Upcoming Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping Meeting EXPLAINED | Victor Davis Hanson
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
There’s a lot of acrimony right now about a planned summit with the three most powerful leaders, at least in terms of nuclear weapons and military: Vladimir Putin, President Xi Jinping of China, and Donald Trump.
And the West is furious right now because they are accusing Donald Trump of selling out Ukraine because he said some negative things about them, the Ukrainian war. And they feel that the Europeans are shut out and the American Congress is shut out, and Trump will deal away Ukrainian sovereignty.
But why are they meeting? Why does Trump want to? What’s he want to get out of this? The obvious thing is he’s mentioned it so much before that he would like to be a triangulator. He would like to tell Putin, “I don’t want you to be friendlier to China than you are to us.” He wants to tell Xi, “I don’t want you to consider us a greater enemy than you consider Putin. We want all three to balance each other out.”
Where does he get this? It’s traditional Henry Kissinger triangulation.
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There’s a second reason that Trump wants to meet. During this lull in the Iranian war, it’s pretty clear that we have not hit facilities on the Caspian Sea, nor have we stopped all the highway and rail links by land out of Iran that find their way into Russian provinces, former Soviet provinces, and eventually Russia. And Iran is getting some materials.
Trump wants to say to Putin, “I would like to negotiate the United States’ role with Ukraine if you will stop all of that, and we can finish.” The last thing Donald Trump wants is two wars at the same time.
Three, of course, he wants cheap oil prices. Right now, 24 million barrels are going out of the Gulf. That is at the same level, if not a little greater than before the war. But gas prices haven’t yet felt that decline or that open Hormuz. They haven’t seen it because of refineries. And the Ukrainians are hitting refineries in Russia. And we don’t have enough refineries due to our regulatory and green mania of the last two decades.
So the problem is not going to be oil, it’s refineries. And Trump wants to talk to Putin and say, “Let’s finish the war and let us—we will stop the Ukrainians from hitting your refineries, and we’ll take the sanctions off, and the price of gas and oil will drop, and the world economy will flourish.”
Now, the Ukrainians are scared stiff, and they are thinking that he’s gonna give Putin everything. He’s not. From what has leaked out, it is what we call uti possidetis, as you possess it. It’s a formula for the status before the war.
In other words, before the war, there was a sovereign Ukraine and there was aggressive Russia. You’re not gonna change that. But as you possess it also means that the battle line between the two parties will be the new armistice line.
Ukraine, in that 500- or 600-mile corridor, has linked towns, roads, and has a viable defense front. It has to have that, otherwise, the Russians will keep going into Kyiv. Russia has got about 6 to 8 million Russian speakers by annexing Crimea and annexing Eastern Ukraine.
There is no way that Ukraine, which has lost 25% to 30% of its population and suffered a devastating loss to its economy, will ever have the wherewithal to take back Crimea or to take back Eastern Ukraine.
And you add into that factor that Crimea has traditionally been a part of Russia since the late 1700s. It was only autonomous as an independent country for about three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. And Ukraine grabbed it before the Russians could grab it.
And Ukraine’s eastern part was ceded to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev, partly to assuage Ukrainian national liberation sympathies. In other words, cool an independence movement. So there’s a checkered history there.
This is very reminiscent, this meeting that will occur, of the Finnish War, the Winter War of 1939. Russia, as aggressive as ever, attacked little Finland, just like Putin attacked Ukraine. And they said they were gonna roll over Finland.
And the Finns fought completely outnumbered 10 to one. They fought ferociously for the whole fall and into the spring of 1940, just like the Ukrainians. And then they realized they could not defeat this Soviet juggernaut.
So they cut a deal and they said you wanted us to surrender 10% or 15%. We went to war to preserve that. You’ve got that now. You can take it. However, we will fight you to the death, or we will promise not to attack you and keep to ourselves. The Germans are our allies. Should there ever be a war, we will not join the Germans in attacking you on Russian soil.
