The Feb. 28 Oval Office brawl between Volodymyr Zelensky, Donald Trump, and JD Vance offered a stark reminder that, all too often, wars do not end when rational calculation would dictate an end, but rather when all those who want to fight to the death have done so. This is why casualties increase in inverse proportion to the hope of victory—think here of Germany after Stalingrad or the Confederacy after Gettysburg. As Vance warned Zelensky, Ukraine is close to manpower exhaustion. But what we saw in the Oval Office was a leader too consumed by rage to care. “I think it’s good for the American people to see what’s going on,” President Trump declared. “The hatred he’s [Zelensky] got for Putin, it’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate. He’s got tremendous hatred, and I understand that.”
But even more consequential than this hate for the continuation of the war is the Atlanticist commitment to the utopian goal of regime change in Russia. The US foreign-policy establishment never doubted that the expansion of NATO would prompt Russian intervention. Yet its leaders continued to insist on NATO membership for Ukraine, despite warnings from, among others, the late Henry Kissinger as well as Biden’s CIA Director William Burns.
The standard claim marshaled to justify NATO intransigence is that Vladimir Putin is bent on unlimited conquest, so that any compromise with Russia is the equivalent of appeasing Hitler. This claim is incompatible with the single most important fact about Russia: It is in rapid demographic decline, and its working-age population will fall, on the present trend, from 88 million today to just 48 million at the end of this century. Countries with declining populations do not go to war for Lebensraum. On the contrary, as I argued in 2008, this demographic trend helps explain why Moscow cannot afford to abandon the 22 million Russian speakers in its near abroad who were separated from the Motherland after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin doesn’t have the manpower to occupy western Ukraine, even if his army were able to conquer it.