Pity the Oscars. There they were thinking they were hogging the stage for sheer compelling screen time – the frocks! The gum-throwing! The big, shocking reveals! Jeff Bezos at the after parties! But we all knew different. The most outrageously compelling watch of the last few days was the incendiary showdown on Friday at the White House between Ukraine’s President Zelensky and President Trump and V-P JD Vance. Then it was over to Keir Starmer to provide a more muted spectacle – from accompanying him to his car to the supportive hand on his shoulder. It was all a riveting display, because it was for real.
Can we take it as read that most of us were watching between our fingers as the showdown between Trump and Vance versus Zelensky unfolded on Friday? It was partly the fact that it was two against one, partly that the Ukrainian president was shouted down, partly the failure to acknowledge that Ukraine had indeed been the victim of aggression, partly the sheer petulance of JD Vance’s pronouncement: “you never said thank you”. Actually, JD Vance was the real disappointment: there we were – I can’t have been alone – thinking that the author of the Hillbilly Elegy, the underdog made good, the thoughtful one, would have been an influence for restraint on the flammable president, and there he was, looking like the school bully’s best friend.
Many of us, then, will be inclined to think that it’s the Europeans who are the grownups in this debacle, trying their best to restrain the wayward, unpredictable, unhappily crucial, US president, while Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron cobble together some sort of framework for a deal that includes the Ukrainian president.
But lest we quite get carried away by the notion of European gravitas versus Trumpian febrility, we owe it to ourselves to consider the outrageous possibility that Trump had a point. “I have determined that President Zelensky is not ready for Peace if America is involved because he feels that our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations. I don’t want Advantage. I want PEACE”, he wrote on social media.
And then there was his earlier, equally inflammatory post on Truth Social:
“Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and “TRUMP,” will never be able to settle. The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe…In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only “TRUMP,” and the Trump Administration, can do. Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring Peace, and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the “gravy train” going. I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died”.
The question is: does he want peace?
And the question is: does he want peace? If so, is he right? It may indeed be that he wants peace at the price of allowing Russian aggression to be seen to succeed in that Russia will be allowed to keep some of the territory that it has occupied, including the Donbas. But he is right to say that until he did the unthinkable and engaged with President Putin, there was nothing remotely like a peace process; rather, there was what looked very much like a war of attrition in which the only strategy evident was that one side would buckle either in terms of lives lost or the sheer cost of war.
The Ukrainians gave themselves additional leverage by invading Russia’s Kursk region but by the time Trump took office, the war was going nowhere. It is untrue to say, as he does, that millions have unnecessarily died; for actual military casualties, the BBC’s estimate is that the figure is roughly 70,400 Ukrainians and up to 200,000 Russians, excluding civilian casualties. Trump is also right to say that the Europeans – us – have had the opportunity to pursue peace by any means during the three years of the conflict.
I would say myself that we should at least entertain the possibility that an end to the conflict is preferable to a continuation of the conflict. It may mean putting Ukraine’s pathway to NATO membership (which was never a good plan) on hold indefinitely; ditto the route to EU membership. The PM is obviously right that Ukraine cannot be excluded from the negotiations. He is also right that there needs to be a coalition of the willing (for which read Britain and France) to be in Ukraine to guarantee its security – though this does embarrassingly make clear the extent of our cuts to conventional troop numbers under successive Tory governments. There would need to be support from the US for that operation. But given all this, is Trump not right that it is time to bring an end to a conflict for which there was no real end in sight until he came lumbering into the offing?
As for Trump’s contention that half of the $380 billion in US aid to Ukraine has gone missing… let’s keep an open mind on this. It would be astonishing if a country which already was already 105 in a corruption index of 180 countries in 2024, according to Transparency International (a significant improvement on its previous standing) could absorb hundreds of billions of dollars without some at least of it going astray. It is impossible to run an audit of spending during a war, but that should be one of our priorities in the aftermath of the conflict. As for the distribution of reconstruction contracts after the conflict, this is – pace the Balkans – where most money is misappropriated and where the possibilities of corruption are self-evident.
President Trump is flashy, febrile, combative, but let’s judge him by substance. He hasn’t invaded Iraq; he hasn’t taken down a Libyan president; he hasn’t committed war crimes – all of which can be laid at the doors of his more urbane predecessors. He may of course invade Greenland or impose a terrible settlement on Gaza. Let’s see. But for now can we at least entertain the possibility that he may have a point? Peace is better than war. And until now it wasn’t happening.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
