Will Trump Choose Victory or Defeat in Ukraine?

The US President-elect will face choices that will determine both the success or failure of his administration and the fate of the entire free world - victory is achievable, defeat catastrophic.

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 effectively allowing 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 will be disaster.

Consequences of a Ukrainian Defeat

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

• Russia would conquer Ukraine, removing Europe’s largest land army 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 bring Moscow’s forces to the borders of NATO allies Poland and Romania.

• Putin has stated his intention to restore the Russian empire, which would include the Baltic states, as well as Finland and much of Poland. As long as Ukraine remains free, strong, and in the fight, swarming into the Baltics would be unattractive, 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 will not go 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 more enticing to take, as doing so would expose the impotence of that alliance.

• Russia would carry out widespread massacre 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 did by removing the native Tatars from Crimea and ethnic Germans from Prussia. The evidence is there already - in Mariupol Russian-speaking Ukrainians are moved in favor of “real” Russians. Proving contrary to Kremlin propaganda, Russian-speaking Ukrainians are not Russians, any more than the 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. They are 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, along with the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Balts they would eliminate, Russia would send millions more fleeing as refugees into Western Europe.

• Guided by the thinking of its chief ideologist Aleksandr Dugin, the Kremlin has helped create a new Comintern of AltRight parties in Europe which includes 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 - a combination of radical anti-immigrant politics with fealty to Moscow. Flooding western Europe with refugees would bring them to power.

An end to 80 years of peace assured by collective security

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.

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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 with Hitler in the 1930s, the abandonment of collective security to appease aggressors is guaranteed to unleash war. 

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

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

How the war in Ukraine can be won

The United States can put a decisive check on the expansionist ambitions of the Russian-China Axis by 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:

• 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 the Patriot system, but offensive systems including ATACM long range missiles and F-16 fighter aircraft armed with both air-to-air and long-range air-to-ground missiles, such as the JASSM, which can deliver 1000 lb. warheads over a range of 230 miles.

• To achieve security, the Ukrainians need not just to block Russia’s arrows, it must kill her archers. The United States has more than 2,000 F-16s of which the USAF currently only operates a total of less than 850. Washington could easily afford to send Ukraine 200 of them. More than 4600 F-16s have been produced since they first entered 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.

• The US also has around 340 A-10 ground attack aircraft that the US Air Force has been trying to divest itself of for years. Armed with the powerful GAU-8/A seven-barrel Gatling gun and the ability to carry 7,200 kilograms (16,000 pounds) of munitions capable of destroying Russian tanks. These could be initially deployed in rear areas to intercept and eliminate the slow moving Shahed kamikaze drones that have been bombarding Ukraine. 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.

• We need to help Ukraine win the drone war. Ukraine has revolutionized warfare by developing small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as a decisive miliary weapon. While large miliary aircraft can take years or decades to develop, new types of UAV can be brought 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 Western 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 the US already has.

• Washington needs to lift its ITAR rules currently throttling the transfer of drone warfare and other technologies from US companies to Ukraine. This technology would enable Kyiv to produce advanced drones that cannot be stopped by Russian jamming or other counter measures. It costs about $2,000 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 millions of such advanced UAVs. Alternatively, the Pentagon could cut a check to companies, who could produce them themselves. This would cost the US about five times as much, but it would benefit from building up its own defense industrial base in this now critical area. Or better yet, the Administration 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 up, Trump has a choice. He can take a brave stand, restore deterrence, save the peace, and save the West. Or he can choose to be even weaker than Joe Biden and, in losing everything, cause the greatest geostrategic catastrophe in history.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.

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