For nearly a month, Vladimir Putin has delivered a daily masterclass in incompetence and brutality. The ex-KGB spymaster and world-class kleptocrat was the guy Donald Trump wanted to be. Just weeks ago, the former president lavished praise on his idol and derided Nato as “not so smart”.
How’s that working out, Donald?
The world cheers for Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Ukraine, his besieged country. Russia’s economy is on its knees, its stock market shuttered, its shelves bare. The rouble is worth less than a penny. The west is not as decadent or as flaccid as the tyrant-in-the-Kremlin and President Bone-Spurs bet.
With impeccable timing, Marie Yovanovitch delivers Lessons from the Edge, her memoir. The author is the former US ambassador to Ukraine who Trump fired during his attempt to withhold aid to Kyiv in return for political dirt, an effort that got him impeached. For the first time.
Yovanovitch tells a story of an immigrant’s success. But, of course, her short but momentous stint in the last administration receives particular attention.
On the page, Yovanovitch berates Trump for “his obsequiousness to Putin”, which she says was a “frequent and continuing cause for concern” among the diplomatic corps. Trump, she writes, saw “Ukraine as a ‘loser’ country, smaller and weaker than Russia”. If only thousands of dead Russian troops could talk.
Trump was commander-in-chief but according to Yovanovitch, he didn’t exactly have the best handle on where his soldiers were deployed.
At an Oval Office meeting in 2017 with Petro Poroshenko, then president of Ukraine, Trump asked HR McMaster, his national security adviser, if US troops were deployed in Donbas in eastern Ukraine, territory now invoked by Putin as grounds for his invasion.
“An affirmative answer to that question would have meant that the United States was in a shooting war with Russia,” Yovanovitch writes.
In the moment, she says, she also pondered if it was “better to interpret Trump’s question as suggesting that the commander-in-chief thought it possible that US troops were fighting Russia-led forces, or instead as an indicator that the president wasn’t clear which country was on the other side of the war against Ukraine”.
Let that sink in. And remember this. According to Mary Trump, the former president’s niece, Trump mocked his father as he succumbed to Alzheimer’s.
Yovanovitch’s parents fled the Nazis, then the Soviets. She was born in Canada and her family moved to the US when she was three. Later she received an offer from Smith, an all-women’s school in Massachusetts, but opted for Princeton. It had gone co-ed less than a decade earlier but Yovanovitch counted on it being more fun.
In her memoir, she devotes particular attention to snubs and put-downs endured on account of gender. One of her professors, a European history specialist, announced that he opposed women being admitted. After that, Yovanovitch stayed silent during discussion. It was only after she received an A, she writes, that the professor noticed her and made sure to include her. She really had something to say.
Lessons from the Edge also recalls a sex discrimination lawsuit brought in 1976 by Alison Palmer, a retired foreign service officer, against the US Department of State. The case was settled, but only in 1989 and with an acknowledgment of past wrongs by the department.
State had “disproportionately given men the good assignments”, Palmer said. Yovanovitch writes: “I felt – and still feel – tremendous gratitude to [her] for fighting for me and so many other women.”
Yovanovitch would serve in Moscow and as US ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Ukraine. She worked with political appointees and careerists. She offers particular praise for Republicans of an earlier, saner era.
She lauds George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, for professionalism and commitment to country. Shultz reminded new ambassadors that “my” country meant the US, not their place of posting. He also viewed diplomacy as a constant effort, as opposed to a spasmodic intervention.
Yovanovitch also singles out James Baker, secretary of state to George HW Bush, for helping the president forge a coalition to win the Gulf war.
“Department folks found him cold and aloof,” Yovanovitch recalls. “But it was clear immediately that he was a master of diplomacy.”
Baker showed flashes of idealism. The US stood for something. As younger men, both Shultz and Baker were marines.
In marked contrast, Yovanovitch gives the Trump administration a thumping. She brands Rex Tillerson’s 14-month tenure as secretary of state as “near-disastrous”. As for Tillerson’s successor, Mike Pompeo, Yovanovitch lambasts his “faux swagger” and his refusal to defend her when she came under attack from Trump and his minions.
Amid Trump’s first impeachment, over Ukraine, Yovanovitch testified: “The policy process is visibly unravelling … the state department is being hollowed out.”
Loyalty to subordinates was not Pompeo’s thing – or Trump’s. “Lick what’s above you, kick what’s below you” – that was more their mantra. True to form, in 2020 Pompeo screamed at a reporter: “Do you think Americans give a fuck about Ukraine?”
Two years later, they do. At the same time, Pompeo nurses presidential ambitions. Good luck with that.
Yovanovitch rightly places part of the blame for Putin’s invasion on Trump.
“He saw Ukraine as a pawn that could be bullied into doing his bidding,” she said in a recent interview. “I think that made a huge impact on Zelenskiy and I think that Putin and other bad actors around the world saw that our president was acting in his own personal interests.”
What comes next for the US, Ukraine and Russia? Pressure mounts on the Biden administration to do more for Ukraine – at the risk of nuclear conflict. Congressional Republicans vote against aid to Zelenskiy but demand a more robust US response.
Recently, Trump admitted that he was “surprised” by Putin’s “special military operation”. He “thought he was negotiating”, he said. A very stable genius, indeed.
Lessons from the Edge is published in the US by Mariner Books
