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An Enemy to Its Friends

James Meek

Leon Festinger’s concept of cognitive dissonance was born in the 1950s out of research into what happens when there’s a doomsday cult and doomsday fails to arrive. A tiny minority of cultists have their warped worldview confronted by reality. How do they deal with it? They rationalise the unreasonable. They cherry-pick information to suit themselves. They deny the evidence of the data, and their senses.

In the second Trump era, the cultists are running the show, and it is the majority of people in Europe, including Ukraine, who are in denial. Perhaps doomsday hasn’t actually arrived. But if it hasn’t, it is for us, the supposedly rational ones, to prove it. At the moment, the signs point the other way. Maybe America is not now ruled by arrogant, vengeful, petty, patriarchal, racist imperialists. But where’s the evidence?

Like the United Nations and the World Health and Trade Organisations, Nato may continue to exist on paper, but if it still has any meaning, the onus is on the believers to prove it. Perhaps the United States would take action to defend Estonia or Poland if Russia attacked; but as things stand, there’s no reason to suppose it would, and multiple indications that it wouldn’t.

It may be that, generally, on any given day, the US government – if such a concept can be said to be real in any sense that its own people, let alone the rest of the world, can rely on – regards Russia as a threat, an adversary. But there is no proof that this is the case, and abundant evidence that the leader of the United States regards his Russian counterpart as a friend, a hero and a wronged man.

Perhaps Donald Trump has some sympathy for Ukraine’s suffering at Russia’s hands, but there’s no evidence that he does. Everything Trump has said and done since before he was re-elected, right up to his comments this week after the first round of talks between Russian and American officials in Saudi Arabia, suggests he believes that the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, leader of a poor, insignificant, obscure country, started a war with Russia – a rich, glamorous, important country – that Russia was forced to fight with all its strength. Many soldiers have been killed and much property has sadly been damaged. Trump must help poor Vladimir Putin out of this tragic situation, overthrow the tyrant Zelensky, and enable their two great countries to grow rich together. Details to follow.

In other words, Trump’s America adopts, wholesale, Putin’s explanation for his actions, right down to his mocking accusations against the man who, against enormous odds, led his country’s defence.

None of this is to say it’s wrong for the US and Russia to be talking. In ending Russia’s war on Ukraine, there was always going to be a moment when the ‘West’, in some form, had to approach Putin, with or without Ukraine’s consent, to get him to spell out his preferred terms for ending the war. Putin began it, and Putin continues it; apart from a tiny and desperate incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, Ukraine is on the defensive, and continues to lose ground to Russia’s merciless expenditure of troops. It is not lack of arms so much as lack of sons that has killed Ukraine’s hopes of forcing Russia to give back the land it seized.

In a wiser and more competent – to say nothing of a better – world, the initial approach to Putin would have been followed by a consultation between the US, Ukraine and other European countries on their counter-proposals, and the pressure they could put on Putin if he refused to budge. Perhaps this will still happen. For the time being, Ukraine and the rest of Europe will be consulted in the way the residents of a village are consulted before it gets demolished to make way for a new airport.

Although the terms for an initial ceasefire that Putin is offering the Americans in private is unknown, we have a pretty good idea what he wants, which is not so much peace as its evil twin, victory. The degree to which the US pushes back or endorses Putin’s demands could be the first test of how far Trump speaks for America. There are still Atlanticists in positions of power in the US; on the other hand, plenty of others in Trump’s coterie share his awe of Putin and contempt for Zelensky and Ukraine.

For now, there is still all to negotiate for. The two supposed shocks of the opening of talks – the US declarations that Ukraine would never be allowed to join Nato, and would have to give up territory – were not, in reality, so remarkable. Of course it would have been smarter not to give in to these demands of Putin’s even before talks began, but ever since the bloody failures of Ukraine’s counter-offensive and its defence of Bakhmut in 2023, it has been apparent to everyone, including, perhaps, most Ukrainians, that Ukraine lacks the manpower and, for now, the administrative capacity to take back land by force from Russia, which is, while enfeebled, resilient in defence.

