Clash of Worldview

More Trump vs Zelenskyy Thoughts

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The reaction to the Friday Live TV explosion amongst people I follow on blogs, substack and social media has been instructive. There are roughly three groups.

In group 1 we have the Trump/MAGA faithful and (often) Putin apologists, who think that punk Zelenskyy was finally shown up to be the money grabbing corruptocrat globalist puppet dictator they all knew he was.

In group 2 we have the various never Trumpers and their allies, who often are connected to/sympathetic to deep state/globalist causes who think that Trump just embarrassed the US and that he’s just blown up decades of US diplomacy, destroyed trust in the US and betrayed Ukraine to Trump’s best buddy Putin

In group 3 we have people like me, who think that both sides have valid points and that neither are devils or angels. We think that Trump is bluntly stating some hard truths but that he also goes overboard when he says things like Ukraine started the war. We also think that Zelenskyy is telling the absolute truth when he says that Putin will break any deal he signs and that there won’t be peace in Eastern Europe (and other places like the Caucases) until Putin is gone and Russia radically reforms.

A fairly good description of group 3’s view of things comes from this substack from a former UK Tory MP and minister

Trump vs Zelenskyy

One thing that seems clear to me is that many in groups 1 and 2 are unable to see that the other side has a valid viewpoint about some things and I think this is because they simply can’t see the other side’s motivations and that they have legitimate issues with things the first side takes as truth. So in the hope that this gets some readership by influential people on both sides, here’s my impression of the Trump and Zelenskyy worldviews and their genuine issues

Trump

President Trump and his supporters think, with much evidence in their favor, that the US federal bureaucracy, related NGOs, beltway bandits, and US politicans of both parties have been putting their own interests ahead of those of the average American for decades. Not only that but they are now actively harming average Americans as opposed to just not helping them and average Americans want this to stop.

John Ringo (referring to the classic Walter Mead distinctions) says Trump and his supporters are mostly Jacksonians and that they are now finally roused to take action against their perceived enemies - foreign and domestic. Right now however the focus is on domestic with DOGE, DataRepublican, Chris Rufo and all exposing the fraud, waste and abuse in federal government spending as well as the DEIification of critical government functions like the military and Air Traffic Control.

To the average Trump supporter, Ukraine is unimportant except as an example of waste, fraud and corruption. If asked they would probably agree that Putin is an evil dictator - in fact many of them have shared dark memes about him and the way people in Russia tend to fall out of windows or drink radioactive tea

from https://meme.aho.st/window-or-tea/

But they don’t see Ukraine as being notably better or worth spending money, let alone troops, on defending. Sure, in general, they want free people but they see no compelling interest in the territorial integrity of Ukraine or the threat Russia poses to other Eastern European countries. As

David

has made the point well in a comment thread on my previous post, it’s hard to see how it is in the strategic interest of the USA to support Ukraine over Russia.

Trumpians think this is Europe’s problem and, as JD Vance, Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio have made clear in the last couple of weeks, the fact that Europe has not got serious about Russia and defense in general is not America’s problem. They have been warned repeatedly and ignored the warnings. The way they look at it, Europe has been freeloading off the USA’s military might and relying on the US to pull it out of any hole, while not doing anything that serves the interests of Americans outside Washington DC, New York etc.

In particular, almost nothing that the Jacksonian, MAGA supporting, American cares about comes from Europe so if it all disappeared they wouldn’t miss it¹. The people who buy German cars, French wines and Italian fashions aren’t them. If they do enjoy one of the above they don’t feel like it’s vital to their quality of life to have it all the time and would be open to alternatives from other places - and the same applies to everything else they consume from Europe. If they pay close attention they might see that some critical components or supplies do originate from Europe and would be hard to source reliably elsewhere (and the obvious second source - West Taiwan - is definitely problematic), but then again they probably want to see these critical components etc. manufactured in the USA and not be outsourced to other countries anyway.

Compare this, by the way, to Asia. While some of the same applies, regular Americans are well aware that they buy a lot of critical stuff from Japan, Taiwan, Korea and of course West Taiwan and a lot more is made in lower wage Asian places like Bangladesh, Vietnam or Indonesia. So they can absolutely see that it is in America’s interest to ensure peace and stability there. Hence a general agreement with the announced “pivots to Asia” made by every adminstration since Dubya.

Moreover, right now, Jacksonians see that the USA’s military and its ability to project force abroad has been severely impacted by DEIification and a general failure of the people at the top and in the procurement parts of the pentagon to get serious about building new stuff that works. The F-35 is probably OK if expensive, but any number of other major projects seem to have ended up producing clunky crap that comes in far over budget (hi LCS). The US military needs to sort this stuff out, recruit more and so on and it can’t do that while also getting involved in wars in Europe, the Middle East and potentially the Western Pacific.

