For All Its Risks For The World – I Fear Trump Is About To Abandon Ukraine.

This appeared a day or so ago:

‘Capitulation’ on Ukraine will haunt the West

Henry Ergas

Updated 10:51AM February 21, 2025

With American and Russian negotiators discussing the fate of Ukraine, parallels are inevitably being drawn to the Yalta conference, which was held 80 years ago this month.

Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration, accurately captured that conference’s grim reputation. “Yalta,” he observed in 1997, “is a place name that has come to be a codeword for the cynical sacrifice of small nations’ freedom to great powers’ spheres of influence.”

Speaking on the conference’s 60th anniversary, George W. Bush went even further. Comparing the agreements reached at Yalta to the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Bush concluded that “when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small countries was somehow expendable”.

There is, for sure, a grain of truth in those claims; but by taking the Yalta conference entirely out of context, they misrepresent its outcomes and misinterpret its lessons.

Yalta was not the concluding conference of the Second World War; it was a wartime summit, conducted before the common enemy had been defeated.

A simple fact hung over its proceedings: while the British and American forces were still recovering from the German counter-attack in the Ardennes, the Red Army – having swept through Bulgaria, Romania and large parts of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia – was securing bridgeheads on the Oder River, a mere 70km from Berlin.

It was, in other words, not Yalta that sealed Soviet predominance in central and eastern Europe; that predominance was a military reality by the time the summit convened.

Nor was the so-called “proportions agreement” – which defined the “proportions of influence” each of the allied powers would exercise in the Balkan countries – an endorsement of Soviet predominance; on the contrary, it was an attempt to mollify its effects.

It is a common error, recently repeated on these pages, to attribute that agreement to Yalta. It had, in fact, been reached by Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in October 1944, months before the summit took place. Churchill’s goal was straightforward: to ensure the West retained some influence, however slight, in countries that were, or would soon be, under tight Soviet control.

Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt not only continued to pursue that objective at Yalta; they also sought Stalin’s agreement to a democratic government in Poland and to the exclusion of Italy and Greece from the emerging Soviet bloc.

That Roosevelt was unduly optimistic about the prospects for great-power co-operation is well-known; but he wasn’t entirely unrealistic about the summit’s outcomes. When Admiral William Leahy, who accompanied him to Yalta, complained that the agreement on Poland was “so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without ever technically breaking it”, Roosevelt wearily replied, “I know it, Bill, I know it; but it’s the best I can do at this time”.

Churchill was even more disabused. As he wrote to Peter Fraser, the prime minister of New Zealand, “Great Britain and the British Commonwealth are very much weaker militarily than Soviet Russia and have no means, short of another general war, of enforcing their point of view”. In the end, however, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”; Britain, and he believed the US, would only remain committed to the agreements if there was “full execution in good faith of the terms of our published communique”.

That was the crucial point for Harry Truman, who became president after Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945. Rushing back from Moscow to brief him, Averell Harriman alerted Truman to a new “barbarian invasion of Europe”, with Stalin breaching every element of the Yalta summit’s Declaration on Liberated Europe, which committed the parties to hold free and fair elections in the countries under their control.

To make things worse, from Austria to Turkey and Iran, the USSR was trying to extend its reach beyond what had been presented at Yalta, and later at the Potsdam summit, as a fait accompli.

By March 1946, when Churchill warned in his famous speech at Fulton, Missouri, that “an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent” of Europe, Truman was convinced that “We must stand up to the Russians – we must not be too easy with them”.

The result was a series of hard-nosed decisions, including, most importantly, the announcement on March 12, 1947 of the Truman Doctrine, which committed the US to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures”.

That doctrine did not mean Truman was unwilling to compromise, if compromise was demanded by the facts on the ground. But to the greatest extent possible, compromises had to preserve the space for freedom to grow.

Thus, when the Korean War turned into a bloody stalemate, Truman accepted a return to Korea’s division at the 38th parallel, ensuring that at least the South had the scope to become a prosperous, democratic society. And Truman readily acknowledged, as did his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, that enforcing the armistice would require an American military presence in Korea “for years to come” as both a trigger and a trip-wire, mightily increasing the costs the North would bear for breaches.

Moreover, to ensure the armistice wasn’t viewed as a broader sign of weakness, Eisenhower, on learning that Mao intended to seize Taiwan, deterred the invasion by entering into a Mutual Defence Agreement with the Republic of China (Taiwan) and by having congress pass the Formosa Resolution, which authorised the president “to employ the armed forces of the United States as he deems necessary for securing and protecting Formosa against armed attack”.

That, in the end, is the real lesson of Yalta. As Harvard’s Serhii Plohky put it, “Like any war, any peace is never a one-act play: it has its beginning and its end, its ups and downs, its heroes and villains. It also has its price”.

It was the abject refusal of the European Union – and notably of France and Germany – to pay that price by enforcing the agreement it had reached with Vladimir Putin ending Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia that encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine.

And it was the paltry response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, along with France and Germany’s failure to give any teeth to the Minsk Agreements on the Donbas, that laid the ground for today’s disastrous war.

Whether a deeply divided EU now has a greater willingness and ability to bear the costs of securing a credible peace is highly doubtful. Moreover, the Trump administration has made it clear that it has no intention of doing so. Truman’s abiding sense of “the shadow cast by power” – the burdens the United States and its allies must bear to preserve freedom’s chances – seems to have vanished from this Earth.

We are, as a result, at the point where compromise risks veering into capitulation. That is not Yalta; it is Munich. If the West can do no better, our future is a world of pain.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/capitulation-on-ukraine-will-haunt-the-west/news-story/bad463a75cc3e3cb4ba1fd9bafe8982d

I have to say I suspect a Mr. Ergas is right and that there is a very great risk of the various great-power accommodations that flow from this will be seen as a total win for Russia and a loss for the EU, UK and the US as it will surely be.

Trump is planning to sell Ukraine and Europe out and it is just too horrible to watch. – (think how long it took Poland etc. to escape the Russian yoke after 1945!)

Trump and Putin are playing an evil game with the freedom of millions of people and it is awful to see happening!

David.