Trump is throwing away America’s Cold War victory
At the rate that the Trump administration is alienating America’s friends and comforting its enemies, Russians may soon be triumphantly celebrating VA Day — Victory Over America Day — with vodka toasts, fireworks and cannon salutes.
Moscow will be plastered with giant posters of a smirking Russian President Vladimir Putin. Video projections on the Kremlin walls will play endless loops of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s humiliating Oval Office meeting with President Trump and Vice President Vance. That meeting reminded Lech Walesa, the Solidarity movement leader who helped free Poland from Soviet control, and other former Polish political prisoners, of their “interrogations by the Security Service” in the Communist era.
Victory Over America Day will not simply celebrate a victory over Ukraine — which Trump appears to be handing Putin on a silver platter by suspending military aid and intelligence sharing — but the break-up of NATO and the retreat of the U.S. from Europe.
That was the holy grail of Soviet leaders, from Joseph Stalin to Leonid Brezhnev, during the Cold War. But the multi-generational, bipartisan leadership of American presidents from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan blocked the Soviet Union from achieving those goals — while avoiding another world war. Their Cold War leadership tore down the Iron Curtain, freeing tens of millions in Eastern Europe from tyranny and leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
If you are looking for examples of successful American statesmanship, read up on these Cold War presidents. They were tough, but they knew how to make deals when it served American interests. They understood who were America’s enemies and who were its friends. They never tried to shake down their allies.
Truman rescued West Berlin with the Berlin Airlift, and his Marshall Plan revived a devastated post-war Europe, which became a vital ally and American trading partner. After forcing the Soviet Union to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba, Kennedy pivoted, in his famous 1963 “A Strategy of Peace” speech at American University, to proposing a partial nuclear test ban treaty, which the Soviet Union signed. In his 1987 Brandenburg Gate address, Reagan stood in front of the Berlin Wall and shouted at the Soviet president, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” And it came down.
The Cold War nadir for America was in South Vietnam. Our ally was a nation whose own army, despite in-country American soldiers and enormous military aid and training, simply lacked the will to fight. Today, Trump is undermining Ukraine, a gallant and courageous democracy whose will to fight, even without American boots on the ground, is undeniable.
Just weeks into Trump’s second term, the video of the last 80 years has begun to run in reverse: Moscow dominates first Ukraine and then Eastern Europe, NATO disintegrates and America withdraws from Europe to sit “in the parlor with a loaded shotgun, waiting.” That was how Secretary of State Dean Acheson described the U.S. posture after World War I, an isolationist strategy that was rejected by the Cold War presidents.
Putin is close to reversing the Cold War’s outcome, but not because of Russian power. The Trump administration is simply throwing our Cold War victory away and, as far as anyone can tell, getting nothing in return except vague promises of access to Russian minerals and an invitation to the Kremlin.
No doubt Putin, who knows how to stroke Trump’s galaxy-size vanity, will host him for a seven-course state dinner in the Grand Kremlin Palace, but the true nature of that event will escape no one but the honored guest.
It will be a surrender ceremony.
Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.”
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