As for Nato, it is both an organising principle and a myth; its much fretted over ‘expansion’ was never a very serious proposition, when even with so many extra countries it had a much smaller collective military at the end than at the beginning. It was insurance from America for something Europe thought was never going to happen, which is why Europe was so parsimonious with its premiums. What Ukraine wants and needs is not Nato membership but the physical reassurance that Nato promises and doesn’t provide: hard security guarantees manifest in Western arms, Western troops and Western air cover.

Putin and those around him have often spoken of Russia’s war aims. Central to Putin’s version of events is the myth Ukraine was ready to sign a Russian-drafted peace deal in Istanbul in 2022 and was talked out of it by Western warmongers, Boris Johnson chief among them. In fact, Ukraine was never close to signing the draft treaty, which was, in essence, a document of surrender. But Putin still harks back to it as his preferred closure state, and the text has emerged, giving us, with other events and statements, ways to question how ready America is to give him what he wants.

Russia has already said that any Western peacekeeping force in Ukraine after a ceasefire is out of the question, but the Istanbul draft goes much further. It demands that Ukraine renounce any defence treaties with other countries, forbid any foreign troops on its soil, give up any missiles or drones with a range of more than 155 miles and reduce its military to one-sixth of its pre-invasion size, with a skeleton force of only 1500 officers. The draft proposed that all Ukrainian units would return to barracks, with their disarmament supervised by Russia. Will America push back on this? And will it undertake to go on providing ammunition and spare parts for the weapons it has given Ukraine in the past?

What will America’s response be to Russia’s demand for more territory than it already has? Since the Istanbul talks in 2022, Russia has declared five Ukrainian regions to be part of Russia: Donetsk and Luhansk in the east and Crimea, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south. Of these regions, it has complete control only of Crimea. Will America back Russia in trying to force Ukraine to hand over these huge, heavily populated areas of free Ukraine, including the large cities of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, to Putin, without a fight?

Will America help Putin to try to depose Zelensky? He would have been up for election this year, but he remains in power legally while the country is under martial law, and it is hard to imagine that in anything remotely resembling a fair election in a free Ukraine he would be beaten by anyone more Russia-friendly than him. And yet ousting Zelensky and putting a pliable puppet in place in Kyiv has always been, and continues to be, one of Putin’s war aims. Even under present circumstances the idea that Putin and Trump might conspire to insert a Putin nominee as Zelensky’s replacement, under the delusion that Ukrainians would accept the switch, is far-fetched, but we kick in vain for a firm ground of the possible on which to stand.

Many of these questions, of course, can’t be settled between America and Russia. The obvious drawback to Trump and Putin performing a truth-free, morality-free cosplay of Reagan and Gorbachev is that unless the US president plans to intervene militarily on Russia’s behalf, and perhaps even then, any deal requires the consent of Ukraine. It is a lot to ask of Ukraine not only to give up hopes of getting its lost territories back, but to give up land it still holds. And what is the incentive for Ukraine to demilitarise and leave itself undefended under the supervision of the country that has just killed tens of thousands of its people and smashed its cities to smithereens?

The same bullheaded charge to peace may also damage Russian demands that might, from the outside, seem acceptable: its insistence on a constitutionally enshrined special status for the Russian language in Ukraine, and on banning small Ukrainian far-right organisations involved in violence against Jews and Soviet power in the mid-20th century. Again, what is the incentive for Ukraine to yield on these, when all Trump is offering in exchange is to plunder its mineral resources, when it was Putin who made the Russian language unpopular, and radical nationalists popular?

Europe, too, frozen out of the Saudi talks and attacked in Munich by Trump’s vice-president for resisting the march of populism, has more power than it seems to realise to obstruct a bad deal with Putin, and will have to be reckoned with eventually. Nobody but Europe will lead the rebuilding of Ukraine; Europe, too, has a say in lifting sanctions against and returning assets to Russia. It can’t replace America’s defence industries, but it can sustain Ukraine’s war effort with arms for now. Much has been said of the indecisiveness of Europe’s bickering leaders, and the ambivalence of its people towards Ukraine, but perhaps the hardest thing of all is overcoming the cognitive dissonance that comes with accepting quite how much of an enemy to its friends America has suddenly become.

