Will Trump Choose Victory or Defeat in Ukraine

Victory is achievable. Defeat would be catastrophic.

President-elect Donald Trump will soon face a choice that will determine not only the success or failure of his administration, but the fate of the entire free world. Will he choose victory or defeat in Ukraine?

There is a large faction within the Trump camp that has been shouting from the rooftops for some time that the West needs to accept defeat in Ukraine and allow Russia to conquer that country. At various times during the campaign, Trump himself has made statements that align with such sentiments. But Trump will soon be president, and his stand regarding Ukraine will be judged not by how well it plays at a campaign rally or on Fox TV, but how it works out in reality.

For this reason, Trump must decisively reject the counsels of the defeatist camp, because the alternative is catastrophe.

Consequences of Ukrainian Defeat

Were Trump to accept the advice of the isolationists and defeatists in his entourage and cut off American arms aid to Ukraine, the following consequences would likely ensue.

1. Russia would conquer Ukraine. This would delete the largest land army in Europe from the West’s order of battle, greatly strengthen Russia economically and technically, eliminate a strategic weakness along Russia’s southwest border that would otherwise constrain Putin’s aggressive plans, and advance Russian armies to the borders of NATO allies Poland and Romania.

2. Russia would seize the Baltic States. Putin has stated his intention to restore the Russian empire, which included these countries, as well as Finland and much of Poland. But so long as Ukraine remains free, strong, and in the fight, swarming the Baltics would be an unattractive course of action, because the West could counter it by giving the Ukrainian armed forces all the weapons they need to win. However with Ukraine gone, NATO would have no effective counter move to a Russian seizure of the Baltics. Putin knows that we not going to nuclear war to save Estonia, and that NATO lacks the 500,000 man expeditionary force that would be need to expel his troops from the Baltic states after he seizes them So take them he will, with the fact that they are NATO members proving no deterrent whatsoever. On the contrary, their NATO membership would make them all the more enticing to take, as doing so would expose the impotence of that alliance.

3. Russia would carry out widespread massacres https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/facing-the-russian-world/ and mass deportations from Ukraine and the Baltic States. This would be done to crush resistances and effect ethnic cleansing to make those lands permanently Russian, as it already has done removing the native Tatar population from Crimea and German population of Prussia. It is in the process of doing this right now in Mariupol, where it is replacing Russian-speaking Ukrainians with Russians. (Note: Contrary to Kremlin propaganda, Russian-speaking Ukrainians are not Russians, any more than Irish are English. Whether they speak Ukrainian, Russian or Surzhyk, a mixture of the two languages, Ukrainians have an entirely different, and far more western mentality than Russians, rooted in a different history and the fact that in Czarist times, Ukrainian peasants farmed their plots independently, whereas Russian serfs worked their owner’s land as village collectives.) In addition, however, by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Balts, Russia would also send millions of them fleeing as refugees into Western Europe.

4. Guided by the thinking of its chief ideologist Aleksandr Dugin https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/03/eurasianist-threat-robert-zubrin/ , the Kremlin has created a new Comintern of AltRight parties https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/06/wrong-right-robert-zubrin/ including the AfD in Germany, the National Rally in France, and similar movements in Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, the Netherlands. These all share the same ID format, combining radical anti-immigrant politics with fealty to Moscow. Flooding western Europe with refugees would bring them to power.

5. With NATO humiliated, and pro-Moscow parties taking power in many of its key members, the Atlantic alliance would disintegrate. Furthermore, with America discredited as an ally, smaller countries everywhere, notably including Taiwan, would have no choice but to accept domination by the China-Russia Axis, while medium-sized powers like South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and AfD Germany would rush to develop their own nuclear arsenals. This will make nuclear war far more likely.

For the past eighty years we have not had a general war. This is because of the deterrent effect of the free world’s policy of collective security. That will end, and with it will end the golden age of the Pax Americana we have enjoyed, if not properly appreciated, since 1945.

The isolationists claim that the desertion of the cause of world freedom is necessary to appease Putin and avoid war. On the contrary, as it did in the 1930s, the abandonment of collective security to appease aggressors is guaranteed to unleash war. https://www.kyivpost.com/article/opinion/op-ed/the-folly-and-lessons-of-appeasement-revisited.html

But even before general war breaks out, America will be progressively impoverished, as stripped of our leadership role, we enter a world in which not we, but China, makes the rules.

There is no need, however, to accept such a catastrophic outcome. With proper support, Ukraine can win the war.

