"What a Ukraine peace treaty brokered by Trump might look like"
by Gilbert Doctorow, gilbertdoctorow.com (July 22, 2024)
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/07/22/what-a-ukraine-peace-treaty-brokered-by-trump-might-look-like/
Before getting into Mr Doctorow's essay, it pays to explore the term "brokered" which also goes by the name of "mediated":
The following dissertation comes in response to India offering its good offices as mediator between Ukraine and Russia.
Alexander Mercouris, The Duran (July 28, 2024)
https://theduran.com/ukr-says-no-brics-talks-proposal-lavrov-firm-smo-goals-rus-konstantinovka-toretsk-cauldron-forms/
53:17 Alexander Mercouris “The key thing to understand about mediation is that mediators are not supposed to come forward with their own plans. That is not what mediators are about. The United States has pretended to act as a mediator in the Arab-Israeli conflict by repeatedly coming up with its own ideas and its own plans, ideas which – most people would agree – have been tilted very favorably towards the Israelis, and this is one of the prime reasons, in my opinion, why all of those supposed mediation attempts by the United States have never succeeded in achieving peace in the Middle East, because the United States, far from acting as a mediator, has sought to impose on the conflicting parties its own ideas.”
[54:57] “A mediator does not come with ideas. A mediator speaks to each side and conveys to each side the views and opinions of the other. And the mediator, gradually – and it’s a complex and time consuming and often very thankless task – manages to get the two sides to speak with each other. Usually in mediation there is no direct contact between the opposing sides, at least at the beginning. Anyway, gradually the mediator is able to isolate what the points of conflict between the two sides are. Also, the points where they actually agree. Gradually a dialogue between the conflicting parties through the mediator takes place and then the mediator is eventually able to bring them together into face-to-face discussions, and then out of those discussions, possibly in fact in my experience, more often than not, an agreement is eventually found.”
. . .
The simple point of this extended explication of the meaning of "brokered" or "mediated," amounts to disqualifying a President Trump -- or any U. S. President -- from "brokering" or "mediating" any agreement between two warring adversaries when the United States, as principle architect of the war, has no claim whatsoever to honesty or impartiality.
Back to Mr Doctorow's essay:
For those among you who still believe that my high expectations of a Donald Trump 2.0 administration in the domain of foreign relations are misplaced, I offer some considerations based on the ‘warts and all’ presentation of Trump’s thinking and belly-led inclinations coming from his former ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell. See
Former US Ambassador Richard Grenell Discusses Trump, the US Election, Germany | RONZHEIMER [ENG]
Bild (July 19, 2024)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2lOC6CLh3I
Sadly this two day old video has received only 22,000 views. It merits vastly more attention. What you get here is the underlying logic of what the mainstream media falsely denounce as the ‘isolationism’ of MAGA. In fact the isolationism is nothing more than drawing back from the overextended position as global policeman that the country cannot afford financially.
This video provides a wealth of clues as to how Trump’s promise to snuff out the wars that Biden lit can be achieved quickly. Most importantly it allows us to see beyond the bravado of transactional foreign policy based on overwhelming U.S. strength and bullying. What we see instead is the fundamental weakness of the U.S. position that necessitates the turn away from military solutions in favor of diplomacy and, second, the realization that the United States has no fundamental interests at stake in how the diplomatic solution is structured other than to see that both sides make compromises that ensure the deal will stick and be properly enforced by global powers in a way that Minsk-2 was not.
Throughout the interview, Grenell takes as his point of reference the unsupportable 37 trillion dollar national debt, which must be cut back, not added to in the years of a future Trump administration. This can only be realized by ending the wars that Washington is fueling NOW.
I put this explanation of why the United States under Trump will cut all further assistance to Ukraine together with the explanation we heard from Senator J.D. Vance, now Trump’s running mate, in his speech on the Senate floor just before the fateful vote on an additional 60 billion dollars appropriation to Kiev: that in the ongoing war of attrition the United States simply does not have the manufacturing capacity to send to Ukraine the 155 mm artillery shells and other munitions and weapons systems that it needs to defend itself against the greatly superior Russian armed forces, which are backed up by the world’s biggest production of these necessities of war.
