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If President Donald Trump wants a full-on riot within the Republican Party, going along with Vladimir Putin’s idea for a “Yalta 2” summit with Xi Jinping is the way to do it.
Putin knows that the original Yalta was a triumph for Joseph Stalin, who persuaded an ailing President Franklin Roosevelt to open the door to postwar Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.
Look: Yalta One was a meeting of allies — this new one would be Trump volunteering to be outnumbered by our determined foes.
It doesn’t matter how much contempt the prez has for Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky — setting out a plan to resolve the war without him present recalls another conference last century: the Munich Agreement that fed Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler.
That “peace in our time” deal ensured that British Premier Neville Chamberlain would go down in history as one of history’s greatest chumps.
Yet the biggest problems start long before any sitdown.
However much Trump thinks he can work with Xi, however charmed he is by Putin, doesn’t matter: Simply announcing he means to do this would instantly prompt all-out rebellion by much of the GOP, further sinking the party’s chances in the midterms.
It’s such a gift to the Democrats that it might hand them 60 Senate seats — enough to end an impeachment process with conviction.
Heck, it might outrage several GOP senators into going along.
For all Trump’s desire to end the carnage in Ukraine, this won’t do it: Putin’s looking to win via diplomacy what he can’t on the battlefield, and would be happy to see it destroy Trump’s presidency as an added bonus.
You say it nicely, Mr. President, but tell Vlad it’s a flat “no.”