"The only way to reach a deal on anything, whether it's in business or in politics or in geopolitics, the only way to reach a deal is for each side to get something and each side to give something," Secretary of State Marco Rubio told NBC's Kristen Welker on Meet the Press on August 17.
Rubio, talking about the war in Ukraine, completely missed the fundamental issue: Should the United States be trying to reach a deal in the first place?
The answer is no: The U.S. should not be trying to broker any settlement with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a mass-murdering, genocide-committing aggressor.
Rubio should heed his own words. "This guy lies, habitually lies," the then senator said in March 2022 about the Russian leader.
"He's never kept a deal they've ever signed, and he's lied all—he lies all the time. And I don't know why, but he plays us like a—like a violin in the West, because the West wants to believe that you can cut a deal with everybody. You can't cut a deal with guys like this."
President Donald Trump genuinely wants to end the slaughter. "I like the concept of a ceasefire for one reason, because you'd stop killing people immediately," he said on Monday as Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders met at the White House.
Since the war began on February 24, 2022, about 1.4 million soldiers on both sides have been killed or wounded. Tens of thousands of Ukraine's civilians have lost their lives.
No one wants to see more people die, but trying to end this war by agreement will ultimately make the world less safe.
Putin, Trump should remember, broke apart Georgia in 2008, invaded Crimea in 2014, and denied the right of Ukraine to exist just before invading the remainder of it in 2022,
In the current war, Putin's troops have raped, tortured, and carried out acts of barbarism, almost certainly as a matter of state policy. By kidnapping over 20,000 Ukrainian children and raising them as Russians, Moscow has committed genocide. Russia routinely targets Ukraine's citizens in hospitals and schools, killing people in missile barrages and drone attacks. His planes have carpet-bombed civilian areas.
Putin, for many reasons, is a war criminal. The International Criminal Court in March 2023 was right to issue a warrant for his arrest.
And that brings us back to Rubio. Here are questions for the new secretary of state. Did the U.S. try to reach a "deal" with the Third Reich? How about Imperial Japan?
A "deal" with aggressors always opens the door to more aggression. Does anyone in Washington remember anything about the 20th century?
Apparently not.
The Trump administration is now trying to pressure Ukraine into accepting a land-for-peace deal with Putin. The Munich Pact of 1938 was a land-for-peace arrangement.
The pact, which prompted British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to proclaim "peace for our time," allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland and opened the door for Adolf Hitler to grab the rest of Czechoslovakia, which he had promised to leave alone. The deal, in short, made region-wide war in Europe more probable than it had been.
Instead of trying to force a peace, Trump should refer to these words from Henry Kissinger, written about the Congress of Vienna:
"Whenever peace—conceived as the avoidance of war—has been the primary objective of a power or a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of the most ruthless member of the international community."
The lesson is two centuries-old, but still relevant. Human nature has not changed. To end the Ukraine war for our time, Trump is putting the world at the mercy of the ruthless Putin.
If Trump ends the war in Ukraine by letting Russia control or annex parts of that country—he has already said that Ukraine should formally cede Crimea and possibly give up territory already under Russian control — he makes war in Asia far more likely. China's expansionist regime will doubtless think it can invade and keep parts of its neighbors, too.
Already, China, with belligerent tactics, is threatening to break apart all its East Asia neighbors, from South Korea in the north to Indonesia in the south. In South Asia, China has been threatening Nepal, India and Bhutan.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is not going to stop with just nearby countries. Throughout this century, he has been pushing China's imperial-era notion that Chinese rulers have an obligation to rule tianxia, "all under Heaven." Since 2017, China's officials have been talking about the moon and Mars as sovereign Chinese territory.
The world does not need another world war.
So here is some advice for Trump from Vice President Dick Cheney, reportedly spoken in 2003: "We don't negotiate with evil; we defeat it."
It is time to defeat evil, President Trump, not enable it.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China's Project to Destroy America, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.
