Trump, Zelensky, the Democrats, and Carl Sagan

I'll get around to that last one.

“Vague References”

Like everyone else, I watched the short clip going around of Trump and Zelensky’s March 1 press conference. Recently, I decided to watch the whole roughly hour-long appearance and a strange shape emerged, different from the ones on newspaper homepages. Zelensky wants the United States to pledge to send American soldiers to Ukraine’s frontline as a “security guarantee.” This phrase, “security guarantee,” has been repeated as a refrain without much unpacking of what it would actually mean, concretely. This sort of security guarantee functions, essentially, as a threat. One form such a guarantee could take—and this is the form Zelensky seems to prefer—would be for the U.S. to pledge that if Russia breaks the ceasefire agreement, then the U.S. would send American troops to Ukraine’s frontlines. In such a scenario, the U.S. and Russia would then be at war.

It’s understandable, of course, that Zelensky might want this, as such a guarantee would not only be a pretty effective deterrent to Russia from breaking its agreement, but even for the U.S. to make the agreement would signal its willingness to fight Putin. And in any case, the U.S. would only be what Zelensky called a “backstop” for the western European countries, who would also make a security guarantee to Ukraine. Zelensky says that only if Ukraine gets this security guarantee from the U.S. will it accept any negotiated ceasefire with Russia.

It’s not being called that, but you could say that Zelensky is offering his own “security guarantee,” of sorts. He is saying that if the U.S. does not offer a security guarantee, then there is nothing Russia can do that will make Ukraine stop fighting—this includes if Russia were to agree to a ceasefire and end all military operations in Ukraine. Even if Russia were to uphold its end of the ceasefire, Zelensky would continue military strikes against Russia, thereby destroying any peace.

I wondered if perhaps I was misunderstanding and that Zelensky only meant that if Russia broke the ceasefire agreement, then Ukraine would respond militarily. This was for many reasons a seemingly far more plausible scenario. The problem with it is that Zelensky was clearly communicating his absolute unwillingness to accept any deal that came without a U.S. security guarantee. If he were to maintain a peace with Russia without the United States’ security guarantee, then both the U.S. and Russia could call him out on what would then in that case have been only a bluff. So that gives Zelensky a pretty strong incentive in that scenario to ignore the ceasefire and continue the fighting.

I thought to myself, this is not actually that difficult to understand. Why doesn’t mainstream U.S. news coverage explain to people a bit better that this important impasse—and not the embarrassing hazing over his attire—was the major part of why that meeting had gotten so tense? In fact, this February 26 New York Times’ article with the soporific title, “Draft of Minerals Features Vague Reference to Ukrainian Security,” lays it all out clearly even before the meeting happened:

In his comments to reporters in Kyiv on Wednesday, Mr. Zelensky also touched on the cease-fire negotiations that Mr. Trump has said he will engage in with Russia. The Ukrainian Army would continue fighting, Mr. Zelensky said, unless a cease-fire included security guarantees.

Mr. Zelensky has said he will not accept an agreement without involvement by Ukraine but had not so clearly indicated the Ukrainian Army could continue fighting if a condition were not reached in the talks.

Moreover, further leverage for Zelensky is that he believes that if he were to continue the war with Russia in spite of a ceasefire agreement, then the war would drag on and eventually spread until it reached Poland. Since Poland is a NATO country, the terms of the NATO treaty would oblige the U.S. to send troops in. So, Zelensky reckons, the U.S. might as well offer the security guarantee “backstop” right now. If the U.S. doesn’t do this, Zelensky will continue the war and the ensuing confrontation would eventually draw the U.S. directly into the conflict, anyway. As Zelensky put it in that testy White House meeting:

Like the President said, you have big, nice ocean right between us. But if we will not stay, Russia will go further to Baltics—and to Poland, by the way—but first, to the Baltics. It’s understandable for them because they’ve been, they’ve been the USSR, you know? Or they’ve been one of the republics of the USSR, and Putin wants to bring them back to his empire. It’s a fact! And when he will go there, if we will not stay, you will fight. Your American soldiers. It doesn’t matter do you have ocean or not. Your soldiers will fight.

