Trump Puts His Fist on the Scale of World Peace

Last week, President Trump sent his team to deliver a message to Europe: time for you to step up — against censorship, against mass migration, for free elections — or lose our support. SecDef Pete Hegseth, VP Vance, SecState Marco Rubio, DNI Tulsi Gabbard — vigorous and unapologetic — became the new face of a US foreign policy that posits a 21st Century role as waging the Big Battles, while Europe defends itself.

To anyone who remembers the Cold War, when in the cradle of World War II the US cushioned Europe’s descent into starvation and communism, to anyone who remembers President Reagan’s epic call on Soviet leader Mikhael Gorbachev to “Tear Down This Wall,” America stood for democracy and prosperity, and always will.

But now that Europe has shifted away from individual sovereignty into rule by global elites who care more about applause in Davos than their own citizens, who criminalize speech that disagrees with their dicta and cancel elections when they threaten their power, the America 1st generation is moving on to other battle grounds.

As Vance said in his wake-up speech to Europe at Munich, “We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them.” What side in the Cold War, he asked, “censored dissidents, closed churches, canceled elections?” It was the Soviet bloc, and “thank God they lost the Cold War.” But now, as Romania nullifies elections when the results don’t return them to power, when Britain jails dissidents who protest mass migration, when Scotland censors citizens for praying privately in their homes, “when I look at Europe today, it’s not so clear what happened to the Cold War’s winners.”

Cue the outrage, among Euro’s leaders and the Dem media. Pearl-clutching hysteria in the wake of clear-sighted geo-strategic thinking. Elections have consequences.

At the top of Trump’s list is peace between Russia and Ukraine, to be negotiated first between Putin and Trump in the neutral ground of Riyahd, Saudi Arabia. Like a puppet twirling through space, Volodymyr Zelenskyy complains that if the US deserts its cause, Europe will have to form a permament army to defend his people. Trump tells him to hold elections — to which the unelected Zelenskyy complains it will cost Ukraine the war — and to repay President Biden’s largess in a huge money laundering scheme with US rights to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals. Ukraine is no democracy, and according to The Conservative Treehouse, “all over Europe Ukranian govt officials are seen driving exotic cars, arriving in multi-million-dollar yachts, staying at the most expensive hotels, shopping at exclusive stores, buying jewelry and watches. The Ukraine military and govt officials are generally living a life of stunning opulence and overwhelming indulgence. When you travel there, people simply nod toward the visibility of it and say, “Ukraine.” It’s an open joke, and they are hated.”

Trump often says that the Ukraine-Russian war would never have started if he had been in office — or, more exactly, if Biden had not given Russia a wink and a nod approval for a “minor incursion.” Unlike Biden, he understands that the war has been bloody and destructive, recalling the pointless trench warfare slaughterhouse of WWI. And Trump is, as SecDef Hegseth pointed out on his bench-pressing with the troops trip to Europe, the best negotiator in the world. Ukraine in NATO? Hegseth doubts it.

Trump also says that October 7 — the slaughter in Israel by Hamas of more than a thousand babies burned in ovens, women raped to death, men starved to emaciation — would also not have happened on his watch. In this he seems more hawkish than our Israeli allies, who seem content to accept hostages in threes, ignoring Trump’s suggested deadline of noon Saturday for all of them to be returned. But he has their back — something Biden-Harris never offered — and that may yet prove decisive.

In 2009, less than a year after taking office, President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The reward was not so much recognition for international achievement — Obama had yet to do anything — but a nod to the Nobel Committee’s history of rewarding “peaceniks, terrorists, blowhards, and others who fit what Oriana Fallaci called ‘Goodists,’ what Wall Street Journal pundit Bret Stephens called “do-gooders who do little good and carp at those who actually do good.” As the American Spectator pointed out, “No peace prize went to the likes of FDR, Churchill, Truman, nor to Ronald Reagan (Gorbachev got one). Diplomats Frank Kellogg and Aristide Briand won, for the 1928 Kellogg-Briand pact that outlawed war as an instrument of national policy. The Japanese signed that pact two years before invading Manchuria.”

Trump has already been nominated four times. If he can end the slaughter in Ukraine and Israel, if he can expand the Mideast treaties he began in his first term with the Abraham Accords, he will surely be nominated again. Whether he wins the prize is of little importance if he wins the peace, a validation of his credo that peace through strength protects against war, and that the Art of the Deal needs a great leverager.

“President Trump promised in his inaugural address that his proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” said Tulsi Gabbard in her speech in Munich. Less than a month into his term, she added, “the foundations of this legacy” are apparent.

As if that were not enough, last night Team USA beat Canada, on their home turf, at hockey. And this despite all the booing from Canadian fans at the playing of the US National Anthem in their stadium. Maybe it was all that trolling by Trump about making Canada the 51st state, or his imposition of tariffs if Trudeau’s government does not close the northern border to illegal migrants and lethal drugs.

Or you could say, it’s Trump knowing how to play his cards on the world stage.