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Is Trump wrong to negotiate with Russia?

Is Trump wrong to negotiate with Russia?

Last updated on: February 21, 2025 at 6:14 am by Jim Denison

Is Trump wrong to negotiate with Russia? 2025-02-21T06:14:34-06:00 Jim Denison

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The peace talks between America and Russia continue to dominate headlines, with leaders in Europe and Ukraine increasingly wary of how they’ve been excluded from those discussions. While President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and even Russian President Vladimir Putin have all acknowledged that Ukraine will be part of the negotiations when they begin in earnest, that is not how much of the Western world has seen this week’s events.

It didn’t help that the conversations with Russia’s representation have already essentially acknowledged that Ukraine will likely not be able to join NATO and that Russia will keep much—if not all—of the land they have taken so far in the war. Couple those accessions with Trump’s recent rhetoric in which he called Ukrainian President Zelensky a dictator and implied that Ukraine bore responsibility for starting the war, and it’s not difficult to see why many are wary of America leading the push for peace.

After all, one of Trump’s most frequent claims throughout his campaign was that he would bring an end to the war in Ukraine and that he would do it quickly. While he’s already missed his first deadline of having an agreement in place before he took office, the goal remains to achieve peace as soon as possible.

Most would agree that it’s better for the war to end sooner rather than later, but America’s allies—Ukraine most of all—are wary of prioritizing speed over justice and a peace that lasts.

What is the Munich Agreement?

An increasingly common refrain among many in the West in the wake of this week’s conversations is that the negotiations are a repeat of the same mistakes that enabled Hitler during the buildup to World War II.

After absorbing Austria in March of 1938, Hitler began to covet Czechoslovakia and made plans to take the Sudetenland—a region of roughly three million people of German origin—next. As his aggression escalated, France and Britain, both of whom had pledged to protect the country in the aftermath of World War I, did not feel prepared for a full-scale war with the Nazis. Instead, they prioritized peace.

The result was the Munich Agreement, in which European leaders essentially allowed Hitler to absorb parts of Czechoslovakia in exchange for promises to leave the rest of Europe alone.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned home to declare that he had achieved “peace with honor,” adding “I believe it is peace for our time.”

Winston Churchill famously retorted “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.” Churchill was proven right when Hitler proceeded to take the rest of Czechoslovakia the next year.

But while the parallels to America’s current conversations with Russia are easy to see, is Trump heading toward the same mistake? That question is a good bit more difficult to answer.

Living in reality

You see, the primary reason why the Munich Agreement failed to do more than provide a brief pause in the conflict that culminated in World War II is that France and Britain were not prepared to go to war with Germany. They needed peace more than the Nazis, even if that peace was not to last.

The situation in Ukraine is much the same: Ukraine needs peace more than Russia. The last three years have made clear that the most likely outcome of simply giving Ukraine more money and munitions is a slower pace of defeat. Victory is not a realistic option unless the US and its European allies are willing to take a more active role in the fighting.

So, as much as Ukraine may want to act like it is negotiating from a position of strength or should continue fighting until they are, that is never going to be the case in the current conflict.

As such, when Trump began his conversations with Russia by essentially ceding Ukraine’s ability to join NATO or reclaim all the land they’ve lost, he didn’t really give up anything that was within their power to keep.

Putin’s desires to maintain a buffer between his borders and those of NATO while also retaining control over the fertile lands of Eastern Ukraine have long been among his primary motivations for waging this war. He has little reason to come to the table if those are not part of the agreement.

The sanctions currently crippling the Russian economy, however, were notably absent from those early negotiations. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio implied they could be removed once peace was achieved, he also seemed to indicate that they would remain in place until that point.

Moreover, Trump recently declared that he is “all for” European peacekeepers in Ukraine after the war, calling such promises “a beautiful gesture” from France and Britain. The prospect of NATO troops on Ukrainian soil is particularly notable since Russia considers it an unacceptable condition for peace.

So, while it is certainly possible that any treaty with Russia will end like the Munich Agreement and simply delay a much larger conflict, it would be a mistake to presume that will be the case. There is still too much left undecided to know what the final agreement will look like.

What is clear is that there can be no peace unless everyone involved approaches the negotiations with a recognition of the fact that the West is not in a position to dictate the terms of that agreement. The only way to stop the bloodshed and wanton destruction that has already killed or injured nearly a million people is to recognize what is realistic to achieve.

As a culture not accustomed to losing in geopolitics and war, that is an understandably hard pill to swallow. Yet it remains the reality in which everyone involved must operate. And that need to accept reality applies to each of us as well.

Why “lies are the root of evil”

One of Satan’s most effective tactics is convincing people to trust the narrative they prefer to believe rather than the reality in which they live. If we claim to serve the God who is truth, then rejecting that truth in favor of a more palatable lie undermines the very foundation of who Christ has called us to be. And make no mistake, there are few things more detrimental to both our witness and our walk with God than living in a lie.

As Dennis Prager once warned, “Lies are the root of evil more than any other of the sins that we commit because people who believe lies don’t know that they’re doing evil. That’s why it’s so terrible.” He goes on to give examples from the holocaust and slavery to illustrate the principle that lies are a necessary prerequisite to the belief that it is permissible to commit such atrocities.

And while most of the lies we accept as truth will not have consequences so grave as those, each one that we believe takes us further away from the Lord.

So where have your beliefs diverged from reality? Are there any lies you’ve accepted as truth?

If so, today is a great day to confess them to the Lord and embrace his truth as the guiding light for every facet of your life.

Will you start now?

Quote of the day:

“Self-awareness is indispensable to seeing the lines between what you want to be true and what is actually true.” —Jonah Goldberg

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