When I read a recent news article by my Post colleagues headlined “Inside Donald Trump’s secret, long-shot plan to end the war in Ukraine,” my thoughts naturally turned to another election in which another Republican presidential candidate was widely reported to have a “secret plan” to end another war. Richard M. Nixon did not actually make that claim himself about the Vietnam War during the 1968 campaign. Instead, he made a vague promise to “end the war and win the peace in the Pacific” and let voters imagine he knew how do that.
Nixon’s strategy, as it turned out, consisted of going to Moscow and Beijing to win over North Vietnam’s principal allies, while dropping hints that he was a “madman” who was willing to use nuclear weapons if Hanoi did not stop fighting. To further increase the pressure on Hanoi, he stepped up bombing of North Vietnam and invaded Cambodia to clear out communist sanctuaries.
None of Nixon’s machinations produced what he promised: “peace with honor.” In 1973, he signed a peace treaty that pulled all remaining U.S. forces out of South Vietnam but allowed North Vietnam to keep between 140,000 and 300,000 of its own troops in the south. A little more than two years later, North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam. The south’s fall demonstrated, for neither the first nor the last time, that the surest way to end any war is for one side to win and the other to lose.
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That brings us to the “very stable genius” and his current plans to end the war in Ukraine. If elected again, Trump claims he would end the war in 24 hours, but he has been cagey about how he would pull off this miraculous feat, supposedly so that he could maintain his flexibility to negotiate.
Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, proclaimed after meeting with Trump last month that the former president’s formula was simple and cynical: “He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war. Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own feet.”
Trump aides told The Post that Orban’s statement, which sounded entirely plausible to me, was “false,” even though Trump has not publicly contradicted it. The aides explained that the presumptive GOP nominee’s actual plan is to push for “Ukraine to cede Crimea and Donbas border region to Russia” in return for an end to the Russian invasion.
If that is Trump’s plan, it is more preposterous than anything Nixon ever contemplated during the Vietnam War. It displays a witches’ brew of arrogance, ignorance and defeatism.
Start with the arrogance: Trump regards himself as the world’s greatest dealmaker despite a long track record, going back at least to 1990 and his first casino bankruptcy, indicating the opposite. As president, he was very good at abrogating treaties — including the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal — but not very successful at negotiating new ones. He announced the Abraham Accords but did not personally negotiate them, as Jimmy Carter did with the Camp David Accords, and he renamed the North American Free Trade Agreement rather than truly renegotiating it. His summits with Kim Jong Un did not produce North Korean denuclearization; Pyongyang’s weapons of mass destruction program is considerably more advanced now than it was when Trump and Kim met in Singapore in 2018.
Of greatest relevance to the conflict in Ukraine was Trump’s ill-fated attempt to negotiate an end to the war in Afghanistan. His 2020 deal with the Taliban was as one-sided as Nixon’s Paris peace accords with the North Vietnamese: Trump’s negotiators agreed to withdraw all U.S. troops within 14 months and free 5,000 Taliban prisoners. In return, the Taliban promised not to allow Afghanistan to become a haven for international terrorists. The Taliban was not required to stop fighting or reconcile with the Afghan government.
Nixon’s strategy, as it turned out, consisted of going to Moscow and Beijing to win over North Vietnam’s principal allies, while dropping hints that he was a “madman” who was willing to use nuclear weapons if Hanoi did not stop fighting. To further increase the pressure on Hanoi, he stepped up bombing of North Vietnam and invaded Cambodia to clear out communist sanctuaries.
None of Nixon’s machinations produced what he promised: “peace with honor.” In 1973, he signed a peace treaty that pulled all remaining U.S. forces out of South Vietnam but allowed North Vietnam to keep between 140,000 and 300,000 of its own troops in the south. A little more than two years later, North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam. The south’s fall demonstrated, for neither the first nor the last time, that the surest way to end any war is for one side to win and the other to lose.
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That brings us to the “very stable genius” and his current plans to end the war in Ukraine. If elected again, Trump claims he would end the war in 24 hours, but he has been cagey about how he would pull off this miraculous feat, supposedly so that he could maintain his flexibility to negotiate.
Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, proclaimed after meeting with Trump last month that the former president’s formula was simple and cynical: “He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war. Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own feet.”
Trump aides told The Post that Orban’s statement, which sounded entirely plausible to me, was “false,” even though Trump has not publicly contradicted it. The aides explained that the presumptive GOP nominee’s actual plan is to push for “Ukraine to cede Crimea and Donbas border region to Russia” in return for an end to the Russian invasion.
If that is Trump’s plan, it is more preposterous than anything Nixon ever contemplated during the Vietnam War. It displays a witches’ brew of arrogance, ignorance and defeatism.
Start with the arrogance: Trump regards himself as the world’s greatest dealmaker despite a long track record, going back at least to 1990 and his first casino bankruptcy, indicating the opposite. As president, he was very good at abrogating treaties — including the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal — but not very successful at negotiating new ones. He announced the Abraham Accords but did not personally negotiate them, as Jimmy Carter did with the Camp David Accords, and he renamed the North American Free Trade Agreement rather than truly renegotiating it. His summits with Kim Jong Un did not produce North Korean denuclearization; Pyongyang’s weapons of mass destruction program is considerably more advanced now than it was when Trump and Kim met in Singapore in 2018.
Of greatest relevance to the conflict in Ukraine was Trump’s ill-fated attempt to negotiate an end to the war in Afghanistan. His 2020 deal with the Taliban was as one-sided as Nixon’s Paris peace accords with the North Vietnamese: Trump’s negotiators agreed to withdraw all U.S. troops within 14 months and free 5,000 Taliban prisoners. In return, the Taliban promised not to allow Afghanistan to become a haven for international terrorists. The Taliban was not required to stop fighting or reconcile with the Afghan government.