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  • 19 February 2025 at 8:10pm
    Rory Allen says:
    America has adopted the same position towards Russia now, under the Trump faction of the Republican Party, as it would have done in 1939 towards Germany if the German American Bund had been in control of the Presidency and both houses of Congress.

    We can no longer expect help from the United States to save what is left of Western liberal democracy. The only hope, slender though it is, is for Western Europe to massively increase its military spending, become totally independent from America for its weapons technology, and increase the size of its armed forces, possibly including conscription in those countries that don't already have it.

    We assume that without US arms, Europe is defenceless, but this may not be the case. Sweden's Gripen is probably better than anything Russia currently has, three European countries have excellent tank and IFV designs, and presumably drones can be built as plentifully and cheaply in Europe as in Russia.

    What may be lacking is the political will. Russia has spent decades systematically building up the far right parties in Europe, and their investment has paid off. We can be certain that Reform UK and its counterparts in other countries will set up howls of grief and outrage in the event that Europe takes serious steps to make sure it can defend against Russia, either on Ukraine's current border or perhaps further West.
  • 19 February 2025 at 8:22pm
    Ian Ross says:
    Trump is the great disruptor and propagandist. His philosophy, if you can call it that, is grounded on the 'deal' - if he wants it he can buy it or bully his opponent into submission. He will MAGA by attacking any economy that has a trade surplus through tariffs - 'such a beautiful word' - while forgetting that trade surpluses are not the real issue - that is balance of payments which include services. He wants world peace on his terms because, as a certifiable narcissist, he has no interest in anybody apart from himself and that includes US citizens. It also allows him to make false claims about anything because the propaganda noise drowns out any questioning. His sociopathic personality reveals a belief that he is the greatest man on earth.
    In reality he is both lazy and certainly not cerebral. Geopolitics cannot be resolved by real estate deals. Tariffs have proved time and time again to be counterproductive - most spectacularly in the Great Depression when world trade declined by 60%. Buying Putin's line about the awfulness of Ukraine in requiring self-determination is the most egregious example of this, as is making Gaza a new Riviera, or buying Greenland, or using force to take over the Panama Canal. He reminds me of a toddler given a new basket of toys.

    We have to put up with this for four years by which time I hope American electors have realised the folly of their choice. The only way to do this is for NATO, the EU and the UK to develop an alternative strategy with the first objective being to secure Ukraine's right to decide for themselves and provide the military cover to ensure that Russia will face the consequences if it invades again. NATO membership is not a pre-requisite, and such arrangements need back channel diplomacy to save Putin's face. All that is necessary is for him to understand is that immediate and forceful intervention will follow any further incursions.

    Europe could have ended this war much earlier had it been decisive at the outset - through a 'no fly' zone for example. Instead it only provided enough support for Ukraine to keep fighting, but not enough to win. As we have all discovered fighting wars elsewhere has collateral damage in the cost of living. So what is most important - protecting our way of life or our borders? There are dissenting views from Orban and Fico but so what? I am no expert on EU voting rules but I am sure that the Baltics, Sweden and Finland, Poland and the big hitters (including the UK) could form an informal alliance that could both constrain Putin and Trump. We need to remind ourselves that the EU economy is 12 times bigger than that of Russia.

