Peace through strength and other American illusions

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Peace through strength and other American illusions

Once again, I am grateful to an Indian broadcaster, for inviting me to participate in a round table discussion of Donald Trump’s latest remarks on settling the Russia-Ukraine war by calling for an ‘immediate’ meeting with Vladimir Putin at which he expects to negotiate from a position of strength.

I expect that the link to the video of this broadcast will be passed along to me in a day or two by News X and I will post it then. But what I came up with as I prepared for my moments before the microphone merit sharing without delay.

The touchstone of this interview was the quote from Trump that justified his enthusiasm for meeting with Putin NOW. I paraphrase: ‘We have real power over Putin.”  The logic is that in the prospective meeting the Russian leader will come to heel and agree to a cease fire without preconditions, placing Trump on his path to nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

By curious coincidence, earlier today I started the culling of my lengthy manuscript for my about to be published ‘War Diaries’ which open with essays I wrote in the early spring of 2021, when Washington expressed great concern over the 80,000 troops that the Russians had amassed at the Ukrainian border as a warning against a savage Ukrainian attack on the rebellious Donbas regions that seemed to be approaching.  The Biden team called for a meeting with Putin to defuse the tension and this led to their summit in Geneva in June 2021.  But at the start of the initiative for this summit, the United States rolled out new harsh sanctions on Russia which were intended to show beyond all doubt who had the upper hand.  It was to be ‘negotiations from a position of strength.’  Sound familiar? 

Sad to say, it would appear that Donald Trump and his advisers have not bothered to open the State Department files for the period before and during the Biden-Putin summit.  And if they did, they learned nothing.

From the day after the inauguration, Trump’s remarks about ending the war have shown utter ignorance not only about facts but about the culture and mindset of those with whom he proposes to negotiate. What he said about the Russians having been helpful in America’s winning WWII was taken as sacrilegious in Moscow. May 9th is the most important day in the calendar of most Russians today as they celebrate THEIR victory over Nazi Germany. They know that three-quarters of the Wehrmacht forces were engaged on the Eastern Front against Russia.  Each and every Russian adult knows how many of their soldiers and civilians died in the war, and to hear Trump’s careless and ignorant statement on the subject could only undermine respect for him in advance of his planned meeting with the Russian leadership.

The notion implicit in Trump’s remarks today on how he will do a deal with Saudi Arabia to ensure that OPEC steps up oil exports to bring down the price and so force Russia to the negotiating table reveals his complete ignorance of economic realities, not to mention political realities.   We are not living in 1985 when Reagan did such a deal with the Saudis, when the price of a barrel fell to $12 and the USSR economy was devastated.  No, in today’s Russia, gas and oil revenues to the state are lower than the taxes it collects from the industrial economy, which are surging. Russia’s economy is far more diverse and healthier than it has been in more than 100 years. The balance of payments of Russia in 2024 was positive to the tune of $50 billion and there is little that Mr. Trump can do to change that fact.

Now, as for political realities, they are presently dictated by the military realities.  When the United States and its friends in the EU declared in the spring of 2023 that the conflict would be settled on the field of battle, they little knew how right they were.  IT IS BEING SETTLED THERE, definitively and in Russia’s favor.  Don’t take my word for it. Just pick up the daily editions of the Russia-hating Financial Times and you see the fulsome reports of how the Ukrainian forces are being pushed back along the whole line of confrontation in disarray and at great cost in casualties.  These are not debating points; they are incontrovertible facts that for some reason Mr. Donald Trump ignores.

Yes, there will likely be a summit between Trump and Putin. But the Russians are sure to insist that ‘sherpas’ from both sides prepare the way to ensure that something substantive will be achieved. And that something substantive will likely have nothing to do with Ukraine, which the Russians are solving without any help from Washington, thank you.  It will be about some Yalta 2.0 and the spheres of influence of the world’s three super powers:  the USA, Russia and China.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

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Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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3 thoughts on “Peace through strength and other American illusions”

  1. Let us stipulate that the United States is a state sponsor of terrorism and only a state sponsor of terrorism, which is to say a toothless military power. Yalta? Spheres of influence? How do you negotiate with a state sponsor of terrorism, when you know that disguise and dishonesty are the only items in its toolkit? I really do wonder when any sort of Trump Putin summit will take place, and I feel that every day that passes moves that summit farther away.

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  2. I’m writing a blog on things Trump said and the remark about the Soviets “helping out” is hard to deal with without emotion. Also, I saw in his first interview (with Sean Hannity) he resurrected the claim that the reason the U.S. does not have hypersonic missiles and Russia does is because Russia stole the U.S. plans and designs for a hypersonic during the Obama administration. Since then, the U.S. has not been able to redesign it. The only reason Russia has hypersonic missiles is because they are thieves. I am speechless.

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  3. Pingback: Peace through strength and other American illusions – Emma Olive

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