than war-ready Spanish empire, starting with Cuba. Roosevelt, as relentlessly shown in Evan Thomas’s book The War Lovers, lusted for war against a weaker foe so that he could receive the Medal of Honor. (The award rightfully eluded him despite his constant carrying on to anyone who would listen about how he bravely killed one Spaniard near San Juan Hill.)
And for Trump? One day he is publicly body shaming actress Rosie O‘Donnell, another day he is publicly mocking the physical challenges of a journalist suffering from arthrogryposis, a congenital condition affecting the joints primarily of the arms and legs.
More recently it was Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who during his White House visit came within a hair’s breadth of having two Marines being ordered to pick him up by the ears, perp-walk him down the corridor, kick open the double doors and throw him to the curb.
Ah, beloved Ukraine, breadbasket of Europe and Africa! And a land of historic misery and home to its share of gangsters, oligarchs, Jew haters, and the inspiration for the NCAA’s NIL policy; that is, the country where the coked-up son of the former President of the United States made millions of dollars providing only his Name, Image and Likeness as a board member of an international energy company.
And worse yet, its chaos can infect Americans’ thinking faster than COVID in a nursing home. How else to explain why so many Americans today are up in arms over Trump’s seeming lack of interest in Ukraine’s sovereignty but were eerily silent about Ukraine’s sovereignty when Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
(This would be a good time to give a shout-out to former President Barack Obama, who immediately initiated sanctions against Russia in 2014, which were as effective as his “line-in-the-sand” threat that did nothing to stop Syria’s Assad from gassing to death thousands of his own citizens.)
Just as Trump is expressing seller’s remorse regarding the Panama Canal, Russian President Vladimir Putin hates how the Soviet Union made accommodations to Ukraine when it was a Soviet Republic, such as Premier Nikita Khrushchev giving Ukraine control of the Crimean Peninsula in 1954.
And it is critical to know that independence for Ukraine in 1990 was actually a frightening event for every European country because, well, here is how journalist Matt Taibbi summed it up in his recent timeline:
July 16, 1990: Ukraine issues a Declaration of Sovereignty, part of which involves an agreement “not to accept, produce, or acquire nuclear weapons.” … Had it not made this move, Ukraine would have been the third most heavily armed nuclear power in the world. It had 176 long-range ballistic missiles and 42 nuclear bombers containing roughly 1,900 nuclear warheads.
With Ukraine suddenly a new country after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia understandably wanted its nukes back, but it also wanted to make sure Ukraine never became a member of NATO, which would then allow the United States to do what the U.S. does best: Cowboy Up the place again, with all missile and bomber sights set on Moscow, et al.
And America agreed with Russia’s leadership. For years, President Bill Clinton said no NATO for Ukraine so there will be no nukes trained on Russia. But after 9-11, U.S. foreign policy began to change and our discussions with European allies morphed into Ukraine is more European than Russian, and maybe it should be in the European Union, and maybe we can all have one universal passport, and maybe we can replace the Ukrainian hryvnia with the Euro, and (pause for effect) maybe one day we can all sit down for a chat about NATO.
In 1962 President John Kennedy was ready to go to war to keep Soviet nukes out of Cuba. If you can easily wrap your head around that, you can thus see Putin’s point about neighboring Ukraine joining NATO. (Yes, you can see that point and still agree that Putin is a psychopathic murderer.)
What will happen in Ukraine in the next three years of the Trump Presidency? How about this: The war will end, Ukraine will remain a sovereign nation, it won’t join NATO, and under a new president —rather than the former professional comedian it has now — it will start rebuilding with foreign aid that was previously going to weapon systems.
Since we’re spit balling here, it’s likely a good bet that even if peace breaks out, reams of Facebook posts will lament how our Hitler-like leader turned his back on our new best friends, the Ukrainians.
Meanwhile, the actual end game will be this: Trump’s true believers filling in the nomination form and working overtime to ensure he becomes the fifth U.S. President to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the most important rare earth medal of them all.