    As it stands the EU seems preoccupied with saving itself. This is an opportunity to take sensible leadership from the front-runner Trump.
    • 19 February 2025 at 9:32pm
      wse9999 says: @ Ian Ross
      Totally agree.
      An historic confrontation, now suddenly exacerbated by the mystifying collaboration of Trump with a Hitlerian Neo-Soviet Russia.
      Thus what will his avowed foe Xi be making of this? It surely raises the chances of Taiwan going hot.
      Yes Europe has no choice but to sock it to Russia, stand with Ukraine.
      Just look at a map.
      Yes it's from a standing start, will take time, but yes their economy dwarfs Russia.
      The strategy, loudly telegraphed, should be simply to increase the cost to Russia beyond what Putin's "electorate" will tolerate.
      Regime change would bring a huge peace dividend, to both sides.
      Meanwhile it's hard to believe Trump will not be disciplined at home, even by the GOP one way or another.
      The whole ugly Trump experience may leave democracy stronger for it in the longer term.
    • 19 February 2025 at 10:24pm
      Adam Chmielewski says: @ Ian Ross
      Ian Ross writes that „As it stands the EU seems preoccupied with saving itself.” It has now become painfully obvious that Europe might save itself only by taking a decisive step to support Ukraine by saying no to Putin-the-annihilator and deranged Trump. Otherwise, in not that distant future, Putin’s troops will be marching down not only Marszałkowska but also Unter den Linden and maybe even further, and the European Union will be paying the taxes to Russia.
    • 20 February 2025 at 12:52pm
      Delaide says: @ Ian Ross
      Surely the mid-terms will see the Republicans lose the House and, though less likely, they could lose the Senate. Change could come in two years, if the world can hang on till then.
  • 19 February 2025 at 8:24pm
    Harry Gilonis says:
    Oddly, it almost a year ago to the day that James Meek wrote a piece in the ‘LRB’ explaining how the crippling problem facing Ukraine was the supply of military materiel, particularly ammunition:

    https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n04/james-meek/two-armies-in-one

    Obviously enough Pete Hegseth is not going to act to ameliorate that.
    • 20 February 2025 at 10:41am
      James Meek says: @ Harry Gilonis
      They still don't have everything they need, no army ever does, but two things have changed the situation. One is that European arms manufacturers have stepped up their output, with the Czech republic leading quite a successful effort to buy ammunition for Ukraine from non-western countries. It seems unlikely the US, which has also increased munitions production, will fund more weapons for Ukraine (much of it nominal funding in the sense what Ukraine gets is second hand gear America wasn't using) but that doesn't mean they wouldn't sell weapons to Europe for Ukraine to use. The net result is that supplies are somewhat less of a problem than they were, but the other thing that has happened is that Ukraine's problem conscripting fresh soldiers for its army has got much, much worse, and is now the main reason it can't hold back Russia's creeping, low-tech advances in the east.
  • 19 February 2025 at 8:54pm
    j. w. says:
    Anyone who believes that Putin has any intention of ever honoring the terms of any agreement or treaty he signs is themselves suffering from cognitive dissonance.

    Here is a (surely incomplete) list of the treaties, conventions and agreements violated by Russia over the last two decades:

    ◦ United Nations Charter
    ◦ All Geneva Conventions and in particular, the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention
    ◦ Additional Protocols to the Geneva Convention that define war crimes against civilians
    ◦ Rome Statute (Russia not a party but bound by the force of customary law).
    ◦ 1899 Hague Convention on Belligerent Occupation
    ◦ Helsinki Accords
    ◦ Universal Declaration of Human Rights
    ◦ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
    ◦ European Convention on Human Rights
    ◦ Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
    ◦ UN Genocide Convention
    ◦ New Start Treaty
    ◦ Conventional Forces in Europe
    (CFE) Treaty
    ◦ Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty
    ◦ Treaty on Incidents On and Over the High Seas
    ◦ Open Skies Treaty
    ◦ NATO - Russia Founding Act
    ◦ 2008 Ceasefire Agreement with Georgia
    ◦ Minsk I and Minsk II Agreements
    ◦ 1994 Budapest Memorandum
    ◦ 1999 Istanbul Summit Agreement committing Russia to withdraw its army from Moldova and Georgia by 2002
    ◦ Moscow Mechanism of OSCE
    ◦ 2003 Ukraine-Russia Treaty on the Sea of Azov
    ◦ 1997 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation that recognised the mutual inviolability of borders
  • 19 February 2025 at 9:03pm
    Conn Nugent says:
    Brilliant, sophisticated piece on a tawdry but crazily consequential development.

    -- Conn Nugent
    Washington DC
  • 19 February 2025 at 10:31pm
    David Ascher says:
    The suggestion that the EU could start a US style re-armament program is both naive and puzzling. It is naive to think that the Trumpists and other American Imperialist wannabes, won't turn around, after years and years of demanding that Europe re-arm and stop depending on the US to guarantee European security , and declare that rearmament by the EU is hostile to US interests. Of course, they're right because the US sells EU countries quite a bit of weaponry and EU countries making their own toys is against the interests of US weapons manufacturers.

