Trump loves a card metaphor. Ukraine, he tells us, “does not hold the cards.” What he omits, of course, is that he is the one sitting there with the deck in his lap, both jokers up his sleeve and his foot on the table so nobody else can reach the pack.
Ukraine does not lack cards by accident. Washington has been slowly closing the tap on weapons and ammunition, hinting that support is conditional on swallowing a “peace plan” that hands Russia almost a fifth of the country, including land it does not even occupy. Then Trump points at the battlefield situation and announces that Kyiv is not in a strong position. It is like strangling someone and remarking how very breathless they sound.
If the US chose to, it could transform Ukraine’s hand in short order: long range missiles in sufficient quantity, serious air defence, guaranteed resupply over years rather than months, and a clear message to Moscow that this war ends when Russia goes home, not when Ukraine gives up. Instead we have a protection racket: nice little country you’ve got there, shame if anything happened to your arms shipments. Sign here.
And this is where the second, even more awkward question comes in, the one nobody on his home turf seems keen to ask: would Trump accept this deal for the United States?
Spell it out in plain numbers. His “peace” requires Ukraine to sign away close to 20 per cent of its land, much of it already occupied but some still under Ukrainian control, in return for the promise that the man who invaded them might stop doing it for a bit. Now imagine the same proposal framed in American terms.
“Mr Trump, if a foreign power invaded, would you hand over, say, the entire north east seaboard and a slice of the Midwest, including some areas that are still fighting, and then call it a historic deal?”
Of course, his stock response would be that “such a situation would never happen” to America. Which is perfectly true, and completely damning. It would never happen because the United States sits under an enormous deterrent umbrella, backed by alliances, nuclear weapons, and a very simple rule: touch one inch of our soil and we will go berserk. America does not live next door to a revanchist petro state that denies its right to exist. Ukraine does. The whole reason Putin thought he could get away with this is precisely that Ukraine did not have the sort of security guarantees America takes for granted.
So that little dodge - “it would never happen here” - is not an argument for carving up Ukraine. It is the reason Ukraine wants NATO style protection so it is not carved up again. America’s entire defence posture is “we will never accept what you are now telling Ukrainians to accept”.
If he says yes, he would hand over American land, he brands himself an appeaser. Not a strategic genius, not a realist, just a man willing to carve up his own country to flatter his ego and get a photo on the White House lawn.
If he says no, he admits that what he demands from Ukraine is something he would never tolerate for the US. One rule for them, another for expendable allies on the edge of someone else’s empire. That is the core obscenity here. This is not some impartial doctrine of “ending wars” or “saving lives”. If that were the principle, it would apply to everyone. Instead it mysteriously applies only to small countries being dismembered by larger ones, never to the larger ones themselves.
You can see the hypocrisy from orbit. When a few rocks in the South China Sea are involved, Washington thunders about freedom of navigation. When a hostile power merely thinks about putting missiles in Cuba, it is a world crisis. But when it is Ukraine losing cities, ports and farmland, suddenly the great negotiator discovers a taste for compromise and creative map redrawing.
So when Trump says Ukraine does not hold the cards, the honest reply is very simple. No, it does not. Because you picked them up, locked them in your briefcase, and are now offering to give a couple back if Kyiv agrees to sign over a fifth of its land to the man who started the war.
Call it what it is. Not peace. Not realism. Just a property developer treating someone else’s country as a distressed asset in need of “rationalisation”, and assuming nobody will be rude enough to ask whether he would ever accept the same bargain at home.
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