Peace in Ukraine?
you have to ask yourself, well then, you know, if the United States wants this done, if Ukraine has some very practical reasons for wanting this war to end, and Russia has some big geopolitical reasons for it, who opposes this? What stands in the way? And I would argue that there's a group that doesn't want this to end, and that's really what this is about at this point. And I would call that the old foreign policy establishment that has prevailed in the United States since the end of the cold war. And has dominated Europe in its own approach to security and diplomacy. That's the group that doesn't want to see compromise here. It's not so much a stand off between Ukraine and Russia, although there are certainly aspects of big disagreements there. I think those disagreements are bridgeable. there's a way of compromising that everybody can find acceptable. But, you know, the blob, if you want to call them that, that has ruled Washington in in foreign policy for the last three decades, they don't want to see this kind of compromise. They don't want to close the door on an approach to European security, on an approach to world order that they're very much committed to. So the path to peace really is a question of whether the Trump administration can overcome the resistance of that old guard, that old establishment in Europe and the United States that still doesn't want to see a compromise here.
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if you look at the Trump administration's attitude toward NATO enlargement, they're skeptics of continued expansion, um, if not downright opponents. You know, the problem that we're in right now is that, successive US administrations did not look at the expansion of NATO as really linked to America's own vital national interests. They never asked the question, is it vital to US security to defend Georgia, to go to war with Russia, to defend Georgia? Is it vital to US security to go to war with Russia to defend Estonia? You know, after we brought the Baltic states into the alliance, it was almost a decade, you know, until the United States and NATO actually put together a plan for defending the Baltic states. We only did so after Estonia raised his hand and said, "Don't you think we ought to have a plan?" And the reaction in Washington was, "Oh, yeah, good idea. We should do that." Which shows you how seriously the people in Washington took the notion that they might actually have to exercise an article 5 defense of new members. We we approach the expansion of NATO really as an ideological mission, an effort to transform other countries, to liberalize their governance internally and to establish a I'll call it a NATOization of the global order. This was not looked at as a commitment to go to war to defend the new member states and that has now changed and it will never go back I don't think to that old conception. I think we recognize now that if we're going to take a new member state into NATO we would actually have to seriously consider should we go to war to defend this state? Is it critical to America's own security to go to war to defend this state? And I think the answer to that with all the conceivable, you know, members that might want to join the alliance is going to be no.
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that in turn provides the basis for a compromise with Russia that goes beyond just Ukraine. It opens the door to rethinking of the basis of Europe's security and of the transatlantic alliance and Russia's role in in this regional security order.