    It is puzzling because the idea that Russia could launch a military invasion against any Western European country seems so completely unlikely when Russia has had to struggle so hard in its invasion of Ukraine which absolutely nobody imagined would last more than a month or two when it started. Beyond that, Russia has the friendly right-wing parties to collaborate with them and it has valuable resources to sell to Europe. Why invade Western Europe when you can have plenty of political and economic leverage without the costs of a military invasion.?
  • 20 February 2025 at 8:52am
    shewie says:
    "If you're not a completely brainwashed Rusophreniac, and if you really studied and listened to Putin in the past 20 years, all he ever wanted is a peaceful, mutually beneficial and prosperous relationship with the rest of the European continent.

    But, driven by one US admin after another, the European puppets fell into a trap of illusory self-entitlement and hubris, ignoring and ridiculing the legitimate security and national concerns that Putin has outlined in his historic Munich speech in 2007. Nothing has changed since then - neither Putin's rhetoric, nor Eurocrat's approach to Russia.

    In fact, pushed by the US, and led by the UK, the rotting Eurocrats have managed to escalate what once was called the Cold War into a full blown bloodbath in Ukraine. Driven by ideological insanity, they did it despite damaging their own economic and social status quo.

    And now it has come the time to pay the price. There is a reason just two days ago Lavrov gave the most un-Lavrov speech that I have ever seen. The reckoning is coming, in fact it has already begun, and we are in the front row seat to witness the fall of the decomposing neo-liberal regime that has consumed the citizens of Europe and has caused needless suffering to millions of people with the so-called "European values", when in reality it's just a violent blood-sucking parasite-infested jungle masquerading as the "garden".

    These vampires at the wheels of European power deserve everything that's coming for them."
    Quote from Olga Bazova.
    Who's right? James Meek or Olga Bazova.
  • 20 February 2025 at 8:57am
    steve kay says:
    Thanks for sharing that with us Shewie. Just the thing to read at the breakfast table after the Grauniad reporting Trump’s ascendancy to the status of a king.
  • 20 February 2025 at 1:12pm
    Sebastian Arthur Hau says:
    Thank you for your text, Mr. Meek - as always.
  • 20 February 2025 at 11:47pm
    Graucho says:
    The human head in the sand syndrome is eternal. The guy writes Mein Kampf, no one takes him seriously and then he does exactly what he promised. Putin writes that the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. was a disaster and that he wants to recreate it, no one takes him seriously and he proceeds exactly as promised. Trump campaigns promising to sell the Ukraine down the river, European politicians don't take him seriously and guess what. Well we are where we are and I want Putin's bitchboy out of NATO. He is now the alliance's Achilles heel. He will never honour article 5. He's even threatening to annex one NATO ally and annex the territory of another. From now on Europe's policy has to be "You want isolationism, we will isolate you". Lobby to have oil and other commodities priced in Euros. Invite Canada to join the single market and help them build oil pipelines to export outside the U.S. Cut generous trade deals with LATAM and provide them with alternate export markets. Surcharge all U.S. corporations doing business in Europe. Right now consumers in muslim countries are boycotting U.S. companies because of their Gaza policies. Stop trading with Israel and steal America's lunch.
    • 21 February 2025 at 9:40am
      shewie says: @ Graucho
      Graucho is a parody account, right?
  • 21 February 2025 at 8:04am
    Charles Turner says:
    Trump is a paid Russian agent. His 2016 election campaign was supported by the same people who supported Yanukovych's 2010 campaign in 2010. Don't be surprised if the US now not only stops supplying weapons to Ukraine but starts supplying them to Russia so it can finish the job. Before that happens the EU needs to supply Ukraine with whatever it needs and place no restrictions on their use. Whatever happens, given Putin's imperial ambitions - which means the ambition to wipe Ukraine off the map - the only just peace is one that happens after Russia's complete military defeat. Such a defeat will, in the long run, be good for Russia and the Russian people.
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