Gen. [Carl Gustaf Emil] Mannerheim kept his promise, and Finland, for all the jokes about Finlandization during the Cold War, that it was like Austria or Switzerland, kind of a neutral opportunistic nation, it survived.
That’s a good model for Ukraine. It can say, “I don’t wanna be in NATO. I wanna be armed to the teeth. I’ll be the bulwark of Europe on the front lines, but we cannot be openly a part of NATO and openly aggressive to Russia, but we will be in a position to repel Russian aggression.”
That’s the outline of a deal that I think they’re going to make.
Why else do they wanna do it? Besides the Iran war, besides the unrest in the Middle East, and besides the humanitarian consideration that almost nobody on the Left is talking about, probably two and a half million total casualties. This is Stalingrad and the Somme and Verdun combined. This is the worst massacre in Europe since the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and it’s endless.
There’s no end in sight. Nobody has come up with a peace plan. Nobody has come up with an end to it. Ukraine has not folded to the Russians’ anger. It won’t fold, and Russians won’t stop. They’re very ironic. As I said, they’re in the reverse Stalingrad position where the German army, remember, couldn’t go forward and beat them, but it wouldn’t go back. It refused to go back and be saved.
The Russians will not withdraw, but they can’t advance, and so it’s in everybody’s interest to find an end in humanitarian terms.
Finally, there is the question of Taiwan. When you have Russia and Europe and the United States occupied in Ukraine and you have the United States occupied in Iran, China sees an opportunity and they might move on Taiwan.
So it would be better to talk to Russia and Taiwan, especially to Russia, that China going into Taiwan is not in their interest. I know that they’ve lost Syria, they’ve lost Iran, they’ve lost Venezuela, they’ve lost a lot of clients. But the last thing you want to do is have an aggressive ascendant China right next to Russia that’s underpopulated with the largest area in the world and the richest natural resources in the world.
So there’s a lot of self-interest among these three countries. The criticism, to end, is from Europe because Europe feels it’s left out, and Trump is evil, and he’s Putin’s pup. They have absorbed all the propaganda from the first term.
But if Europe wanted the United States to be engaged more, and we’ve given somewhere between 100 and 200 billion, depending how you calibrate logistics, reconnaissance, intelligence costs. But if you really want Europe to be engaged in this high-stakes diplomacy, then you might have said to the United States we have to have Russian natural gas. We’re the biggest customer, so I can understand why you also are worried and might buy diesel.
They didn’t do that. They blasted Trump.
They might have said, “Just as Russia represents an existential threat to Europe, much less to Ukraine, much more to Ukraine, and we wanted you to give weaponry and to intervene and spend a lot of money and support. So too, you were in an existential war with Iran to stop Iranian nuclear missiles pointed at you and us especially. And therefore, we wanted to help you with Iran like you’re helping with Ukraine on our borders.”
And what did they do? They said, “Not only are we not going to help you, you’re not going to use any of our NATO bases. You’re not gonna use any of our airspaces. We’re not even gonna provide adequate security for your bombers in the UK, and if they’re the object of an Iranian-inspired terrorist attack, we’re gonna let the terrorists out on bail.”
That’s what they did.
So you can see why they are left out. And when you add into the equation that they would have never armed themselves to 2% unless this person that they despise forced them to, Donald Trump, for their own interest. And even then, they’re barely reaching the 2%, at least in Western Europe.
And so, the reason the Europeans are not there is some of the countries are in total chaos with riots in the streets, Italy, Belgium in some cases, but especially France, Albania. In addition to that, their economies are weak, and they’re anemic, and they were not reciprocal.
They said, “We’re buying Russian energy, but you are satanic because you might do the same. We want you to come in as a NATO partner and help us and give aid to Ukraine to stop the common enemy, but we won’t do that for you when you’re trying to stop the common enemy of Iran.”
And the result of it is they were ostracized, and they’re losing influence, and they’re furious, and they’re mischaracterizing what is a realpolitik meeting with a leader of the largest democracy in the world with two autocrats.
But believe me, the United States, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump know whom they’re dealing with.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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