[CORRECTED] The lawless Trump regime, a stupid bully, pressures Ukraine for an illegal ceasefire
BACKGROUND
1) Alan Rappeport (Traveling with the secretary of state), “Ukraine Must Cede Territory in Any Peace Deal, Rubio Says; The secretary of state, heading to talks with Ukrainian officials in Saudi Arabia, said future talks with Moscow will be needed to determine what Russia is willing to give up to end the war,” New York Times,March 10, 2025(Updated 4:18 p.m. ET);
2)Jonathan Chait, “Trump Drops the Mask; The president’s latest positions on the Russia-Ukraine war reveal that he is indifferent to ongoing slaughter—indeed, he is willing to increase it,” The Atlantic, March 10, 2025 (3:28 pm ET);
3) Macarena Vidal Liy y Cristian Segura, “EE UU y Ucrania afrontan en Arabia Saudí una cita crucial para el futuro de la guerra; Donald Trump asegura que está a punto de terminar la pausa en la ayuda de inteligencia al país invadido,” El País, el 10 de marzo, 2025 (00:40 EDT);
4) Macarena Vidal Liy y Cristian Segura,”The US and Ukraine face a crucial appointment in Saudi Arabia for the future of the war; Donald Trump assures that he is about to end the pause in intelligence aid to the invaded country, El País, March 10, 2025 (12:40 a.m. EDT).
UPDATE
5)Frank Bruni, “America Can’t Be Great if America Is Stupid,” New York Times, March 13, 2025..
As U.S. and Ukrainian officials prepare to meet in iSaudi Arabia on Monday, it is useful to examine the contours of just what is going on.
Trump has made it clear in the last two weeks that he is pushing for a ceasefire or peace settlement in Ukraine on Russian terms.
His diplomatic skills are limited to those of a bully.
While demanding virtually no concessions from Vladimir Putin and Russia, he has sought negotiations with Russia over the heads of the Ukrainians and the Europeans, recalling the approach of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who at Munich in 1938 negotiated with Adolf Hitler over the heads of the Czechs the cession to Germany of the German-speaking provinces of the country known as the Sudetenland. The Czechs were mot allowed to participate in negotiations over the future of their own country.
They were bullied into accepting the agreement.
With Germans massing on the border and threatening to invade Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain forced the Czech officials to accept the infamous Munich Pact at the end of September. Five months later Hitler broke the commitments in theMunich Pact and invaded the rest of Czchoslovakia.
Trump initially sought to negotiate a Ukraine deal directly with Vladimir Putin. When that approach generated strong push-back from Ukraine and Europe, he decided to pressure Ukraine into accepting Putin’s terms, which amount to a capitulation. He conceded that Ukraine would have to give up its NATO ambitions, and that it would have to accept continued Russian occupation of territories Russia had conquered through the illegal use of military force (euphemistically referred to as “territorial concessions”).
To pressure Zelensky, Trump has cut off all military and economic aid to Ukraine, halted the provision of intelligence to Ukraine, blocked Ukrainian access to commercially-available satellite imagery, and directed the head of the U.S. Cyber-Command to halt actions and countermeasures aimed at Russia.
As a result of these measures, particulay halting the provision of intelligence information (targeting information and information on the launching of Russian missiles and drones—necessary for the defense of civilian populations and critical infrastructure, and for warning tine to allow civilians to go to bomb shelters—many Ukrainian lives have been lost which otherwise would not have been.
Donald Trump is directly responsible for the loss of these lives. In essence, Trump has been helping Russia kill Ukrainians.
The Brooklyn real estate nafia tactics Trump is using against Ukraine, but not Russia, are not likely to lead to agreement.
Trump has embarked on a course of pressuring Ukraine to accept an illegal ceasefire whose terms violate peremptory norms of international law and the United Nations Charter.
Now, Trump seeks to shove a ceasefire agreement down the throats of the Ukrainians, just as Chamberlain forced the Munich Pact down the throats of the Czechs.
These are the acts of a government acting like a stupid bully.
Stupid, because the Trump administration’s stated objective is a ceasefire that is illegal under peremptory norms of international law and the U.N. Charter, which will never be accepted by European countries such as Germany.
Stupid, because any such ceasefire or peace agreement would be void under international law, and would as a result be inherently unstable.
Stupid, because as we have written,
(T)o establish a ceasefire leaving Russians in possession of territories acquired through the illegal use of force, however worded, would eviscerate the bedrock principles of the United Nations Charter and the Charter-based international legal order.
If such a precedent were established, nations would feel free to invade other countries, and retain possession of conquered territories in “frozen conflicts” established by ceasefires.
The Trump administration’s approach to Ukraine “negotiations” is stupid for the reasons set forth above, and others.
The Trump administration’s approach to negotiations is that of a bully because the President has found that approach useful in real estate negotiations in Brooklyn, and elsewhere.
International negotiations, it is submitted, are more complicated than in Brooklyn, and are not likely to yield the best results through a bullying approach.
***
James Rowles is a former Lecturer on Law at Harv Law School and professor of international law at other universities.
He studied the history of Nazi Germany at Stanford, and has studied and worked on human rights, judicial reform, and access to justice projects in many countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and in Afghanistan and Russia. At Harvard Law School, he taught a course on “Law, Human Rights, and the Struggle for Democracy in Latin America”.
At the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the OAS, he worked on human rights cases involving forced disappearances, executions, and torture in a number of authoritarian countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Recent Books by the Author
James P. Rowles, The Rape of American Democracy: Republican Actions and Democratic Failures, 2016-2021 (2024). Available on Amazon, and from IngramSpark by clicking on a link here.
James P. Rowles, Don’t Be Stupid. Pay Attention, Damn It! Advice for Undecided Voters and Voters Leaning Toward Trump (2024). Available on Amazon,and from IngramSpark by clicking on a link here.
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