If Trump’s goal in opening peace talks with Putin is to end the current Ukraine war and ensure Russia doesn’t begin a new chapter a few years down the road, he has a strange way of going about it. Instead of presenting Putin with a list of actions the U.S. will take unless Russia agrees to workable guarantees of Ukraine’s borders, Trump’s Secretay of Defence announced NATO membership for Ukraine is off the table. Then, his Vice President infers the right-of-center German Christian Democrats should hook up with the pro-Russian Alternative for Germany (Afd).

If this wasn’t bad enough, Trump chose to denigrate Ukraine’s President as a Dictator responsible for the continuing war. Trump demands President Zelinsky hold an election. According to Trump, he has little support in Ukraine. (The latest poll has Zellinsky’s popularity at 57%),

Trump proposed that Ukraine pledge its natural resources for U.S. development to secure any more U.S. aid, and no U.S. forces will ever be involved in maintaining Ukraine’s borders. What is strange is that many of the resources are in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine,

Putin must be dancing a jig over his good fortune. He can visualize sharing a Nobel Peace Prize with Trump while waiting to devour the rest of Ukraine for dessert. He doesn’t have to give up a thing.

What caused Trump to denounce the Ukrainian President? He dared complain about his exclusion from the talks that would decide his nation’s fate. One of the few remaining columnists, George Will, whose first memories were of World War II, reminds us of a similar circumstance on the road to that horrible war. The leaders of Great Britain, France, Italy, and Germany gathered in Munich to decide the fate of Czechoslovakia. The one excluded was the leader of that nation.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain claimed the agreement reached there promised “Peace in our Time.” Seven months later, Germany completed the takeover of the doomed nation. History gives Zelinsky every reason to object to Trump and Putin deciding the life or death of his country. Trump even excluded friendly European nations from the talks. The U.S. President’s anti-involvement stance echoes Chamberlain’s observation about “a quarrel in a faraway land between people of which we know nothing.”

Trump bases his position on the claim that Ukraine could never win the war. Russia is just too strong, but that has never been true. At the beginning of the war, I and others proposed the steps the West needed to take to punish Russia. The best weapons and training to hit back at any place Russia’s war-making capabilities resided would bring Putin’s rag-tag army to ruin. In turning back Russia’s mass attack, the Ukrainian troops showed superiority. They just needed the weapons.

Unfortunately, they never received them in a timely fashion. Even when they eventually did get them, the U.S. restricted their use. Ukraine couldn’t even hit back at the bases from which Russia launched devastating attacks on civilians. We may never know why President Biden adopted such self-defeating policies, but there is no reason to continue them now.

Even now, Trump can force Putin to give up his dream of restoring the Soviet Empire. Rather than giving the Russian leader virtually everything even before you sat down to talk, Trump can inform Putin unless he puts substantial concessions on the table, he’ll face new sanctions, including secondary ones, on everything Russia does. Second, we will provide the weapons and training for Ukraine to hit back anywhere in Russia. It’s time

Russian civilians feel the same pain the Ukrainians have endured for three years.

Why will this program work? Today, Russia isn’t the relative power the USSR appeared to have been during the Cold War. It will probably surprise people that Canada, the country Trump derides as weak, has a greater GDP than Russia. Trump wouldn’t let that nation push us around. Brazil has a greater GDP than Russia, but we wouldn’t allow it to gobble up its neighbors.

Why are we cow-towing to a minor power? Russia has nuclear weapons, but so what? We aren’t going to use them first. Just like the Cold War, Russia isn’t about to commit suicide.

Russia has put in everything it has, including thousands of North Korean mercenaries, and has only massive casualties and a collapsing economy to show for it. Already, 40% of its economy is devoted to the war, and inflation is running wild. Russia has no more to give.

Reagan won the Cold War by letting the USSR know he would produce weaponry they couldn’t keep up with, and the communist nation collapsed under the strain of a race it couldn’t win.

Rather than giving in, we must tell Putin we’re raising and calling your bluff.

So why is tough genius Trump rolling over for Putin? Possibly, he thinks Russia could be a valuable ally against China. This idea makes no sense. Russia is a junior partner in an alliance with China. Would it switch sides, giving China a reason to grab Siberia with all its resources? Would we use our military to backstop a Russian army that struggled against the much smaller Ukraine in a war with China?

China is the only real threat facing Russia. For all of Putin’s talk, NATO has never wanted to attack Russia. If Russia surrendered to the West tomorrow, we would refuse to occupy that nation. Who wants to be responsible for a mess that’s not worth the trouble?

A more likely reason is Trump remains the same underinformed narcissist he has always been. For all his claims that he was against invading Iraq before we went in and that he would’ve retained Bagram Airbase, avoiding the disastrous Biden Afgan pullout, there is no evidence supporting these assertions of superior wisdom. He turned against the Iraq war only after it went south. There is nothing in his agreement with the Tailban about any troops remaining anywhere in that country, much less Bagram.

It is well to remember Trump didn’t allow the Afgan government to participate in the talks with the Taliban, fatally undermining it. Sound familiar?

Others were able to lay out the facts of a situation in Trump’s first administration, but they’re gone. His then-V.P. Mike Pence probably had the most influence. Pence has blasted Trump’s Ukraine approach in the present situation, but he’s no longer in the White House.

It’s possible that Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, who Pence initially bought into the White House, will be a voice of reason. In the past, he did not doubt that Putin was responsible for the war and only respected strength.

I wish I could be more optimistic, but when conservative historian Niall Ferguson alluded to the historical perspective of the situation, the present V.P., J.D. Vance, responded with an incoherent rant. Vance dismisses Ferguson’s showing how another president handled a prior situation by saying, ” a different historical period and a different conflict. That’s another currency of these people: reliance on irrelevant history.” Vance seems unacquainted with George Santayana’s observation, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I fear another Munich-sized error is in the making.