Appeasement 2.0: Now With More Self-Tan

Trump’s “Deals” Have Always Failed. This Time, the Price of Failure Could be European Peace Itself.

As a rule, I don’t wade too deeply into the realm of US politics and tend to, to a certain extent, stay away from International geopolitics. The US bit I find to be largely icky, and the Geo-Politics side is ground that I’m not supremely confident on. I’ve come to the point that I really like very local and regional happenings. They’re interesting, and above all, relevant.

But.

What’s happening with Trump, Putin, and Ukraine right now is feeling like it’s not only relevant to our day-to-day lives, but that it’s an inflexion point for Europe and beyond that is worth looking into a bit more closely.

On Friday, Trump met Vladimir Putin in Alaska.

Image Credit: The White House

Or more accurately: Trump was stage-managed by Putin.

The whole thing was an absolute farce. The Geriatric Orange Game Show Host waving with childlike glee on the tarmac, kneeling US soldiers laying out the red carpet for a man who illegally invaded a country and is openly antagonistic towards the west and being billed as “His Excellency” at a luncheon and overall it just looking like two good mates meeting up to blow smoke up each other’s arses for all the world to see. Which is telling.

After three hours of “talks,” the only tangible outcome was Trump starting to further parrot Russian talking points about “root causes” of the war. (The root cause of the war is that Russia invaded Ukraine. Everything else is Kremlin fan fiction.)

And this is, of course, what “diplomacy” has become in the fever-dream that is Trump-World: optics and leverage for Putin, nothing else for everyone else.

Comforting.

European leaders are well aware of this - which is probably the reason why they all went into full panic mode over the weekend. This morning, what appears to be a hastily assembled group (NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Sir Keir Starmer, Macron, Meloni, Merz, Stubb, von der Leyen) are all joining Zelenskyy for his visit to the cheap, gaudy, knock-off version of Versailles Oval Office. The mission is obvious:

Try to prevent Trump from forcing Ukraine to hand over its territories to Putin (and also stop Orangina and JD “Maybe it’s Maybelline” Vance from berating Zelenskyy on live television).

The danger feels palpable. Trump has made no secret of the fact that he desperately craves a Nobel Peace Prize, and he would do absolutely anything possible to get it, and the fastest path laid out in his mind is forcing Ukraine to cut a deal with Russia. It doesn’t have to be a good deal. Just a deal. Any deal. Even ceding fortified Ukrainian territory to Moscow in exchange for what would likely be only a temporary lull in this long-running war.

And that lull would last exactly as long as it takes Russia to regroup before turning its eyes on the next target - and yes, the rumblings of propaganda in the Russian Federation seem to be looking far too closely at Poland these days, with not so subtle messages about them being a “threat” proliferating.

This is appeasement. Pure and simple.

It’s the same failed logic from the late 1930s that once insisted that giving a certain angry Austrian man bits and pieces of Czechoslovakia would be the best way to keep the peace. It did not. It emboldened him.

And giving away large swathes of Ukraine will do exactly the same for Vladimir Putin. It’s a move that would likely give even Reform advisors who have a penchant of saying things like “Britain would have been far better off not fighting in WW2” pause.

Raise any of this as a concern on Social Media (especially the hellsite now known as X), and you get inundated with an angry chorus of “OBVIOUSLY YOU JUST WANT WAR!!!” (no, I don’t), “TRUMP IS AMAZING AND I LOVE HIM AND WHAT HAVE YOU EVER ACHIEVED!” (I made a rather lovely pork meatball and marinara sauce last night) and “at least he got Putin to the table” (and gave him year’s worth of propaganda to spread as a result).

The implication here being that anyone who dares cast a critical eye over Trump’s flailing attempts at statesmanship must, obviously, be a war monger, or jealous.

Except that wanting Ukraine not to be dismembered by an authoritarian kleptocracy isn’t “wanting war”. It’s recognising that a bad peace deal now doesn’t prevent war - it guarantees far bigger ones later. There is no one that wants this war to end more than the Ukrainians giving their lives on the fronts - the question is whether it ends on their terms, or on Putin’s.

And if you want proof - any proof at all - that Trump’s so-called “deals” ever work out the way he promises, you only need to glance at his track record.