It didn’t help Zelenskyy’s case that he allowed himself to be used as a campaign prop for Commie La Whoreish or that he regularly sucked up to various Democrats who have sought to impeach and impede Trump. Nor does it help that the MSM, who have been caught repeatedly lying, distorting and censoring news in favor of the globalst deep staters and against Trump and his supporters, all seem to be fanatical Ukraine supporters.

My enemy’s friend may not be my enemy, but if someone is friendly with lots of my enemies he needs to work on it to show that he is my friend

The Trumpian worldview in a nutshell is that Ukraine is an unimportant sideshow and their leader is a self important corruptocrat would-be dictator who sides with Trump’s domestic enemies and who assisted them in pocketing billions of dollars of US assistance.

There’s a lot of truth in that viewpoint. Globalists like Noah Smith² and Phillips P O’Brien³ either don’t see that truth of consider that something else is more important.

Furthermore Trump, having been assailed by deep staters and globalists over the last eight years, clearly doesn’t care about their opinions and also clearly has decided that the MSM is in the tank for them so he doesn’t care about them either. There is probably no better way to convince Trump to not do something than tell him that CNN and the New York Times are in favor of it. The Trump Honey Badger Don’t Care and this is a truth that has yet to be understood by any of Trump’s critics.

Zelenskyy

Zelenskyy is a Ukrainian patriot. He was elected to seek to move Ukraine out of Russia’s sphere of influence and to unify Ukraine under rule by Kyiv. He also wanted to reduce the endemic corruption in the country and to make it actually rich and functional. He was making progress on this before the invasion.

In Zelenskyy’s view the US and the other signatories to the Budapest Memorandum should be helping Ukraine return to the territorial borders of the immediate post-Soviet era. The fact that the Obama administration (and Europe) failed to properly stand up to Russia in 2014 does not absolve subsequent US governments from doing the same:

Washington brokered with Kyiv and Moscow the terms under which Ukraine agreed to eliminate the strategic missiles, missile silos and bombers on its territory and transfer the 1,900 nuclear warheads to Russia for disassembly.

A key element of the arrangement—many Ukrainians would say the key element—was the readiness of the United States and Russia, joined by Britain, to provide security assurances. The Budapest memorandum committed Washington, Moscow and London, among other things, to “respect the independence and sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine” and to “refrain from the threat or use of force” against that country.

The Kremlin has violated those commitments. Using soldiers in Russian combat fatigues without identifying insignia, whom Mr. Putin later admitted were Russian, Moscow seized Crimea in March.

Russia subsequently encouraged and armed separatists in eastern Ukraine. When the Ukrainian military appeared to gain the upper hand against the separatists, regular Russian army units entered Donetsk and Luhansk to support them.

What part of its commitments to “respect the independence” and “refrain from the threat or use of force” do the Russians not understand?

After the 2014 annexations, the US and European response was pitiful. In fact President Trump was the first person who actually supplied Ukraine with actual weapons as opposed to applying ineffectual sanctions and “soft aid”.

In Zelenskyy’s view (and mine) the lack of effective response simply emboldened Russia. This was clear because Putin and others in Russia started making speeches about Ukraine being a key element of the Russian heritage and that it wasn’t a real country just a Soviet era province and so on.

The Ukrainians knew that another invasion was likely, and once Resident Biden and his crew of puppeteers came to power, it was obvious to everyone that that invasion was going to be fairly soon. For a poor country Ukraine did well. The Armed Forces were not the soviet era corrupt ones and the equipment they had destroyed Russia’s primary offensive to Kyiv.

This seemed to be a surprise to people in the US and Europe. The expected playbook was that Russia would steamroller Ukraine’s forces and that Zelenskyy would then be evacuated to form a government in exile. None of that happened and hence various experts and politicians looked kind of stupid so they did a “well never mind” and promised lots of weapons to help plucky Ukraine fight on. Had Ukraine already had those weapons it might have lost a whole lot less territory in the first place, but experts worrying about escalation and about the weapons falling into Russian hands meant they didn’t.

