How Trump Can End the Ukraine War by Distancing from Zelensky and the EU
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The EU is pushing for more war to try to prop up its economy, but Putin’s gains cannot be pushed back short of going nuclear (literally).
The Pentagon decision to inform Europe that the U.S. may withdraw from NATO if Europe does not take over NATO by 2027 reflects a more fundamental decision by President Trump than merely that, as a practical matter, Russia has won the Ukraine war—a war Europe wants to continue on the wishful thinking that a war-footing economy will forestall the debt-ridden EU’s almost inevitable economic decline.
The grim reality is that the U.S. and the EU would have to engage in a nuclear war to dislodge Russia from the extensive territory in eastern Ukraine and Crimea that Russia already holds. Given time, Putin will almost certainly claim the remaining territory in the Donbas region of Ukraine that he insists is essential to achieve before realizing peace with Kyiv.
As I have argued previously, simply by withdrawing from the conflict, Trump can force an endgame to the war. Corruption-plagued Zelensky’s insistence that Ukraine must preserve sovereignty by refusing to concede Donbas to Putin has made clear to President Trump the economic reality of the war. Without U.S. munitions, financing, and military assistance, Zelensky’s plan for the EU to spend another $1 billion monthly to acquire military hardware elsewhere will be another futile waste in an already failed effort to dislodge Russia from Ukraine.
That Trump did not include the EU in formulating his 28-point peace plan made clear that Trump views the Europeans, not Russia, as the barrier to peace. Trump appears to have reached a turning point in October, when he rejected the plan advanced by General Keith Kellogg, U.S. Special Envoy on Ukraine, to supply Ukraine with long-range, nuclear weapons-capable Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range sufficient to strike deep into Russia.
Obviously, Trump realized that increasing Ukraine’s military ability to bring the war to Russia was a strategy that would escalate the far-from-being-a-proxy-war between NATO and Russia into a direct war between the United States and NATO, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other. The best efforts of U.S. Special Envoy Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, during a prolonged meeting with Putin in December failed to convince Putin to end the war by having the Russian military stand down in place. Having won significant battlefield gains in Donbas during September and October, Putin appears confident his military forces will be able to take the approximately 20 percent of the industrial-rich Donbas region still under Ukrainian control in the coming weeks.
The EU decision to scuttle Trump’s peace plan delivers an opening to fundamentally restructure the relationship between Europe and the United States that has existed since the end of World War II. Utilizing Vice President J.D. Vance as his point man, Trump can spark disagreements that turn the majority of EU nations against Germany and France, along with their legions of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels and Luxembourg, who see the strange marriage of neo-Marxism, cultural Maoism, and radical Islam as the doorway to their long-imagined globalist dystopia. By opening its borders to an invasion of Muslim “immigrants,” the EU has set in motion a revolutionary force determined to impose upon the continent a version of Sharia law that has nothing whatsoever in common with what the EU likes to call “democracy.”
David Horowitz, in his 2006 book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, was among the first to argue that Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1972 radical Islamic revolution in Iran had achieved a fusion between radical jihadist Islam and neo-Marxism that would ultimately typify Democrat party’s affinity for anti-American and anti-Israeli groups like Hamas. The greatest danger to Western Europe is not that Putin will invade Finland or Poland, but that radical Islamic anti-Christian immigrants will undermine the Western Civilization principles that have spurred the rise of Europe since the dawn of the Enlightenment.