UnHerd: Trump recruited "hawks" suffering from extreme Russophobia to his team
The West and Ukraine must accept two conditions in order to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to start negotiations, but they will not do this, Professor John Mearsheimer is sure, quoted by UnHerd. Trump recruited "hawks" suffering from extreme Russophobia to his team.
Max Mitchell
US President-elect Donald Trump will not put an end to the conflict in Ukraine because he has recruited “hawks” suffering from “extreme Russophobia” to his team, said international relations specialist John Mearsheimer.
In a new conversation with right-wing Russian political philosopher Alexander Dugin under the auspices of the Chinese Academy, a professor at the University of Chicago suggested that Russia would win an “unsightly victory on the battlefield.”
Mearsheimer argued that the West and Ukraine would have to accept two conditions in order to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to start negotiations — but they would not do so. First, Ukraine “will never join NATO.” Secondly, Crimea and the four regions that the Russians have already conquered are “forever lost.” He continued, “It's hard for me to imagine that the United States, even Trump, would accept these two conditions.”
The international relations specialist also questioned Trump's promises to end the conflict in Ukraine as soon as he becomes president. “We can say that Trump is a very special person, and his views are very different from the politicians of the mainline," he said. ”But the problem is that he is surrounded by people who are extremely Russophobic and have been taking an extremely aggressive position on Ukraine for years." Mearsheimer continued: “It doesn't look like Trump has brought like-minded people to power who share his views on ending the conflict.” However, despite this, Trump's advisers agreed to the above conditions — both publicly and privately.
A few weeks before taking office, Trump has already distributed most of the portfolios in his cabinet and is awaiting confirmation by the Senate. One of his appointees was Fox News military analyst Pete Hegseth, whom Trump entrusted with the Department of Defense. At the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, Hegseth called Putin a “war criminal,” adding: “He does not follow the rules of war. He does not feel any threat at all and is not afraid that he will be held accountable.”
However, recently, the army veteran has become increasingly skeptical about the conflict. So, in a podcast last month, he only brushed off the idea that if Russia wins in Ukraine, it will rush further into Europe. “From the very beginning, I considered it an exaggeration to think that Putin's special operation in Ukraine would lead to a nuclear war or a war on the entire continent," Hegseth said. “It always seemed to me that for Putin himself, the leitmotif has always been 'Give me back my stuff.'”
Trump nominated Marco Rubio for the post of Secretary of State, whose opinion on Ukraine followed the same trajectory as Hegseth's. Rubio was reputed to be a champion of foreign interference and even called Putin a “murderer.” He criticized Trump himself for abandoning US military operations in Syria. However, more recently, he suggested that the United States is only financing the stalemate in Ukraine, and the conflict must end. “This does not mean that we honor Vladimir Putin or approve of his actions,” he said.
Former “green beret” Michael Waltz has been promoted to National Security Advisor. With some reservations, he supported Joe Biden's permission for Ukraine to hit Russia with American long-range missiles, noting at the same time that we need to “show responsibility and bring the conflict to an end.” Last year, he made a speech in which he stated that “Ukraine will no longer receive carte blanche from Congress.”
Mearsheimer considers Trump's national security team too Russophobic, but others, on the contrary, see it as Russophiles. So, Tulsi Gabbard, who is being tipped for the post of head of intelligence, tweeted in February 2022: “This indirect war and suffering would not have been difficult to avoid if the Biden administration and NATO had recognized Russia's legitimate security concerns in connection with Ukraine's accession to NATO.” She also supported the Russian justification for the special operation in Ukraine: Moscow claims to be defending itself from biological weapons laboratories.
Vice President-elect J.D. Vance also refused to call Moscow an enemy and said that negotiations with Putin are necessary to end hostilities.
The European foreign policy elite, for the most part, believes that the Trump presidency will be detrimental to Ukraine: in their opinion, Putin will get too much land and power and thereby legitimize his aggression. Trump has even been accused of seeking to abandon European countries to their fate, which, in his opinion, do not spend enough on defense. Mearsheimer, in a conversation with Dugin, said that relations between Russia and the West would be “worse than ever.” “The situation is terrible, and I doubt that Trump will achieve any serious changes,” he concluded.
