Stay firm in face of Donald Trump’s divide and rule
President’s treatment of Zelensky leaves the western alliance in its gravest crisis since 1945 — but we must pull through
Max Hastings
Monday March 03 2025, 12.01am, The Times
Amid turbulence greater than has rocked the Atlantic alliance since 1945, it does no good merely to pile the abuse mountain higher. The West’s predicament is so serious that it would waste verbiage to reprise obvious truths about Donald Trump. We must instead reflect on precedents, and explore future courses.
Have we ever been here before? Think Poland. Churchill in 1945 was distraught that the nation for whose freedom Britain had gone to war with Hitler should fall into the bloody maw of Stalin. The prime minister stood accused of naivety in making a deal at Yalta for Polish free elections which the Russians had no intention of honouring. Yet Churchill saw no choice save to trust Stalin when the dying President Roosevelt refused to quarrel with the Kremlin. Moreover the Americans arguably displayed a realism from which the British recoiled, by acknowledging that the Russians occupied Poland. The Red Army had got there first.
In May 1945 Churchill, despairing and frustrated at finding the Yalta deal betrayed, ordered Britain’s chiefs of staff to draw up a plan for the western allies to expel the Russians from Poland by force. The outcome was
Operation Unthinkable, a blueprint for an assault by 47 American and British divisions. In this amazing document the chiefs used the adjective “hazardous” eight times. Their chairman, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, wrote in his diary: “The whole idea is of course fantastic and the chances of success quite impossible”.
The planners observed that “even if our objective is no more than a square deal for Poland, the scope of such a conflict would not be ours to determine. If [the Russians] want total war, they are in a position to have it.” When the Unthinkable proposal was submitted to Washington, the new Truman administration unhesitatingly dismissed it. Poland was served on toast to the Kremlin.
Of course
Ukraine’s plight is different, but there seem four relevant points: the Russians have achieved military ascendancy there; justice plays scant part in international relations; Putin is playing Stalin’s old Polish game; yet we cannot launch an Operation Unthinkable.
The distinguished strategic analyst François Heisbourg wrote before the weekend train wreck in Washington that the outcome in Ukraine “will either blunt or sharpen Russia’s pursuit of its broader aim … to recreate a latter-day Russian empire by limiting the sovereignty of the states [of eastern Europe]”.
If the US continues to refuse air support for European military peacekeepers in Ukraine, there will be no such deployment. The likeliest consequence of the Trump administration’s withdrawal, if persisted with, is that President Zelensky’s country will become, sooner or later, a Russian vassal state like Belarus, and probably also Georgia, just as did Poland in 1945. With the Americans offering shameless support to Vladimir Putin, and
shameless animosity to Volodymyr Zelensky, the Europeans lack the military power, and — as yesterday’s summit suggests, for all its fine words — probably also the will, themselves to protect Ukraine.
We should certainly not acquiesce in Zelensky’s martyrdom, a tragedy not only for Ukraine but for freedom everywhere. Our leaders must continue to strive to keep the Americans in the game, by urging a peace plan upon Washington. We should ship all such arms as we can muster for as long as the Ukrainians continue to fight, and it is welcome that the prime minister confirmed the commitment to do this. But we cannot rearm ourselves remotely fast enough to undo the consequences of Trump’s treachery — and his actions, if persisted with, indeed represent treachery to America’s historic allies.
We must strengthen our defences on a scale thus far unspoken of at Westminster, if we wish to have any voice in an ugly new world in which might is to be deemed right. I am doubtful whether Sir Keir Starmer is yet ready to embrace such radical action, but his duty to our country demands it. We must think beyond the immediate threat to an epochal future requirement to protect ourselves without much America.
The British government should continue to address the Trump administration with superhuman restraint, but concede no point of principle, and recognise that mere subservience will get us nothing. Trump respects only strength. Compassion is not in his lexicon.
He seeks to divide and rule America’s allies; to break the economic power of the EU by promoting the political power of the extreme right and fracturing European unity. He appears willing, for today at least, to treat Britain with a certain regal condescension, because he applauds our separation from the continent.
His mood is liable to change tomorrow, however. Britain is a liberal democracy. He is in the business of destroying such polities. I have often urged recognition of the fact that, forgetting nonsense about the special relationship, a lot of Americans do not like us, and such Americans are now in charge.
A mere state visit will not change that.
We can traffick with Trump only with extreme caution, while prioritising unity with our neighbours and the other old allies. It is problematic whether we can continue full intelligence-sharing with Washington, amid uncertainty about what Trump’s security appointees might tell Moscow. Few students of global strategy expect this generational crisis — which Starmer’s words at the summit acknowledged as such — to end any time soon. It is unlikely that accord can be restored between Washington and Kyiv. Despite yesterday’s emotional protestations of the Europeans’ goodwill, their real strength of purpose seems doubtful, about rearming on a scale to compensate for American retreat.
Trump revels in high noons at which he casts himself in the principal role. He is sustaining a strike rate of almost one a day, exhausting hundreds of millions of horrified spectators around the world. We are being called upon to hold our nerve, to sustain a sense of order, calm and commitment to reason, when none of these things is on offer from Washington.
Hal Brands, of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, writes in the latest issue of US Foreign Affairs: “The democratic recession of recent years could become a rout if Washington quits the fight for the world’s ideological future — or, worse still, joins the other side … Trump’s world could become a very dark place”.
Somehow we shall come through. But the people of the United States may discover themselves paying a historic price for what is happening, through a collapse of respect for their country and of faith in its word. The betrayal of Ukraine, amid televised presidential conduct such as few mafia bosses would stoop to, can only be forgiven if Trump changes course.
There. I have failed. Despite an expression of good intentions in the first lines of this column, it has proved impossible to complete it without adding to the abuse heaped upon America’s most deplorable president.