For his part, Zelensky clearly thinks that his own actions don’t make World War Three any more or less likely, since he doesn’t think Russia will honor any ceasefire agreement and he also considers Russian expansionism to be inherently rapacious and insatiable. So he is highly incentivized to play hardball in getting the security guarantee, as he sees only two possible future scenarios for Europe: a war between NATO and Russia in which the U.S. is aligned with NATO, or a war in which it is not. He does not believe that any stable peace in Europe is possible so long as Russia’s capacity to invade is not totally disabled. To achieve this would require incredibly large additions to the death toll already mounting on the frontlines of war and is certainly not something that Ukraine could carry out alone. So from Zelensky’s perspective, this makes it rational to hold out for the security guarantee and even to threaten belligerence in order to get it. If he thinks World War Three is a certainty, then from that point of view there is nothing he can do that would make world war more likely, anyway.

The things I’ve learned over the years from reading perfectly mainstream newspaper articles with boring titles like “Draft of Minerals Features Vague Reference to Ukrainian Security.”

Why does the media not do more not just to gawk along with us, but actually to explain what we are seeing in this exchange before the cameras? If the whole of the ruling class were unified around Trump’s foreign policy, then it would be very easy to spin this conflict between him and Zelensky in such a way as to have Trump come looking out great. So it seems to me that there remains a very deep foreign policy fault line, that the American ruling class is for now perhaps even irreconcilably split about how to relate to Russia. Therefore, contrary to what many of us were predicting, we may not see total elite liberal capitulation to Trump in the days, weeks, and months ahead. They will acquiesce to deep and catastrophic concessions on things like trans rights, DEI, and the National Park Service. But his isolationist foreign policy will be a line in the sand. This is because among the United States’ official opinion-makers and their bosses, there is a significant section which is willing, eager, even champing at the bit to inch closer towards a hot war with Russia.

The MAGA Revival Tent

Watching Trump’s remarks to the March 5th Joint Session of Congress, it occurred to me that something I wish more liberals understood about Trump is this: he is an absolute consummate showman. I don’t just mean that he’s some kind of a huckster or a conman, although he is those things, too. The man knows drama. Theater. How to land a punchline. This is not a thing to be added, with a smug shake of the head, to the list of things that make him a liar. Every person who wants to build a resistance to Trump will need to understand the ways in which he is an extremely insightful and riveting truth-teller.

I also don’t believe that a person becomes President of the United States by being “dumb.” Perhaps this is a little bit of good ol’ patriotism left in me. I do not believe that anyone who sits at the Resolute Desk gets there by accident, nor do I think they get there by lacking smarts. I think you get into the Oval Office by knowing America a lot better than it knows itself and by giving it a lot of whatever it thinks it wants. You get there by learning every one of America’s buttons and just how to work them. Trump is the businessman, the gangster, the televangelist, the preacher breathing fire underneath the revival tent. Most importantly, when it comes to playing this country like a fiddle, he is the virtuoso.

The Exceptions

Representative Elissa Slotkin gave the Democratic Party response to Trump and this speech was quite forceful, well-organized, and for some, likely quite galvanizing. Slotkin vowed that the Democrats would fight and she presented something like the concept of a plan for organizing the base.

Of all Trump’s outrages against America which Slotkin named, I was struck that she seemed to take particular umbrage at Trump’s obvious failure to recognize American exceptionalism, in spite of his claims to “Make America Great Again”:

Donald Trump’s actions suggest that, in his heart, he doesn’t believe we are an exceptional nation. He clearly doesn’t think we should lead the world.

Look, America’s not perfect. But I stand with most Americans who believe we are still exceptional. Unparalleled. And I would rather have American leadership over Chinese or Russian leadership any day of the week.

What does this mean, concretely? It means that the Democratic Party wants for the United States to offer Zelensky the security guarantee and to throw its weight behind strengthening his bargaining position—even if it might mean inching America closer to a hot war with Russia or perhaps because they, too, already regard such a confrontation as inevitable. It further means that the Democratic Party is serious enough about pushing for this option, that it may begin to galvanize and organize its base around support for Zelensky’s demands.