Bankrupting two casinos. Let me repeat that: two casinos. Not even just one. Two. He managed to do that with a business model that’s essentially designed to print money, and he still managed to run them into the ground.

A trail of failed businesses with his name slapped on everything from steaks to universities. Each one marketed as the “greatest” or the “best,” each one collapsing in a pile of lawsuits, fraud claims, or unpaid contractors.

And on the global stage? His much-vaunted “deal” with North Korea - remember the handshake photo-ops and the talk of Nobel Prizes?

Today, Pyongyang has more nuclear material, more advanced missiles, and a more aggressive posture than at any point in recent history.

And I’m not even going to go into the pan-cluster-fuckery of his latest adventure in “Tariff-Land”, because that needs a whole post (read book) on its own.

That’s the legacy of the “Art of the Deal” in action - a metric tonne of showmanship, little to no substance, and a world left more dangerous than before. His “deals” are ever thus - designed for a camera flash, not for the actual mechanics of reality, and the problem we face with a Trump-Style deal when it comes to Ukraine is that instinct for the quick-fix-shiny-headline is not just dangerous, it’s potentially catastrophic for European peace.

Which neatly brings us back to today’s scramble to Washington.

Europe is now faced with a simple but seismic decision:

Does it tie its security apparatus to an American demagogue who treats alliances as disposable, deals as self-glorification and Russia not as the aggressor, but as the “great power”?

Or;

Does it begin, in earnest, the hard, necessary work of building independent, European (and reliable ally) defence structures?

Because what has become increasingly apparent is that if Trump is willing to trade away Ukraine at the altar of self-congratulation, he will be more than willing to trade away NATO for the same reasons. He has already made very clear that he sees the alliance as a burden, not a bulwark, and he would be very happy to turn it into a hollowed-out acronym, leaving Europe to face down the Kremlin on its own.

And it’s important to add here that this goes well beyond just Trump. Europe has known (or should have) that this moment was coming. “Strategic autonomy” has been a buzzword in Brussels since at least the early 2000s, usually brought out in speeches, white papers and think tank lunches, but never really backed up with any kind of funding or political will that would actually make it a reality.

The subtext has always been “America will sort it out”. That was a mistake. The bill for that denial feels like it’s heading rapidly toward the table, and it’s being delivered to panicking leaders by a man who thinks alliances are a protection racket.

The concept we have to reconcile as Europeans, and what we need to do very, very quickly, is that the post-war assumption of American reliability has evaporated. The Atlantic safety net has been shredded to pieces by Trump himself, scissors in hand, and the only rational response for Europe is now to build its own. And not in the future. Now. Today.

I also want to take a breath now and add something important – I desperately hope I’m wrong. I hope that, for once, against all the odds, Trump pulls out a Trump card that’s not just an illusion. That European leaders arrive in Washington today, he admits, “Putin is playing me, we need to do a united, ironclad defence of Ukraine, and together we can bring this war to a close on Ukraine’s terms.”

I want that.

I want nothing more than for this war to end, for millions of people to rebuild their lives in peace, for Europe to stop lurching from crisis to crisis. I want to believe Trump has it in him to rise to the moment, to prove the doubters wrong.

But looking at his history - the bankruptcies, the sham businesses, the failed North Korea gambit, the tariff chaos - I simply can’t see it. His entire life has been one long rehearsal for the wrong kind of deal: quick headlines over lasting solutions, vanity over reality, (bad) style over substance, and that’s the part that terrifies me.

Today is an inflexion point, a sobering moment, but also, hopefully, a clarifying one.

If we as Europeans learn the lesson, if we invest in resilience and autonomy, and recognise that the defence of the continent cannot be subcontracted to a man who thinks geopolitics is a reality TV ratings game, then perhaps something constructive can come out of this debacle.

But if not, Orangina gets his photo, his Nobel and his Munich cosplay - then we already know where this story ends.

Appeasement does not stop wars. It breeds them. And the world simply cannot afford to let a reality show host play Chamberlain with 21st-century Europe.

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Footnote: This was drafted on an iPad while my MacBook was busy having a nervous breakdown and attempting to update itself. If you spot any stray spelling oddities, rogue commas, or formatting quirks, blame Apple, not me.