None dare call it reason

Some, however, will call it treason, and I may well join that chorus.

This morning, I had to look at the calendar to make sure I got the date right. Yes I did. It’s indeed 16 August. Eight days since the expiration of Trump’s latest ultimatum to Putin.

Trump proclaimed he was “pissed off” with Putin’s “bullshit”. He might have added a few of his favourite intensifiers, but these were omitted from the reports.

As a result, Trump issued an ultimatum. If Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire by 2 September, no, make that 8 August, Trump would visit any number of Egyptian plagues on Russia and her trading partners.

The Ukraine would get a new batch of American weapons, implicitly including long-range cruise missiles. Russia would be hit with new sanctions from hell. And whoever keeps Russia’s economy afloat by buying her oil – are you listening, China and India? – would be thumped with secondary tariffs of 500 per cent. No make that 100 per cent. Whatever, high enough to hurt, was what Trump meant.

The U-Day came and went, but none of that happened. What did ensue was the bafflement of commentators who failed to see any rhyme or reason in Trump’s actions. The ultimatum sank into the Lethe, that river of oblivion. All the deadlines were forgotten too.

Instead of agreeing to stop his aggression, Putin accepted Trump’s invitation to lose his international pariah stigma, come in from the cold and be reinstated as a legitimate world statesman. He magnanimously agreed to fly to Alaska for a heart-to-heart with Trump.

The flight from Moscow to Anchorage took nine hours. The meeting itself, just three. And the subsequent press conference, 12 minutes. There wasn’t much to say, other than Putin repeating, and Trump pretending to believe, the same lies. Actually, Trump has met many world leaders, but he never sounded so servile as he did with Putin yesterday.

The meaningless noise was harmonised with the background of Russian missiles raining on Ukrainian cities. But the solo part was unmistakable: Putin was manipulating Trump like a spy master running a two-bit agent blackmailed with naughty off-focus photos.

I don’t know whether Trump has been coerced into doing Putin’s bidding. I’m sure the truth, one way or the other, will out eventually. However, even if Trump isn’t Putin’s agent, I can’t imagine what he’d be doing differently if he were.

Trump is manifestly accepting at face value Putin’s lies about the “root causes” of the war. The Russian chieftain was supposedly so worried about NATO’s eastward expansion that he simply had to lash out. As himself a man of his word, Putin couldn’t forgive America for breaking her promise not to draw Eastern Europe into the alliance.

It was in 1990 that US Secretary of State James Baker supposedly assured Gorbachev that the unification of Germany wouldn’t entail the expansion of NATO. Gorbachev’s subsequent accounts of that event differed. In some interviews he said the assurance had taken place; in some others, that it hadn’t.

One way or the other, no formal agreement was reached. It’s laughable that Russia, which has broken every treaty she has ever signed (full list available on request), would try to hold the West to an informal oral flourish that might or might not have taken place.

Everyone not doing Putin’s bidding for one reason or another knows that there exists only one “root cause” of the brutal Russian aggression: the Ukraine’s independence.

It’s not for nothing that Putin’s foreign minister Lavrov showed up at Anchorage with the letters CCCP on his T-shirt, the Russian for USSR. Amusingly, the outside two letters were covered by his gilet, with only CC visible, the Russian for the SS.

Some commentators had a good time with that, saying that the latter acronym was closer to the truth. Such fun can be had, but the actual reality is even worse: Putin is dead set on rebuilding the Soviet empire. This noble aim is impossible to achieve without the Ukraine returning to the fold as the bigger and more important version of Lukashenko’s Belarus.

It’s not about getting a part of the Ukraine’s territory. It’s about turning the Ukraine as a whole into Russia’s stooge, a sham ‘republic’ run by a quisling like Yanukovych or Medvedchuk.

Anyone who thinks Putin genuinely wants peace, especially at a time his troops are inching forward over piles of their comrades’ corpses, is sorely misguided. What he wants is Trump’s acquiescence in pursuing that objective. And the Alaska travesty showed yet again that this is exactly what Putin is getting.

“The war wouldn’t have happened had Trump been president in 2022,” lied Putin, and Trump beamed from ear to ear. That’s exactly what he has been saying for years.

Of course, he has also been saying he’ll end the war in 24 hours (three days, three months, six months and so on), but Putin never confirmed those deadlines. He did confirm that Don Trump could have prevented – and now can stop – the killing. What further proof of Trump’s genius can anyone, including the Nobel Committee, possibly want?

Putin was playing Trump’s ego like a violin virtuoso plying his trade. That favour was repaid: both the Ukraine and Europe were reduced to the role of extras floating in and out behind the two stars of the show.

The only tangible result of the meeting was that, courtesy of Trump, Putin shed the striped clothes of a war criminal under an international arrest warrant. Overnight, he regained the status of a world leader, equal partner to Trump if perhaps not quite yet to Xi.

That was his reason for going to Alaska, but Putin’s reason was Trump’s treason. He betrayed the Ukraine, NATO, the West in general. He allowed the fascist regime threatening Europe to gain time for continuing its aggression, with all ultimatums forgotten, all deadlines buried.

Now Trump will meet Zelensky, trying no doubt to bully him into surrender. He’ll then probably accept Putin’s invitation to have another pointless chinwag, in Moscow this time. There we’ll go, round and round, to and fro, while the Ukraine bleeds white.

Eventually, she’ll bleed out, with Putin claiming his spoils and Trump his Nobel Peace Prize. And the epigram by the Elizabethan poet John Harrington will be vindicated yet again: “Treason doth never prosper? What’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”