An Enemy to Its Friends

Leon Festinger’s concept of cognitive dissonance was born in the 1950s out of research into what happens when there’s a doomsday cult and doomsday fails to arrive. A tiny minority of cultists have their warped worldview confronted by reality. How do they deal with it? They rationalise the unreasonable. They cherry-pick information to suit themselves. They deny the evidence of the data, and their senses.

In the second Trump era, the cultists are running the show, and it is the majority of people in Europe, including Ukraine, who are in denial. Perhaps doomsday hasn’t actually arrived. But if it hasn’t, it is for us, the supposedly rational ones, to prove it. At the moment, the signs point the other way. Maybe America is not now ruled by arrogant, vengeful, petty, patriarchal, racist imperialists. But where’s the evidence?

Like the United Nations and the World Health and Trade Organisations, Nato may continue to exist on paper, but if it still has any meaning, the onus is on the believers to prove it. Perhaps the United States would take action to defend Estonia or Poland if Russia attacked; but as things stand, there’s no reason to suppose it would, and multiple indications that it wouldn’t.

It may be that, generally, on any given day, the US government – if such a concept can be said to be real in any sense that its own people, let alone the rest of the world, can rely on – regards Russia as a threat, an adversary. But there is no proof that this is the case, and abundant evidence that the leader of the United States regards his Russian counterpart as a friend, a hero and a wronged man. 

Perhaps Donald Trump has some sympathy for Ukraine’s suffering at Russia’s hands, but there’s no evidence that he does. Everything Trump has said and done since before he was re-elected, right up to his comments this week after the first round of talks between Russian and American officials in Saudi Arabia, suggests he believes that the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, leader of a poor, insignificant, obscure country, started a war with Russia – a rich, glamorous, important country – that Russia was forced to fight with all its strength. Many soldiers have been killed and much property has sadly been damaged. Trump must help poor Vladimir Putin out of this tragic situation, overthrow the tyrant Zelensky, and enable their two great countries to grow rich together. Details to follow.

In other words, Trump’s America adopts, wholesale, Putin’s explanation for his actions, right down to his mocking accusations against the man who, against enormous odds, led his country’s defence.

None of this is to say it’s wrong for the US and Russia to be talking. In ending Russia’s war on Ukraine, there was always going to be a moment when the ‘West’, in some form, had to approach Putin, with or without Ukraine’s consent, to get him to spell out his preferred terms for ending the war. Putin began it, and Putin continues it; apart from a tiny and desperate incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, Ukraine is on the defensive, and continues to lose ground to Russia’s merciless expenditure of troops. It is not lack of arms so much as lack of sons that has killed Ukraine’s hopes of forcing Russia to give back the land it seized.

In a wiser and more competent – to say nothing of a better – world, the initial approach to Putin would have been followed by a consultation between the US, Ukraine and other European countries on their counter-proposals, and the pressure they could put on Putin if he refused to budge. Perhaps this will still happen. For the time being, Ukraine and the rest of Europe will be consulted in the way the residents of a village are consulted before it gets demolished to make way for a new airport.

Although the terms for an initial ceasefire that Putin is offering the Americans in private is unknown, we have a pretty good idea what he wants, which is not so much peace as its evil twin, victory. The degree to which the US pushes back or endorses Putin’s demands could be the first test of how far Trump speaks for America. There are still Atlanticists in positions of power in the US; on the other hand, plenty of others in Trump’s coterie share his awe of Putin and contempt for Zelensky and Ukraine.

For now, there is still all to negotiate for. The two supposed shocks of the opening of talks – the US declarations that Ukraine would never be allowed to join Nato, and would have to give up territory – were not, in reality, so remarkable. Of course it would have been smarter not to give in to these demands of Putin’s even before talks began, but ever since the bloody failures of Ukraine’s counter-offensive and its defence of Bakhmut in 2023, it has been apparent to everyone, including, perhaps, most Ukrainians, that Ukraine lacks the manpower and, for now, the administrative capacity to take back land by force from Russia, which is, while enfeebled, resilient in defence.

