The Trump phenomenon represents four potential defections: from the Atlantic alliance system; from the UN-based Charter International System; from the letter and spirit of the US Constitution; and finally, from the hallowed traditions of US governance, described by Steve Bannon as the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’. That it’s in everyone’s interest to end this fighting as quickly as possible should be evident to any reasonable person though it is not to Zelensky and the coalition of those will to fight to the last Ukrainian who will be joining him in Washington on Monday in a hopefully futile attempt to keep the war going. Even if the deliverables from the Alaska talks were slight, Trump and Putin seem to understand better than most the wisdom of Harold Macmillan’s comment (often attributed to Churchill) that “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” Putin’s preference to “jaw to jaw” with his Ukrainian and European counterparts over the course of the six years of the Minsk Process backfired badly on him—those six years were used not to come to a peaceful settlement but to buy the Ukrainian armed forces time (as Angela Merkel admitted in her memoirs), and to integrate them under the EuroAtlantic security umbrella.
Author: James Carden
Published at: 2025-08-17 21:24:00
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