Betrayed, robbed, colonised

Trump walks and talks like a two-bit gangster, whose whole education came from the school of hard knockers followed by Screw U.

Yet a hope flickered that at least he wouldn’t act according to type. That hope has now been dashed.

First Trump betrayed the Ukraine by cutting her out of the peace negotiations. She is being treated like a child sent out of the room while the grown-ups discuss serious business.

Now I haven’t read Trump’s book on the art of making a deal, but I wonder if he recommends relinquishing all the leverage by giving the other party everything it desires before the negotiations even start. If he doesn’t, then the ongoing spectacle will be covered in a sequel: Putin was already promised everything he wants.

Zelensky, on the other hand, is treated as a supplicant who has no say in the matter and must accept whatever crumbs he is thrown. Or else – we know where you live, where your wife shops, where your children go to school.

Trump’s version of such gangster talk differs in exact words but not in substance. If Zelensky plays silly buggers, he won’t even be allowed to keep the rump of his country: “They may make a deal. They may not make a deal, they may be Russian someday or they may not be Russian someday. But I want this money back.”

The last sentence is a reference to the reparations Trump insists the Ukraine must pay. Or rather “pay up”, which is his favourite way of putting it. The price of the country not becoming “Russian someday” has been established at a cool half-trillion, $500 billion.

Even assuming that the Ukraine is obligated to “pay up”, which is pay back every cent she has received from the US in aid, the number is fanciful. So far Congress has approved five packages amounting to $175 billion.

Trump, however, insists the US has spent $300 billion, and he isn’t so “stupid” as to approve any more. (“Whadja think I am, stupid?” I can just hear him say.) Even so, if my arithmetic is correct, 300 is still less than 500. So what’s going on is old-fashioned “we know where you live” extortion.

As a percentage of GDP, Trump’s blackmailing demand exceeds the reparations imposed on defeated Germany at Versailles, and you remember how well that worked out. It’s debatable whether Germany was the aggressor in that war, but she definitely was in the next one, and so was Japan. However, the reparations the two countries had to “pay up” after 1945 were minuscule. In fact, they came out as net recipients under the Marshall Plan.

Trump is magnanimous enough not to demand cash on the nail. Instead, he wants to turn the Ukraine into a US protectorate, but without offering any protection.

The leaked terms of the “deal” offered Zelensky are take it or leave it. And if you leave it, we know where you live.

Zelensky is told to turn over control of the country’s minerals to the US. And not just that.

The agreement covers every asset of the Ukraine, including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure (as agreed)”. “Other infrastructure” sounds a bit open-ended to me, but gangsters make such demands when they think the victim is at their mercy.

The US will take 50 per cent of all revenues from production of natural resources, and the same cut of  “all new licences issued to third parties” for future exploration. The US will set up a designated fund to handle such transactions, and the fund “shall have the exclusive right to establish the method, selection criteria, terms, and conditions” of all future licences.

This would effectively turn the Ukraine into an American colony, with the country having no money to reconstruct its cities and infrastructure destroyed by Russian fascists. Once Trump or his successors have squeezed the Ukraine dry, she will be left to the tender mercies of Putin or his successors.

Meanwhile Putin will get 20 per cent of the Ukraine’s territory and with it political control of the devastated, impoverished nation. A Russian puppet, such as Yanukovych, will be installed in Kiev and the freedom-loving nation will be enslaved politically by one power and economically by another.

This is the way to treat aggressors finding themselves on the losing end, except the victorious allies didn’t treat the vanquished belligerents that way in the two World Wars. Meting out this kind of punishment to a country that heroically resisted aggressive barbarians for three years, thwarting their dastardly aims, is worse than immoral.

It’s a criminal affront to honour – not Trump’s for he has none, but America’s, a country that likes to claim a moral high ground towering above the rest of the world. Now the country is letting a gangster president make her act as a criminal family, which has to sadden anyone who had high hopes for America.

And Putin still isn’t happy. “A lasting and long-term viable resolution is impossible without a comprehensive consideration of security issues on the continent,” said Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman. 

This Aesopian language means NATO rolling back to its 1997 borders. Since Trump has no time for NATO anyway, I shan’t be surprised if Putin gets that concession too. There have been reports already that Trump will remove American tripwire troops from the Baltics, and leaving all of Europe without an American umbrella is sure to follow.

It’s not just the Ukraine that’s being betrayed but Europe and, even broader, Western civilisation. If Trump goes so far as to withdraw America from NATO altogether, and I wouldn’t put it past him, that defensive organisation will disband, certainly de facto, but probably de jure as well.

Putin will then be able to pick off Eastern European countries one by one, starting probably with the three small Baltic republics. Whatever symbolic protection Article 5 of the NATO Charter offers will no longer be there, and every country will be left to fend for itself.

Even assuming European countries embark on a massive rearmament campaign, and Trump is right when saying they should have done so long ago, it will be years before Western armies will be able to deter or, barring that, defeat Russian hordes. And we may not have years at our disposal.

Europe is in danger of being plunged into decades of war, and Asia won’t be far behind. Seeing the preferential treatment received by the aggressor and the humiliation of its victim, China will be emboldened to attack Taiwan – after all, Chinese communists haven’t been creating the world’s largest navy just to fight India.

The US will cede her superpower status step by step, with evil predators accepting one surrender after another, the sort of thing Trump calls a “deal”. America’s interests will go the way of her honour, and the net effect of Trump’s presidency will be disastrous – regardless of how successful he is in trimming the federal budget and securing his country’s borders.

But gangsters don’t plan far ahead, and neither do old presidents with less than four years left in their term. Tomorrow they may be dead, so the time to grab all they can is now.

Trump is transparently acting in Putin’s interests and, perhaps unwittingly, against America’s. What do you think the Botox Boy has on him? It has to be something major, and I used to wonder about that in all seriousness.

Then, allowing for the possibility that I might be wrong, I pushed that thought to the back of my mind. It’s now pushing its way back to the very front. All I can say is that the free world can ill-afford as its leader a Manchurian candidate with gangster tendencies.

Can someone talk sense into Trump, explaining to him that it isn’t the Ukraine who owes us, but we who owe her? No, is the answer to that.