From Munich To Trump Tower: Appeasing Putin in 2025— The Art Of The Surrender

Appeasement, MAGA-Style: Trump’s Surrender In Ukraine

Trump is— has always been— a classic schoolyard bully. He blusters, threatens and manipulates, always targeting those he perceives as weaker or more principled than himself. He surrounds himself with enablers, avoids real accountability and hides behind blame-shifting and bravado when challenged. Whether stiffing contractors, mocking the vulnerable or using the machinery of government to settle personal scores, Trump’s instinct is always the same: dominate, humiliate and walk away before consequences arrive. His entire business and political career has been an extension of this pathology— louder meaner, and more dangerous with every passing year.

But now the playground is Ukraine, and the stakes are nothing less than European security and the survival of a sovereign nation. Rather than stand firmly with Kyiv and its/our allies, Trump is pushing a deal that would reward Putin, a murderous tyrant who appears to have something on Trump,  with vast swaths of Ukrainian territory— essentially pressuring Ukraine to surrender and calling it "peace." Just like a bully, Trump pretends he’s stopping a fight while holding the victim in a headlock and demanding they apologize. He’s desperate for a Nobel Peace Prize but he isn’t negotiating a ceasefire as much as brokering capitulation— without Ukraine’s consent, without Europe’s confidence, and without any guarantee that Putin won’t simply regroup and attack again.

Yesterday, Donato Mancini, Alberto Nardelli and Darnya Krasnolutska reported that the Trump-Putin scheme “would lock in Russia’s occupation of territory seized during its military invasion… Putin is demanding that Ukraine cede its entire eastern Donbas area to Russia as well as Crimea, which his forces illegally annexed in 2014. That would require Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to order a withdrawal of troops from parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions still held by Kyiv, handing Russia a victory that its army couldn’t achieve militarily since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.”

Putin always knew he could get this deal from the weak, blustery Trump even if no one else would buy in. “Zelenskiy,” they wrote, “risks being presented with a take-it-or-leave-it deal to accept the loss of Ukrainian territory, while Europe fears it would be left to monitor a ceasefire as Putin rebuilds his forces… Putin on Friday held phone calls with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as well as with the leaders of South Africa, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Belarus to share details of his Aug. 6 meeting with Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow, according to the Kremlin. Having returned to the White House in January on a pledge to rapidly resolve Europe’s worst conflict since World War II, Trump has expressed increasing frustration with Putin’s refusal to agree to a ceasefire. The two leaders held six phone calls since February and Witkoff met with Putin five times in Russia to try to broker an agreement.”

I wonder if anyone has ever told Trump, a man woefully ignorant of history, the story of Neville Chamberlain, Hitler and Czechoslovakia. If he’s even ever heard of it, he probably thinks Chamberlain was the hero of that story— just like he sees himself now. But appeasement dressed up as diplomacy is still appeasement, and history has already shown us where that leads. Like Chamberlain did in 1938 (“Peace in our time”), Trump is paving the way to further aggression, emboldening autocrats by showing them that America, under his watch, is willing to sacrifice democracy, sovereignty and principle for a quick PR win. This is MAGA statesmanship: cowardice masquerading as dealmaking, and the cost will be dear.

“Alongside those discussions,” the trio wrote, “Ukraine was seeking security guarantees to ensure any truce holds and urging allies to keep Russia’s economy under pressure through sanctions… Putin has repeatedly insisted that his war goals remain unchanged. They include demands for Kyiv to accept neutral status and abandon its ambition of NATO membership, and to accept the loss of Crimea and the other four eastern and southern Ukrainian regions to Russia. Parts of Donetsk and Luhansk have been under Russian occupation since 2014, when the Kremlin incited separatist violence shortly after the operation to seize Crimea. Putin declared the four Ukrainian regions to be ‘forever’ part of Russia after announcing that he was annexing them in September 2022, even as his forces have never fully controlled those territories. Ukraine cannot constitutionally cede territory and it has said it won’t recognize Russian occupation and annexation of its land… [Señor TACO] had previously offered to recognize Crimea as Russian as part of any deal to halt the war, and to effectively cede Russian control of parts of other Ukrainian regions.”