We should welcome, not begrudge, the few good things Trump does

By Herbert Rothschild

In the comment section of a CNN story about President Donald Trump’s ending the “de minimis” trade policy that so favored imported goods from China, a reader posted the following comment: “All good Democrats need to resist Trump. We are entitled to affordable goods. If American jobs get shipped overseas, so be it. And the condition of those making the products is not our problem. Resist Trump at every step!”

Would this writer have expressed those same thoughts had it been Biden who was trying to level the playing field for U.S. workers?

When Barack Obama was elected president, Republicans in Congress opposed his legislative initiatives even when they resembled what Republicans themselves previously had favored. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell bears much responsibility for his party’s toxic partisanship. It depresses me that Democrats may behave in the same way. We’ll have to resist Trump on many fronts, but our resistance must be based on principle. We should applaud even bad people when they do good things. To do otherwise is to deprive good of its force.

My guess is that few Americans know what “de minimis” is. It entered the public forum on Feb. 5 when Trump announced a change of policy. I knew about it only because my older son is an executive in a midsized manufacturing firm. In my next column I’ll explain the policy and why people situated as he is were pleased by Trump’s rejection of it.

In this column I’ll explain why I was pleased when Trump announced that the U.S. will oppose NATO membership for Ukraine. As I’ve said before in Relocations, that is the necessary prelude to ending the war of attrition in Ukraine, a war Ukraine cannot win and, over time, is bound to lose.

In the talks with Western powers before Russia launched its 2022 invasion, Russia kept asking for such a declaration from the U.S. and its NATO allies, but we wouldn’t give it. After the invasion, almost everyone in this country insisted that it wouldn’t have stopped Russian President Vladimir Putin, who we said was determined to annex Ukraine in pursuit of a new Russian empire. I won’t pretend to know for sure that the guarantee would have stopped him, but what would have been the downside in trying? Unless, that is, we wanted him to invade.

I’ll reiterate for my more recent readers the relevant historical background to the invasion. In 1990, prior to withdrawing from what was then the Soviet Union, Ukraine adopted a Declaration of State Sovereignty that included a commitment to remain a permanently neutral state and not participate in any military blocs. Additionally, when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to the reunification of Germany, Western leaders pledged not to extend NATO’s presence beyond its boundaries at that time.

Despite those pledges, capitalizing on Russia’s weakness, in 1999 and again in 2004, we admitted into NATO countries right up to Russia’s borders. From the start of that expansion and without ceasing, Russia protested, to no avail. Then, in 2008, against even the advice of NATO partners like the French, the Bush administration green-lighted a process by which the states of Georgia and Ukraine might eventually join. That year, Russia invaded Georgia to prevent its pursuit of NATO membership. Then, after a U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine, Putin acted to protect Russia’s access to Crimea, its only warm-water naval base.

Crimea had been part of Russia from the time of Catherine the Great until Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred control over it to Ukraine on the 300th anniversary of the 1654 Treaty of Pereyaslav, which symbolized the historical ties between Ukraine and Russia. Given the geopolitical reality in 1954, Khrushchev never imagined that Ukraine might become part of a military alliance hostile to Russia.  

In the U.S., both our government and our mainstream media portrayed what they called the annexation of Crimea as Russian aggression, and Obama imposed economic sanctions. Although the transfer of sovereignty was completely bloodless, we refused to credit the possibility that the Crimeans favored returning to Russia. Yet, the 1959 census, the first after the transfer, showed that about 75% of Crimea’s population was ethnically Russian, with Ukrainians making up about 20%, and Russian was the everyday language of the region.

Only if you’re mired in the unreasonable partisan mindset I criticized at the start of this column will you attribute Putin’s military interference in Georgia and Ukraine solely to imperialism. His national security concerns were realistic and of longstanding. Once again I’ll ask my readers what the U.S. response would be if either Canada or Mexico, and especially if both of them, joined a military alliance that was created to oppose us.

One way to answer the question is to recall our near hysteria when, in response to the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuba turned to the Soviet Union for security assistance. As it happened, for one brief moment now called the Cuban Missile Crisis our fears were justified, although never again.

I’m not sure what peace deal Trump will force on Ukraine. The man is impulsive and thoughtless. The deal might be grossly unfair. I hope that what Ukraine will have to concede is limited to Russian control of Crimea and self-determination to those portions of the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk that rebelled against the un-elected government in Kiev when forces in the more populous west staged an illegal coup against the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych in late 2014 and early 2015. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will regard these concessions as a terrible defeat, but a more objective observer might discern some justice in such a settlement.

Will such a settlement embolden Putin to attack Poland or the Baltic states? Doing so would risk war with NATO, and even without U.S. participation, war with the NATO states would be on a scale immensely different than war with Ukraine, which has cost Russia far more than Putin apparently foresaw in 2022. Such warnings remind me of the self-serving “domino theory” used to justify our war in Vietnam. I may be wrong in the present case. I hope I’m not.

Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear Fridays. Opinions expressed in them represent the author’s views. Email Rothschild at herbertrothschild6839@gmail.com.