At Least Vance Has A Plan

JD Vance has proposed a plan to end the war in Ukraine that has made the Washington Post and the combined cognoscenti livid. 

The Post reports:

“I think what this looks like is Trump sits down, he says to the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Europeans: You guys need to figure out — What does a peaceful settlement look like? And what it probably looks like is the current line of demarcation between Russia and Ukraine, that becomes like a demilitarized zone,” Vance said Wednesday on The Shawn Ryan Show.

Vance continued, saying that the proposed DMZ would be heavily fortified, to deter further war and that the cost of an independent entity in Kiev would mean ensuring that Ukraine cannot ever join NATO or the EU. 

So, overall, the idea is a frozen conflict, a demilitarized zone, and Ukrainian neutrality. Not dissimilar to countless such compromises throughout the Cold War, including the Korean peninsula, East Berlin, and most famously, the Austrian Neutralitätserklärung. Your prudent analyst also once dared to suggest a similar course of realist compromise in a paper, but that was a few years back, and the war might have been entirely avoided that way. 

The Post lamented further, adding, “Although some Republican lawmakers are among the strongest supporters of Ukraine, others have been increasingly reluctant to continue providing federal funding toward the war, arguing that the money is better spent on domestic issues such as securing the southern U.S. border.”

But the most egregious piece of falsehood was when the Post continued with a lie that Europe is continuing to overspend the United States in Ukraine. 

Vance also said Europe has “underfunded this war while American taxpayers have been very generous,” a charge often made by Trump, who falsely said in Tuesday’s debate that the US had spent $250-$275 billion on Ukraine — more than twice as much as Europe. As of June 30, European nations with far smaller economies had collectively spent and allocated considerably more than the US, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. As a percentage of its economy, the US ranks lower than 21 other countries, according to the institute.

This, is, to put it mildly, not even a spin but a lie.

The Kiel Institute stopped measuring actual given aid, due to this specific problem, as it showed that the US is dominating the aid to Ukraine. Instead, it started to measure “pledges” and “allocations” within delivered aid, to pump up European contribution numbers. And the argument that per percentage some European countries are giving more than the US makes no real sense, as one, they are close to Russia so they should pay a greater percentage of their GDP, and two, Estonia spending ten percent of their GDP for defense is nothing compared to an actual 1 percent of US GDP towards the same cause. 

Either way, at least Vance has a theory of victory, and a plan to end the rush towards a peer nuclear war with another great power. The entire Cold War was about the same compromises. The other side has no plan. And that should ideally disqualify them from talking about the war.