If those of us who identify as part of the left are serious about understanding the threat we face from far-right politics, and from imperialism, militarism, fascism, and war, then we must make a sober appraisal of our situation. To do that, we must learn to see what it is that Trump sees which allows him to play his part so well.

The kernel of truth in Trump’s awful dystopian vision of America is that we are not any exception. The irony of the situation is that this was also Zelensky’s point. Zelensky’s dire warnings to Trump about how if there is another world war, the U.S. cannot count on being an isolationist exception from it, were absolutely correct. But this idea that America is exceptional—this is the lie of which we must let go. American Exceptionalism is our sickness and Trump understands that our cruel, thoughtless, arrogant way of elevating our country above all others is simultaneously our pathology and the key to our hearts.

Slotkin is correct that although Trump talks about putting America first as a sop to the people who maybe need most to believe it, he proves by his actions that he really doesn’t think there’s anything special about this place, at all. In fact, Trump, Musk, and his whole crew are distinctive in their seemingly total incapacity to see the value in anything except the all-mighty dollar and brute domination over humanity. Not only does this crew not seem to believe that America is exceptional, they don’t seem to think there’s much special about anything. A federally-owned Brutalist landmark, a nuclear security expert, a scientist working on the bird flu vaccine, an endangered species—for Trump and his ilk these are all just pluses or minuses in a column.

So it makes sense that Slotkin’s speech was centered around values and the ability to preserve what’s worth saving. The problem comes when we ask what it is that her party finds worth saving:

President Trump loves to promise “peace through strength.” That’s actually a line he stole from Ronald Reagan. But let me tell you, after the spectacle that just took place in the Oval Office last week, Reagan must be rolling over in his grave. We all want an end to the war in Ukraine, but Reagan understood that true strength required America to combine our military and economic might with moral clarity.

If you are a liberal or other member of the left who was alive during the 1980s, is “moral clarity” the first phrase you associate with the Gipper? Did you ever think you’d be looking to the party of Reagan to define for you the meaning of moral clarity?

Because that is where we are now and what it suggests—if we look closely at that legacy—is that neither Trump’s party nor the leadership of the Democrats should encourage us in the belief that we’ve cornered the global market on doing the right thing. We desperately need to practice a bit more humility and learn from and with working people the world over. We have so much more to learn from the tradition of international, grassroots, popular struggles against the American ruling class than we do from the American ruling class. And it is desperately necessary that we figure this out sooner rather than later.

So, about Carl Sagan.

And here, I come finally to my point. With Zelensky’s demands elevated by elite liberals attempting to generate popular support for them, we have moved quite a far way from even three years ago when the official Democratic Party position was that it did not “seek a war between NATO and Russia.” And neither is the U.S. in any position to discourage the idea that “might makes right” or that aggressors “can seize territory and subjugate other countries,” regardless of how exceptionally good Biden quite implausibly claimed the U.S. might be at teaching these moral lessons to the rest of the world.

So this might seem like an incredibly minor point to end on, but I think it bears saying. If, as the drums of world war begin to beat louder and louder—and they will, of that I am sure—if you find yourself eager, excited, even thrilled at the prospect of the U.S. going to war, and if you have a Carl Sagan poster, then that poster has to come down off the wall. Because in the 1980s, Sagan—a champion of science, internationalism, solidarity, humanism, and peace—was not looking to Ronald Reagan for moral clarity. He found his answers in the universe of stars in which we all belong.

Where all major sectors of the U.S. ruling class are leading us today is not towards our highest values, but away from them. We have two parties of bloodlust and revenge. What actually is special in Americans is nothing more nor less than what is wonderful and special in all human beings everywhere, the whole world over. So while I know that in this moment, quite a lot of America’s left will complete its now nearly half-century process of embracing the ideals of Ronald Reagan and those who commit themselves to his bloody legacy, I recommend sticking with Carl.