As for Nato, it is both an organising principle and a myth; its much fretted over ‘expansion’ was never a very serious proposition, when even with so many extra countries it had a much smaller collective military at the end than at the beginning. It was insurance from America for something Europe thought was never going to happen, which is why Europe was so parsimonious with its premiums. What Ukraine wants and needs is not Nato membership but the physical reassurance that Nato promises and doesn’t provide: hard security guarantees manifest in Western arms, Western troops and Western air cover.

Putin and those around him have often spoken of Russia’s war aims. Central to Putin’s version of events is the myth Ukraine was ready to sign a Russian-drafted peace deal in Istanbul in 2022 and was talked out of it by Western warmongers, Boris Johnson chief among them. In fact, Ukraine was never close to signing the draft treaty, which was, in essence, a document of surrender. But Putin still harks back to it as his preferred closure state, and the text has emerged, giving us, with other events and statements, ways to question how ready America is to give him what he wants.

Russia has already said that any Western peacekeeping force in Ukraine after a ceasefire is out of the question, but the Istanbul draft goes much further. It demands that Ukraine renounce any defence treaties or co-operation with other countries, forbid any foreign troops on its soil, give up any missiles or drones with a range of more than 155 miles and reduce its military to less than half its pre-invasion size. Ukraine’s demobilisation and disarmament was to have been supervised by Russian officials. Ukraine’s Western allies were to have signed the peace deal with Russia as guarantors of Ukraine’s security, but the treaty was drafted in such a way that were Russia to attack Ukraine again, Russia would be able to veto Western intervention on Ukraine’s behalf. Will America push back on this? And will it undertake to go on providing ammunition and spare parts for the weapons it has given Ukraine in the past?

What will America’s response be to Russia’s demand for more territory than it already has? Since the Istanbul talks in 2022, Russia has declared five Ukrainian regions to be part of Russia: Donetsk and Luhansk in the east and Crimea, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south. Of these regions, it has complete control only of Crimea. Will America back Russia in trying to force Ukraine to hand over these huge, heavily populated areas of free Ukraine, including the large cities of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, to Putin, without a fight?

Will America help Putin to try to depose Zelensky? He would have been up for election this year, but he remains in power legally while the country is under martial law, and it is hard to imagine that in anything remotely resembling a fair election in a free Ukraine he would be beaten by anyone more Russia-friendly than him. And yet ousting Zelensky and putting a pliable puppet in place in Kyiv has always been, and continues to be, one of Putin’s war aims. Even under present circumstances the idea that Putin and Trump might conspire to insert a Putin nominee as Zelensky’s replacement, under the delusion that Ukrainians would accept the switch, is far-fetched, but we kick in vain for a firm ground of the possible on which to stand.

Many of these questions, of course, can’t be settled between America and Russia. The obvious drawback to Trump and Putin performing a truth-free, morality-free cosplay of Reagan and Gorbachev is that unless the USpresident plans to intervene militarily on Russia’s behalf, and perhaps even then, any deal requires the consent of Ukraine. It is a lot to ask of Ukraine not only to give up hopes of getting its lost territories back, but to give up land it still holds. And what is the incentive for Ukraine to demilitarise and leave itself undefended under the supervision of the country that has just killed tens of thousands of its people and smashed its cities to smithereens?

The same bullheaded charge to peace may also damage Russian demands that might, from the outside, seem acceptable: its insistence on a constitutionally enshrined special status for the Russian language in Ukraine, and on banning small Ukrainian far-right organisations involved in violence against Jews and Soviet power in the mid-20th century. Again, what is the incentive for Ukraine to yield on these, when all Trump is offering in exchange is to plunder its mineral resources, when it was Putin who made the Russian language unpopular, and radical nationalists popular?

Europe, too, frozen out of the Saudi talks and attacked in Munich by Trump’s vice-president for resisting the march of populism, has more power than it seems to realise to obstruct a bad deal with Putin, and will have to be reckoned with eventually. Nobody but Europe will lead the rebuilding of Ukraine; Europe, too, has a say in lifting sanctions against and returning assets to Russia. It can’t replace America’s defence industries, but it can sustain Ukraine’s war effort with arms for now. Much has been said of the indecisiveness of Europe’s bickering leaders, and the ambivalence of its people towards Ukraine, but perhaps the hardest thing of all is overcoming the cognitive dissonance that comes with accepting quite how much of an enemy to its friends America has suddenly become.

22 February