If President Trump does not understand what will happen to him if he proceeds with his plan to trade away support for Ukraine’s democracy for Russian diesel, let me spell it out: He will enter the history books in the chapter on leaders who sold out their country’s democratic values to appease a dictator.
Donald Trump, meet Neville Chamberlain. When future students search online for “sellout,” “appeaser” or “traitor to his country’s core values,” their two pictures will come up first, side by side. And deservedly so. At least Chamberlain was trying, in what proved to be lethally misguided fashion, to avoid a world war. Trump is trying to avoid losing a few seats in Congress — and is likely to be no more successful in achieving his goal than Chamberlain was in achieving his.
I have never believed that Trump was somehow an agent of Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, or in his pay. It is much worse. He simply does not cherish democracy. He cherishes money. And he has no problem selling out the first for the second. When he acts in his own commercial interests, that’s his personal business. When he uses the American presidency to make a buck, it is our collective shame.
There is simply no core American value Trump will not sell out. Desperate to lower diesel prices, which are hurting Republicans in the midterms, Trump actually made a deal to import diesel fuel from Russia, even though it offers a potential windfall for the Kremlin so it can bomb Ukraine harder — and is unlikely to help lower prices or increase supplies much at all. Worse, his aides then asked Ukraine to refrain from attacks on Russia’s oil refineries, without Trump making the same demand of Putin regarding Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. It makes me sick to my stomach to even type this.
Unique among great powers, “the United States has always made the protection and promotion of liberal values part of its foreign policy because it’s part of the country’s political DNA,” Michael Mandelbaum, the author of the new book “The American Way of Foreign Policy: Ideology, Economics, Democracy,” told me. “Different presidents have given these values different emphases, depending on the circumstances and their own personal predilections.”
But none have “ever abandoned them entirely — let alone repudiated them,” Mandelbaum added. “In that sense Trump really is unique. Of course, all presidents, including him, have operated in a domestic political environment in which those values are widely shared, which means that he will pay a political price for violating them. But in the short term that isn’t likely to help Ukraine.”
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