Terry Glavin: Time for NATO tell Trump he isn’t needed in Ukraine

U.S. President Donald Trump has disgraced himself by openly siding with Vladimir Putin in Russia’s war of terror and conquest in Ukraine. The sanctions-relief lifelines he’s thrown to Moscow and everything else over the past few days show that the moral squalor of the president’s various interventions can’t be described any other way, so the time has come for some serious decision-making in the NATO capitals.

For at least the next two years, in the deepening trade and hybrid-war conflicts that leave the world’s liberal democracies prone to Russia, China and the rest of the United Nations’ police-state bloc, European parliaments will have to arrange their affairs on the working assumption that the United States has gone over to the other side.

Against the constant menace of Beijing’s airspace incursions and the ceaseless background threat of an eventual Chinese invasion, Taiwan will have to hunker down and brace itself against the possibility that the long-stalled $14 billion in promised American arms shipments may never arrive. Chinese frigates will continue to harass Filipino supply boats in the South China Sea. The exodus of Japanese businesses from China — nearly 3,000 have pulled up stakes over the past two years — shows no sign of abating.

In Ottawa, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s jet-setting adventures in elbows-up “middle power” alliance-forging are already looking a bit like a mug’s game, at best. The big prize Carney has his sights on at the moment is a sordid strategic partnership with Neo-Ottoman strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Ankara. Carney will spend three days in Istanbul polishing a Canada-Turkey concordat involving military cooperation, nuclear energy and “sustainable mining.” Of vanishingly minor interest: Erdogan’s habit of jailing opposition figures, persecuting journalists, torturing criminals and making speeches about how Hamas is just an opposition party, and one day Jerusalem will be returned to the Umma.

That’s the thing about the “middle powers” that Carney counseled in Davos back in January to team up so that when they’re at the table with the global hegemons, they don’t end up on the menu. It’s all smiles and proper diplomatic etiquette when Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand declares that Canada and the glorified family compact known as Qatar share “common values.” Out there in the real world, the middle powers are just as likely to be torture states.

This is not the way you go about building a better world.

It’s likely enough that the Trump interregnum will not be followed by a return to the good old days when Carney’s class of statesmen and investment bankers could pretend that democracies were flourishing in the neoliberal world they built that made matters so comfortable for Beijing, Moscow, Islamabad, Riyadh, Phnom Penh and so on. The Carney government is right. That world is gone. And good riddance.

In the meantime, there are decisions to be made, and the great peril is that if they’re bad decisions, they’ll foreclose the better options that a more ambitious, muscular, disciplined and principled politics would allow.

Elbows Up is crowd-pleasing trance music, but Canadians should take care not to delude themselves. Before Donald Trump invited psychoanalysis to explain his otherwise unaccountably obsequious exertions in the company of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un and the rest, it was Justin Trudeau’s first foreign minister, Stephane Dion, who was Moscow’s pet in the NATO countries. Dion wanted to lift sanctions on Moscow, and on Tehran, too.

The good news is that by instructing his dodgy son-in-law Jared Kushner and the real estate magnate Steve Witkoff to make multi-billion-dollar business deals behind Ukraine’s back with Putin’s envoy and sovereign wealth manager Kirill Dmitriev — a McKinsey & Company alumnus, of course — President Trump doesn’t speak for the American people.

President Trump is defying both Houses of Congress in the sanctions relief he’s given Putin along with a diesel deal that will make Moscow a lot of money and otherwise change nothing in the price of fuel at the pumps before the midterm elections, which is what the stunt is supposed to be about. In his various postures and standpoints on Russia’s bloody invasion and occupation of Ukraine, Trump doesn’t appear to command the support of his own Republican Party, even, and not even his MAGA base within the party.

Americans are increasingly confused and disoriented, and understandably so. As recently as July, a bipartisan survey showed overwhelming American support for tougher measures on Russia. Among Democrats, 86 per cent supported stiffer sanctions targeting Moscow. Among avowed Trump voters, even, it was 83 per cent. By Oct. 14, a YouGov poll found that almost 40 per cent of American respondents figured that neither Russia nor Ukraine were owed sympathy in the war, or they were otherwise unsure what to think. But even so, only four per cent said they sympathized with Russia, and 57 per cent chose Ukraine.

Canadians have a bit more backbone. In a poll last October commissioned by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, 68 per cent of respondents backed continued assistance to Ukraine, although Conservatives let down the side a bit: only 54 per cent were on board.

The same day as that YouGov poll, Russia took advantage of a mysterious satellite internet-connectivity blackout that effectively disabled Ukrainian interceptor drones and short-circuited Ukrainian defences. In the worst barrage since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, Russian drones and missiles knocked out powerhouses and substations and plunged half of Kyiv into darkness. Either the White House ordered it or Trump confidante, MAGA megabillionaire and SpaceX commander Elon Musk is solely responsible for sabotaging Ukraine by disabling access to the SpaceX Starlink and Starshield systems.

The Americans will want to decide whether such immense power should be left in the hands of one slightly deranged private individual. But the most important decisions the NATO countries need to make begin with recognizing that Russia, backed by China, is already at war with Europe. The Soufan Centre documented 255 “hybrid” attacks in six European countries between Russia’s full-on invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and last December.

The most important decision: Tell the Trump administration that it has nothing useful to contribute, and so should vacate the field before it’s too late. The U.S. cut off aid to Ukraine shortly after Trump’s re-election, after all.

“Ukrainians would have been better off if Trump had done absolutely nothing regarding the war, just maintained the status quo,” says Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia and currently a professor at Stanford University. “Because what is now clear is that Trump and his team are far more interested in doing business deals with Putin and his corrupt cronies than ending the war.”

Trump, Kushner and Witkoff need to be told to go home, to mind their own business, and to stay the hell out of the way.

National Post