A friend of mine posted on Facebook[1] that “All I am saying is give war a chance” is the message of “the left” and of all others who are opposed to President Trump’s approach to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Those who used to sing “All I am saying is give peace a chance” have lost their way, and it’s just because they hate Trump.

I will not pretend that I like Donald Trump — but that is not the issue here.

President Trump’s approach to the war is equivalent to telling a home owner who has suffered a home invasion by the bully next door to stop resisting the invader and give up claim to the parts of the house the invader has occupied, with no guarantees that the invader will not push to eventually occupy the entire house.

At the infamous, disgusting “photo op” at the White House last week President Zelenskyj listed a number of ceasefires agreed between Russia and Ukraine which Putin’s Russia has broken, as the reason for Ukraine’s reluctance to enter into yet another ceasefire with the neighbor who 11 years ago “annexed” their front porch and who 3 years ago started the full scale home invasion that is still going on.

I will always be thankful for the American contribution towards ridding my homeland and all of Europe from the madman Hitler and his nazi henchmen; but I am afraid that if President Trump had been around in the 1940s he would have pressured Britain and France as well as all of the other countries occupied by the Germans to enter into a ceasefire that would have cemented the status quo, with the nazi hordes in control of most of Europe.

What President Trump and those who so enthusiastically support him fail to understand is that peace is more than merely the absence of killing; that yielding to the invader is not peace but appeasement and is an invitation to invade another neighbor.

And those of us bystanders who see Trump’s refusal to honor his country’s obligation under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity have no confidence that he will honor his country’s obligation to come to the aid of its NATO allies or to honor its obligation to defend Austria under the 1955 state treaty. We see with increasing clarity that Trump is not a man of honor nor a man of his word, and that he does not feel bound by the contractual obligations of his country.

This is NOT the way to make America great again, and neither are the suggestions of his buddy, weathervane Vance, the way to make Europe great again.

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1. Facebook Post[↩]