On Tuesday, the U.S. and Russia formally kicked off the start of the negotiating process, which Team Trump expects to result in a peace settlement for Ukraine – President Trump’s goal and campaign promise.
Trump’s team of heavy hitters – Secretary of State Marco Rubio, national security advisor Mike Waltz and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff – met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with the opposing team handpicked by Russian President Vladimir Putin: Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s foreign policy advisor Yuriy Ushakov and Harvard-educated former Goldman Sachs executive Kirill Dmitriyev, who currently heads up the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund.
Rubio also met with Lavrov, which State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce characterized as an ‘important step forward.’
Trump, who held a ‘highly productive’ phone call with Putin last week, wants to end the war in Ukraine quickly and being a realist, he made, albeit indirectly, a generous initial offer to Putin – no NATO membership for Ukraine, Putin’s long-held red line; Russia keeps one-fifth of Ukraine and Crimea; and even a return to the Group of Seven (G-7) major economies, making it the G-8.
Why is Trump seemingly handing victory to the Russian dictator who invaded a sovereign country and has been waging a bloody war on it for three years? With Trump, everything is not what it seems. A very unconventional thinker, Trump is playing an entirely different game than all of his predecessors. Trump’s approach to solving the Russia-Ukraine problem reveals his thinking on military strategy, definition of victory and end game.
Trump wants to protect America from the real threat, which he and his team believe is China. He also wants to avoid a nuclear war with Russia, which former President Joe Biden himself warned his DNC donors about.
Trump is compelling NATO allies to take over responsibility for the Russia problem, which has been draining the U.S. of its weapons arsenal and cash. We have provided $200 billion to Ukraine in cash and armaments and depleted our own weapons arsenal to dangerous levels in key weapon systems and ammunition, for no return on our investment.
Trump wants to stop the bleeding – both of Ukrainians and of U.S. military hardware and cash, so we can focus on China, which has an offensive military doctrine to defeat the United States, including kinetically, if Washington intervenes in China’s plans and actions to take over Taiwan.
But Trump wants to win to achieve victory over China without dragging our country into yet another endless unwinnable war, the kind that his predecessors have fought mindlessly. Trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives were lost, and no victories have been achieved, as Washington eagerly engaged in conflicts in foreign lands for the past quarter of a century – think Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria.
The United States spent $2.2 trillion of taxpayers’ earnings and sacrificed six thousand American lives. Wars in Iraq and Syria cost nearly $3 trillion and half a million casualties, which include national military and police, allied troops, civilians and opposition fighters. None of those countries have become democracies, as Trump’s predecessors hoped they would. In fact, they are now worse off than prior to U.S. intervention.
As a successful businessman and wise statesman, Trump wants to win the next war, the one that Xi Jinping has been getting ready to fight to achieve China’s long-term ambitions. But Trump wants to do it the Trump way, not the Washington Way – win without fighting. Trump’s way also happens to be the Chinese way – the ultimate Art of War, or Art of the Deal, in Trump speak.
Here’s what the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu wrote in his seminal treatise ‘The Art of War. ‘To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the supreme excellence. Supreme excellence is to subdue the enemy, to break his resistance without fighting.’
As Sun Tzu warned, ‘When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long coming, then men’s weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.’ ‘Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.’ And this is exactly what happened, as a result of Washington’s obsession with foreign wars.
President Trump’s definition of victory is not about Russia and Putin. It’s about securing the homeland and preventing the next war. For this to happen, Trump wants to preserve our resources, re-build our military, and secure our borders, which China has been violating, sending fentanyl to kill our people and intelligence operatives to conduct clandestine operations.
Winning without fighting is Trump’s Art of War. It is also the essence of the ‘Art of the Deal’ that he is making with Putin on Ukraine.