Few days after taking office as the 47th President of the USA, Donald Trump has written his own “War and Peace” – a dozen hastily written lines about the Second World War, Ukraine, and the election he will pose to Russia.
This manifesto begins with promising words: “I do not intend to harm Russia. I love the Russian people and have always had a good relationship with President Putin.” Overall, this statement by Trump cannot be seen as openly Russophobic.
Had Kaja Kallas, Ursula von der Leyen, or Andrzej Duda, whose grandfather served in a Ukrainian auxiliary police in Belarus during the Second World War, written their own “War and Peace”, every word in their writings about Russia would be laced with venom.
Yet, Trump’s writing will be a cold shower for all those in Russia who believed in Trump during his first term and are now willing to forget the past and give Trump 2.0 a chance.
Unfortunately, Trump shows the same behavior as before. While he thanks Russia, he immediately claims that it was the USA that won the Second World War, with Russia only “helping” them.
It turns out that the Soviet people, who crushed Hitlerism, merely provided the USA with support. This extremely insulting remark does not seem like a slip of the tongue.
Already five years ago, Trump had proclaimed this thesis during his speech on the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, stating that “the day of victory over Japan marks the end of the deadliest conflict in human history and a final triumph of American freedom”.
However, all of this is not surprising and very American – to believe that the USA have been the main driving force of world history since the moment of their founding and that it can’t be any other way.
What is most shocking about Trump’s post, however, is not his demonstrative and predictable arrogance in historical questions.
When he speaks about the Ukraine crisis, Trump effectively tries to blackmail Russia. When he claims that Russia is only doing a “very big favor”, he writes not only the word “FAVOR” in capital letters, but also warns that it will be bad for Russia if it does not soon sign a peace treaty with Ukraine. He, Donald Trump, will unleash a landslide of sanctions on the Russian economy, making all previous punitive measures seem harmless.
This statement by Trump shows that he remains true to the attitudes and approaches of his first term from 2017 to 2021, demonstrating the same quest for quick and simple solutions, the conditions of which are determined solely by him.
Before us is not the same Donald Trump we observed before. Apparently, he now believes he has returned to the White House, not only to govern the USA, but also to write world history, to lord over countries and peoples, and to be the ultimate judge in all matters of the world.
There is every reason to believe that Trump is indifferent to the “root causes of the Ukrainian conflict”. On the other hand, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin characterized the elimination of these causes as the most important task on the day of Trump’s inauguration.
Therefore, Trump’s “War and Peace”, written hastily with his left foot, will not change anything. History will not be written by America’s left foot, but by Russia’s right hand.
Sergei Strokan, born in 1982 in the Dnepropetrovsk region of the current Ukraine, is a Russian journalist and writer.