The utterly idiotic reaction to the Trump-Putin phone call

President Donald Trump called Russian president Vladimir Putin yesterday and discussed various topics, including the war in Ukraine, for an hour and a half. According to Trump, the two agreed to begin negotiations on ending the three year-long conflict immediately and even set up preliminary talks about traveling to one another’s capitals. Shortly after the call with Putin, Trump dialed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for yet another conversation that reportedly went ”very well.”

Trump’s call with Zelensky, of course, wasn’t the controversial part. Nobody had a problem with it. The dialogue with Putin, however, was apparently…

It didn’t take long for the hyperventilating to begin. Carl Bildt, former Swedish prime minister, posted a picture of Neville Chamberlain after he returned from his 1938 conference in Munich with Adolf Hitler. The subtext wasn’t hard to find: Trump and his advisors are at risk of gifting Ukraine to Putin on a silver platter. Former British defense minister Ben Wallace invoked “the stench of appeasement” à la Munich 1938 in an op-ed, blasting US defense secretary Pete Hegseth for taking NATO membership for Ukraine off the table. European ministers are beside themselves; the Germans were particularly depressed, with German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock calling the Trump-Putin call “very much out of the blue,” as if Berlin was oblivious to the fact that striking a peace agreement between Putin and Zelensky is one of Trump’s top foreign policy priorities.

The Europeans do have a point on one thing: they should be a part of the negotiations. Trump, after all, ultimately wants Europe to take the Ukraine file on its shoulders. The war matters more to the Europeans than it does to the Americans by virtue of geography, so it’s only logical for Europe to participate in deliberations about what a diplomatic settlement would look like (assuming, of course, Putin is even genuinely interested in climbing down from his maximalist position; we’ve seen no sign of this yet).

But most of the criticism enveloping the Trump administration over the last day is downright shoddy. 

First, nobody should be surprised that Trump wants to bring the war in Ukraine to a conclusion and is willing to jettison the conventional approach by reaching out to Putin directly. If I had a penny for every time Trump mentioned how the war wouldn’t have happened on his watch (a dubious assertion to say the least), how high the casualties have been on both sides and how he and he alone could settle the conflict quickly, then I would be sitting on a beach somewhere counting my millions. The shock and trepidation felt in European capitals is less a reaction to Trump winging it as he goes and more a reflection of how clueless the Europeans are about the situation confronting them. Nothing about what Trump did or said to Putin should be causing this amount of anguish; if anything, Europe’s political elites should have been prepared for it.

Second, much has been made of Hegseth’s first speech to NATO. It was a strong speech, unafraid to take prisoners or ruffle feathers. The two items of derision include Hegseth ruling out Ukrainian membership in the alliance as part of a peace deal with Russia and making the fairly obvious observation that returning Ukraine to its pre-2014 borders is infeasible. Although he attempted to walk both of these back the next day, Hegseth’s conclusions are on point. Ukraine has waited nearly seventeen years to become a full member of the alliance; it’s still waiting today. You might hear a lot of wishy-washy pablum from US and European elites about Ukraine eventually joining the Western military bloc at some undefined date in the future, but the passage of time reveals the blunt reality: the US and Europe don’t want to fight and die for the Ukrainians. And Putin would never allow it anyway.

As far as Ukraine not reclaiming all of its land, well, you don’t need to be Carl von Clausewitz to figure that one out. The Ukrainian army has exceeded everybody’s grandest expectations and prevented the much larger Russian military from turning the entire country into a satellite. But Kyiv isn’t strong enough to kick Russian forces out of Ukraine entirely. If anything, some of its decision-making — like occupying Russian land in Kursk — makes such a dream even remoter by removing troops that could otherwise be deployed in the east. Even Zelensky acknowledged back in December that the Ukrainians don’t have the power to win back all of their territory. Apparently, Hegseth has to out-Zelensky Zelensky.

Finally, claims of appeasement are woefully wide of the mark. No deal has been negotiated yet, so to assume any diplomatic process Trump attempts to start (and let’s be honest: it may not start given Putin’s maximalism) will inevitably lead to disaster for Europe is as premature as defiantly insisting that Manchester City will win the Champions League before the season even begins. Perhaps it’s smart to wait five minutes before declaring Trump’s diplomacy the second iteration of Munich?

It’s times like these when the best thing we can do is drown out the noise.