A spurious U.S. ‘realism’ about Ukraine flirts with catastrophe
The Washington Post
February 17, 2025
By George Will
Trump and Vance might come to regret their indifference toward Ukraine in its fight against Putin.
Vice President JD Vance delivers remarks at the Munich Security Conference on Friday. (Thomas Kienzle/AFP/Getty Images)
“The Czechs,” murmured Chamberlain. He had lit a cigar and pushed back his chair. “We have rather forgotten about the Czechs.” — “Munich,” by Robert Harris
In Robert Harris’s meticulously researched novel about 1938, the leaders of four nations — Germany, Italy, France, Britain — settled the fate of a fifth, Czechoslovakia. “Realism” dictated its dismemberment.
A Czech official: “The Germans will be able to cut our country in half within a day.” British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s aide: “I am not responsible for the realities of geography. ... Ninety percent of your country will remain intact and you will not be invaded.”
Last week in Munich, a city closer to Ukraine than Washington is to Atlanta, Vice President JD Vance told Europeans that the principal security threat they face is insufficient free speech, exemplified particularly by the refusal of other German political parties to govern in coalition with Alternative for Germany, a fascist-adjacent party sympathetic to Ukraine’s would-be executioner, Vladimir Putin.
Vance spoke two days after President Donald Trump’s 90-minute phone conversation with Putin. The day of that call, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared it “unrealistic” to hope for peace negotiations through which Ukraine regains pre-2014 territories (before Russia’s seizure of Crimea) or gains NATO membership. Perhaps those two outcomes are unattainable. But Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s former prime minister and the European Union’s foreign policy chief, tartly questioned the realism of giving the Russians “everything that they want even before the negotiations have been started.”
Konstantin Malofeyev, a “tycoon who runs several Russian volunteer units fighting in Ukraine” (per the Financial Times), says of the E.U. and Ukraine: “Their opinion doesn’t matter anymore. Ukraine is just the pretext for a grand dialogue between two great countries.” In 1938, in Munich, four nations worked their wills at another’s expense. Trump told Ukraine about the call with Putin, and European leaders learned about it afterward.
Putin is waging what Johns Hopkins scholar Hal Brands calls (in his new book, “The Eurasian Century”) “a quasi-genocidal war.” Barbarian regimes (see “‘Be Cruel’: Inside Russia’s Torture System for Ukrainian POWs,” the Wall Street Journal, Feb. 10) will be barbaric until stopped. But a revanchist and expansionist Russia worries Europeans more than it worries Donald Trump.
“Look,” he said on Feb. 3 regarding Europe, “we have an ocean in between. They don’t. It’s more important for them than it is for us.” But the ocean was there in 1941. And someone should explain to Trump the acronym “ICBM.”
Vance, who has said “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine,” might someday care. The American strategist Nicholas Spykman (1893-1943), referencing a European event that precipitated World War I in 1914, and another that accelerated the 1930s economic catastrophe, said: “The murder of an Austrian Archduke brought a million [U.S.] soldiers to Europe, and the failure of an Austrian credit institution closed all the banks in the United States.”
Hours before Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement, an aide told him (per Harris) that Hitler “plans a war of conquest to gain living space for the German people.” Hitler had said so. Chamberlain: “You need to learn a few lessons in political reality.” Realities such as the reluctance of democratic publics to face unpleasant realities. Particularly for the benefit of (as Chamberlain had described the Czechs) people in “a far away country,” “of whom we know nothing.” We know Putin’s thinking about who should be Russians, and what Russia should be. He has told us.
Trump says he does not care “much about anything” other than “peace.”
“Peace for our time,” Chamberlain said triumphantly when he landed in London from Munich.
Peace lasted 336 days, until Sept. 1, 1939, the first of the European war’s 2,077 days.
Margaret Brennan, who hosts “Face the Nation” on CBS, on Sunday indicated that she missed school the day 20th-century history was taught. She said, disapprovingly, that Vance criticized speech restrictions while he was in Germany, “a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”
Brennan’s interlocutor, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, responded phlegmatically to her garbled gloss on complex history, noting that free speech was nonexistent in Nazi Germany.
Perhaps she meant that free speech in 1920s Germany produced Hitler’s 1930s. So, Vance must be wrong, and those who advocate restrictions on (others’) speech must be right?
The road to war in 1939 was paved with spurious “realisms.” Today, the road to a wider war is being paved by U.S. leaders’ ignorance of history, and by nonsense from people who are paid to make sense of things.
George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. His latest book, "American Happiness and Discontents," was released in September 2021.follow on X@georgewill
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