How We Can Win the War

The United States can put a decisive check on the expansionist ambitions of the Russian-China Axis be sending Ukraine all the arms it needs to completely repel the Russian invasion. Putting American technological virtuosity together with Ukrainian courage and grit can readily achieve victory. It is only the incredible fecklessness of the Biden administration in stalling weapon system approvals, spooning out arms deliveries at the slowest possible rate, and then denying permission to use them most effectively that has allowed to war to go on this long. Here is what needs to be done.

1. We need to give Ukraine the tools it needs to make itself secure from Russian air and missile bombardment. This is essential to allow Ukraine to build up its own defense industrial base. Achieving this requires not only delivery of adequate amounts of air defense systems, like Patriots, but offensive systems including ATACM long range missiles and F-16 fighter aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting_Falcon armed with both air-to-air and long-range air-to-ground missiles, such as our JASSMs, which can deliver 1000 lb. warheads over a range of 230 miles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-158_JASSM To achieve security, the Ukrainians need not just to block Russia’s arrows, it must kill her archers. The United States has over thousands of F-16s which we do not use for anything but target practice for more advanced fighters. We can easily afford to send Ukraine 200 of them. Over 4600 F-16s have been produced since they first went into service in 1974, and they are used by 25 countries. As a result there are tens of thousands of F-16 veteran pilots worldwide. Hundreds of international volunteer pilots and ground crewmen could immediately become available were Trump to lift Biden’s order blocking Ukraine from recruiting them. We also have some 340 A-10 ground attack aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunderbolt_II that the US Air Force has been trying to divest itself of for years. Armed with powerful gatling guns designed to destroy Russian tanks, these could be initially deployed in rear areas to intercept and eliminate the slow moving Shahed cruise missiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136 that Russia has been bombarding Ukraine with. But after the F-16s have neutralized Russia’s air defenses the A-10s could be employed with great effect against Russia’s armed forces on the ground.

2. We need to help Ukraine win the drone war. Ukraine has revolutionized warfare by introducing the small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) as a decisive miliary arm. While large miliary aircraft can take years or decades to develop, new types of UAVs can be introduced into combat within months or even weeks of their conception. This has placed a premium on innovation, and it is here that the ingenious and individualist Ukrainians have been able to outperform the much more numerous but less creative Russians. But with our help they can do much better still. Much of the technology that the Ukrainians have been working hard to invent under conditions of bombardment is stuff that we already have. The US government needs to lift its ITAR rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_Regulations currently throttling the transfer of drone warfare technologies from American companies to the Ukrainians. This will enable Ukraine to produce advanced drones that cannot be stopped by Russian jamming or other counter measures. It costs about $2000 to produce a good small UAV in Ukraine, so with the right technology transfer and a couple of billion dollars in aid Ukraine could produce million such advanced UAVs. Alternatively the pentagon could cut a check to American companies, and we could produce them here ourselves. This would cost about five times as much, but we would benefit from building up our own defense industrial base in this now critical area. Or better yet, we could and should do both.

With its own cities protected and millions of advanced UAVs in hand, Ukraine could strike trucks, trains, and supply depots in the Russian rear, making it impossible for the Russians to supply their frontline forces. Under those conditions the Russians would have no choice but to withdraw.

Once Russia is repelled and shown to gain nothing by its aggressive adventure, China will think twice about messing with the United States.

So to sum it up, Trump has a choice. He can take a brave stand, restore deterrence, save the peace, and save the West. Or he can be choose to be even weaker than Joe Biden and, losing everything, cause the greatest geostrategic catastrophe in history.

Dr. Robert Zubrin is an aerospace engineer and author of 12 books, including most recently The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet https://www.amazon.com/New-World-Mars-Create-Planet/dp/1635768802/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.7CO4pdRvL8H17LVNWUDSYa0KKnyJ_MfnhzkY4QSKkbRSOu2SyePr4Q9tjEhq2rw7ns1I7UqAn8e0Ok2iolwuil9DilwIyEMrY6Iomxdz5pQI1DMWAA_ECM3DM9Gx8vLpGzOvGCTAZTlGv6YBWWBFHkXsxf0AkVZnhxqeLqwa2B9aF1ngeShGrYvBBKiwJOD773Y4VoYSXM_pWDZ3Du1DqHDzwoy8h5mwXnAxzdyyClc.b4Kc23jvkxFxdvEyH657niKeg07Ew0m7-TVo1Axvs0A&qid=1730311816&sr=8-1