And support for Ukraine and Zelenskyy has been unreliable ever since. Many countries made grand promises. Not all delivered. When they did deliver they delivered less and late. And in the case of the US what they delivered had significant strings attached to it such as denial of use outside Ukrainian territory. The result of this was that Russia could (and did) build up lots of nice supply bases a few dozen kilometers from Ukrainian territory in the secure knowledge that Ukraine couldn’t hit them. It is also reported that when the Ukrainians had the Russians on the backfoot in Kherson they were told to let that army mostly survive rather than be entirely annihilated. I don’t know that this is true, but it seems like the sort of thing Sullivan anbd Blinken would do, and it has, as a result undoubtedly led to more Ukrainian deaths from those surviving Russians.

Zelenskyy wears his military-esque clothing as a reminder that his country is at war and that people are dying in large numbers. It also helps remind people that Ukraine has in fact managed a partial defeat of Russia already and that this, also, is completely counter to predictions. Russia has lost control of the Black Sea. Russia has lost control of about half of the territory it originally seized in 2022. Russia has entirely failed to dislodge Ukrainian forces from Kursk. Russia has lost an absolutely staggering number of tanks, artillery, trucks, APCs and probably well over a million men killed or injured. Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure is under constant attack (including an attack on a refinery in Ufa over 800 miles from Ukraine last night)

Zelenskyy has strong evidence from the past that Russia will simply use any cease fire to rearm and then it will break it. As I wrote in my last post:

I don’t think Russia has ever kept a peace treaty and Russians of all sorts - from Putin to Navalny - think that Russia has a divine right to be the controlling power, if not ruler, of anywhere that Russia has ever controlled before. The Russians see ceasefires in the same way the Palestinians do - a chance to rearm and prepare for the next attack. My understanding is that Stalin was extremely upset when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa because he wasn’t yet strong enough to do the reverse to Hitler (that calculation being one of the reasons Hitler attacked when he did of course). So short of radical regime change caused by Eastern European boots on the ground in Moscow and St Petersburg, any peace treaty signed by Russia will have an expiration date on it.

I’ll add that Russia, historically, is guilty of not one, but two actual genocides. The Holodomor in Ukraine in the 1930s and the Circassian genocide in the mid 1800s. Putin pretty much levelled Grozny in the second Chechen war killing thousands and his troops committed well documented atrocities/war crimes in Bucha and other places in Ukraine that were then liberated. Plus of course there’s the Mariupol Theater Attack where Russians deliberately attacked a civilian shelter

Russia simply cannot be trusted to play nice. And Russian leaders either encourage their troops to abuse civilians and prisoners or simply don’t care.

To Zelenskyy and his supporters fighting Russia is literally a fight against evil and, fundamentally, I agree with them. I wrote a post almost a year ago explaining why I support Ukraine (and Israel and Taiwan) and I stick by it today

Zelenskyy and his supporters want Putin removed from power - ideally removed from this plane of existence - and Russia severely demilitarized. It is hard to argue with that point of view when you see the damage Russia has caused and the massive poverty and corruption inside Russia.

Zelenskyy’s supporters also point out that failure to continue supporting Ukraine sends a very bad message to other would be invaders. In particular it potentially emboldens Winnie the Flu to attack Taiwan, something that, as I noted in the Trump section, will have severe consequences for the US. It also shows (see Budapest Memorandum) that the USA cannot be trusted to keep a treaty. In that respect the US is only slightly better than Russia in that it seems treaties with the US have a shelf-life unless it turns out there’s something valuable to the US in keeping them. That is actually a highly damaging hit to the USA’s reputation because once you lose it you can’t really get it back.

Finally to many Zelenskyy supporters it seems axiomatic that a country that fought a war to liberate itself from rule by a perceived despotic distant regime should support other countries that seek not to be ruled by distant despots. Liberty and the right to self-determination should be something that everyone should strive to protect.

Synthesis

The problem is both sides have a lot of good points and they argue past each other.

Trump’s core supporters and many of his advisors are mostly uninterested in the USA’s reputation abroad. They see no benefit and much cost for the USA being seen as the big protector of freedom everywhere.

Zelenskyy’s supporters don’t understand (or deny) that Trump sees Zelenskyy as just another part of the corrupt globalist culture that sought to keep him out of power and seeks to do the same with the AfD in Germany, Reform in the UK and so on. JD Vance’s speech in Munich pointing out that much of Europe is looking like fake democracy with a clear lack of freedom of expression was rejected even though an objective examination of events shows that he is completely correct.

The people who most vocally support Zelenskyy have repeatedly and continuously insulted Trump when they haven’t tried to impeach him, sue him or stop him getting elected. Very few people are willing to take advice and instruction from people who insult etc. them, it should come as absolutely no surprise that Trump is unwilling to do so either. Nor that he is unwilling to ignore them which was the sort of thing he tried in his first term with poor consequences.