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Given the realism underlying these guiding principles of the future Trump foreign policy which will operate on the old truth that politics is the art of the possible, given the longstanding foundation of Russian foreign policy in the very same tradition of the Realist school that puts national interest foremost, what may we expect to find in the peace settlement that Trump may broker as from the days immediately following his election on 5 November?
I hazard the guess that notwithstanding the claims that Trump may make that he has forced concessions on both sides to reach a peace, that peace will be largely based on the latest proposal by Vladimir Putin on the day before the phony Summit on Peace held in Switzerland in June.
To be sure, the Russians will give up their territorial claims to the entirety of the 4 provinces they have already incorporated into the Russian Federation but never fully conquered. It may even be that they will keep only two of these, Donetsk and Lugansk, while Kherson and Zaporozhie are returned to Ukraine under conditions that guaranty substantial autonomy to them, in the sense of the Minsk-2 accords that were never implemented for lack of active intervention by the West European guarantors of the accords. After all, Russia’s national interest was never territorial aggrandizement but its security from NATO encroachment.
Why the distinction between the 4 provinces? Firstly, because Lugansk and Donetsk constitute the most heavily Russophone part of Ukraine and suffered the greatest losses of people killed and property destroyed from the 8 years of shelling and ‘anti-terror’ marauding by Ukrainian military units as from 2014 to the start of the Special Military Operation in 2022. They are also the most valuable territory for their metallurgical and general manufacturing traditions. And they are essential to ensure the viability of Russia’s hold on Crimea. Letting go Kherson and Zaporozhie would return to Ukraine valuable Black Earth land which is essential to ensure the economic viability of the rump state.
At the same time, surely the Russians will set as a non-negotiable demand the formal refusal of Ukraine to ever seek NATO membership, a prohibition on the placement of foreign military infrastructure or personnel on Ukrainian territory and limits on the size and capabilities of the Ukrainian armed forces.
It is virtually certain that Russia will raise no objections to Ukraine joining the European Union. And it is conceivable that Russia will contribute to the rebuilding of Ukraine by ceding part or all of the 350 billion dollars in frozen Russian state assets now in the West as an act of good will, not as war reparations. Russia can well afford to do this because it recouped a large part of this amount in the first year of the war from the vastly inflated prices of the hydrocarbons it sold on world markets as a result of global disruptions in energy supplies. In return, Russia will surely demand, and likely the West will agree to rescind all economic sanctions that have been imposed on the country.
I believe that a package closely resembling what I have outlined above can be sold to the American public, especially if there is provision of massive funding for the reconstruction of Ukraine using the frozen funds with Russian consent and thereby avoiding the risks of overturning the global financial system inherent in the presently discussed outright confiscation of Russian state assets. Moreover, the exchange of land for money is a widely accepted solution that even the much abused Ukrainian citizenry might well accept, were they to be asked in a plebiscite.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024
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[Comments]
Roger
July 22, 2024 at 10:41 am
I always thoroughly enjoy and appreciate your insights. However, I suspect that in any settlement Russia will demand all the land in the 4 Novorossiya oblasts (incl. Kherson city and Zaporozhye city).
1. The land cannot be given away willynilly, as the Russian Constitution prohibits such an action.
2. Also, given the Ukrainian history of cutting off water to Crimea, I cannot see any way Russia would trust Ukraine not to cut off the water once again.
3. After 70k Russian deaths, it would be political suicide for Putin to surrender the inhabitants of Kherson and Zaporozhye oblasts to the neo-Nazis. (Remember what happened to ‘collaborators’ in Bucha who had committed the sin of accepting food supplies from the Russians – they were murdered by the neo-Nazis.)
4. Ukraine has not yet been denazified. If a neo-nazi regime is allowed to continue, they will break any agreements: remember the February 2014 agreement that Germany/France didn’t honour after 24 hours, then Minsk 1, Minsk 2, Steinmeier Formula, March 2022 heads of agreement, Grain Initiative. Six times at least that Ukraine and the West have broken agreements.