J.D. Vance’s Fighting Words—Against Me and Ukraine

It is not ‘moralistic garbage’ but a hard and realistic lesson of history that wars are easy to start and hard to end.

It is not every day I am accused by the vice president of the United States of purveying “moralistic garbage” and “historical illiteracy,” and of being a “globalist.” But those were the charges leveled against me by J.D. Vance this morning.

I suppose I should not have been surprised by the onslaught. This week, President Donald Trump’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine took what struck me as a bad turn. Now, I am not one of those who objects to Trump talking to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Nor am I against the new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. A war that cannot be ended on the battlefield must be ended by negotiation, and peace talks do not get far if one combatant is excluded from the discussions.

However, in the past 10 days the Trump administration—which had up until this point been striking the right tone—made a series of unforced errors. The first indication of what was coming was at a NATO meeting in Brussels on February 12, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that Ukraine’s postwar borders were unlikely to be as they were before Russia initially invaded in 2014; that negotiations would not end with Ukraine as a NATO member; and that non-Americans would have to provide security guarantees.

As those were three of Putin’s negotiating objectives, it seemed to me simply bizarre for the U.S. defense secretary to offer them up as freebies in return for nothing. Of course, the Ukrainian government knows these concessions will likely have to be made. But there must be Russian concessions in return. I was relieved when Hegseth clarified his comments the next day, saying that “what concessions will be made or what concessions will not be made” would be up to President Trump. Even better was The Wall Street Journal’s interview with none other than Vance, who said that the option of sending U.S. troops to Ukraine if Moscow failed to negotiate in good faith remained “on the table,” and that there were “economic tools of leverage” as well as “military tools of leverage” the United States could use against Putin. “We do care about Ukraine having sovereign independence,” Vance said. I cheered.

I cheered too soon.

Read on:

Niall Ferguson: J.D. Vance’s Fighting Words—Against Me and Ukraine