Filenews 14 March 2025 - by Andreas Kluth
A ceasefire is always better than a non-ceasefire, and that includes a ceasefire to which Ukraine, after talks with the United States in Saudi Arabia, says it is ready to agree, provided Russia does the same.
The mere fact that Americans and Ukrainians are talking is also positive, especially after Donald Trump's contempt for Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office earlier this month. But the Ukrainian president is right to remain wary of upcoming peace negotiations, as his American counterpart seems to envision them in a different way.
The direction of U.S. peace efforts under Trump is to impose, on the altar of any deal, a bad and unfair deal on a country that has been a victim of Russian aggression since 2014 and its brutal full-scale invasion since 2022. Trump has reversed moral roles in the conflict, blaming Ukraine rather than Russia for the war and calling Zelensky, not Russian President Vladimir Putin, a dictator. It is clear that Trump will ask a lot of Zelensky and shockingly little of Putin. For starters, Trump has ruled out NATO membership and the presence of U.S. forces on the ground in advance, and has signalled that he expects Ukraine to make major territorial concessions.
These bad omens have led analysts and experts to look for historical parallels. Larry Summers, a former U.S. Treasury secretary, told Bloomberg that the upcoming deal could be "an agreement similar to the Treaty of Versailles, imposed, not on aggressors, but on victims of aggression." He was referring to the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, but in terms that observers like John Maynard Keynes considered so destructive and humiliating to Germany as to "secure" a new war in the future. The fact that Ukraine, unlike Germany in 1914, did nothing to provoke the current war would make such an outcome even harder to endure.
But there are more apt and recent analogies with the current situation, according to historian Ian Horwood. One is Vietnam in the early 1970s. Just as the U.S. stood by Ukraine in 2022, it once supported South Vietnam, which was attacked by North Vietnam, which, in turn, was backed by China and the Soviet Union. One big difference with the current situation in Ukraine was that the U.S. had troops on the ground and a correspondingly wounded home front. One similarity was that Washington had come to believe that this conflict could not be won and wanted to end it, with President Richard Nixon willing to play the role of peacemaker.
Then, as now, the US forced its ally into negotiations by threatening to withdraw all support. They also offered their ally, as it turned out, flimsy security guarantees. In a letter to his South Vietnamese counterpart, Nixon reiterated "my personal assurances to you that the United States will react very strongly and swiftly to any violation of the agreement." This reaction was understood as massive aerial bombardment. The Paris peace accords were signed in 1973. But when the North Vietnamese launched another offensive two years later, the U.S. (now led by Gerald Ford) retreated and South Vietnam fell.
The next example will surely infuriate Trump because it concerns him and his successor, Joe Biden. In his first term, Trump was in a hurry to end the war in Afghanistan, which he also considered a stalemate. So his administration began talking directly to the Taliban — do Trump's talks with Putin remind you of anything? — without including the Afghan government that America supported but which Trump was now pushing with threats of an abrupt withdrawal known as "Damocles Tweets."
Those talks led to the Doha agreement in 2020, in which the Afghan government was sidelined and the U.S. reached an agreement with the Taliban, who promised not to allow terrorists into Afghanistan and to talk to the government. But when they reneged on these guarantees, the Americans continued to withdraw. And when Biden took office, he continued in the same direction, eventually leaving in haste, incompetence and irresponsibility, letting the government collapse and the Taliban to take over Kabul.
The worrying pattern is that the US, when willing to emerge from foreign chaos, tends to sideline allies, concede too much to adversaries, and ultimately move away from commitments either implied or given. Everything Trump has said and done as a candidate and as the 47th president suggests that he may be ready for an encore.
Trump has had a strained relationship with the Ukrainian president since his first term. But for Zelensky, it shouldn't matter who his interlocutor is, just as it didn't matter much to South Vietnamese or Afghans whether Nixon or Ford, Trump or Biden abandoned them. Kiev's job is to ensure that Ukraine survives as a nation, not just for the duration of a news cycle defined by an American president, but forever.
Performance – Editing: Lydia Roumpopoulou