Moreover many of the people criticizing Trump are at best deceiving themselves if not actually lying about some of the things that want. Take Jonah Goldberg regarding Zelenskyy wanting a US security guarantee:

Literally no one of consequence (or anyone at all to my knowledge) is in favor of US troops fighting in Ukraine. If your position was strong you wouldn’t have to lie and spin like this. It’s shameful.

As this reply points out, that’s woolly headed thinking:

What do you think the “security guarantees” Zelensky wants are? It’s a trigger for us to step in militarily if Russia breaks a future ceasefire.

So yeah, we are firmly in the realm of American troops being involved. Time to be honest about what you guys are asking for.

But despite the Egyptian levels of denial in the first Xeet then again that too has a relevant response:

So what is your plan to stop Russia from annexing Ukraine and then moving on to annex some other European country?

The answer should be obvious. Russia is Europe’s problem and Europe should handle it. Unfortunately, as Two Tier Keir accidentally pointed out while doing his best to step in place of Trump, they can’t do so without US help.

Hilarious:🇬🇧

The unpopular Sir Keir Starmer says he will assemble a "coalition of the willing" in Ukraine: the phrase his Labour Party and Bush used to invade Iraq.

He also boasts the UK will puts "boots on the ground" in Ukraine: but can only do so with "strong US backing."

What is worse is that Europe as a whole is still dependent on Russian fossil fuels:

Despite a range of sanctions and the threat posed by dependence on Russian energy, in the third year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, EU imports of Russian fossil fuels in particular remain largely unchanged, totalling EUR 21.9 bn, a 6% year-on-year drop in value but merely a 1% year-on-year drop in volumes.

Notably, EU imports of Russian fossil fuels in the third year of the invasion surpassed the EUR 18.7 bn of financial aid they sent to Ukraine in 2024.

Europe’s political class, in addition to still importing lots of energy from Russia, has mostly decided to ban fracking and failed to get serious about building nuclear power. Instead they’ve blown bazzillions on bird-choppers and solar panels that barely work, especially in winter in Northern lattitudes. This is pure virtue signalling enabled by believing they could rely on the USA bailing them out.

I totally understand why President Trump and his team want nothing to do with Europe. I wouldn’t either.

I feel sorry for President Zelenskyy, back in 2022 he made the only choice that seemed to give him a chance of success. Unfortunately it has become clear he backed wrong horse.

I think part of the solution needs to be for Zelensky to have an ability to borrow money to buy munitions and supplies based on a loan backed by the resources in Ukraine. Those muntions and supplies need to come completely free of usage restrictions and they need to be delivered in a timely manner. The rest of the solution requires (Western) Europe to get serious and that means stopping the Green BS, stopping DEI BS and going all DOGE on their own homegrown bureaucrats and NGOs. I predict this is not going to happen

Update: Two people I like very much have linked to this post from insightful posts of their own - Laughing Wolf and According to Hoyt - both deserve to be read.

Based on their posts and some more reflection, I think my group 2 should be split between 2a “the true believers in the Ukrainian cause” which include Noah, Phillips, and various NAFO sorts on Xitter and 2b “the cynical manipulators” which appear to be the Democrat pols in DC and their associates.

Group 2b probably set up Zelenskyy’s failure because for reasons that I don’t grasp they appear to want Ukraine to be a quagmired forever war. Originally I had assumed their apparent timidity was just worry about nuclear escalation that was misguided but legitimately held and/or a fear that a Russian civil war would lead to catastrophe as different factions sell off nukes to random terror groups etc. Now I’m not sure.

It goes back to the start 3 years ago when they clearly didn’t expect Zelenskyy and Ukraine to stand and fight. I think that “I need ammo not a ride” was completely unexpected and not on their plans, which were to have agovernment in exile and partisan resistance in country. The fact that Zelenskyy then masterfully used Social Media and then the MSM to set up the “plucky Ukraine fighting evil tyranny” narrative meant they had to go along with it - and supplying aid to Ukraine’s military allowed for almost as much graft as supplying aid to Ukrainian partisans. But they didn’t want Ukraine to win (see Kherson noted above). It’s not from fear of what happens when Russia collapses, it’s something else. They see a benefit to them in a forever war and I don’t understand what it is. The graft can’t be that much and Trump has killed that anyway, so there’s something else at stake.

1. Apart perhaps from the desire, now and again, to go visit where the ancestors fled from to see if it’s still a shithole, and similar vague desire to have their distant relatives do OK

2. America is ruled by gangsters now

3. The US Has Taken Sides--Against Democracy