Trump in an age of innocence, when a deal would be done in a day.

“Peace” is a versatile concept.  It has a spiritual context, of course, and a funereal and memorial one.  Then since the sixties it has had a vee-signed, marijuana-driven usage originally followed by the word “man” but these days by “bro”, which more or less sums up the depth of consideration thus far given it by Donald Trump.

Not everyone on the international stage is so blasé.  The honest ones, of whom there are far too few, employ it in the proper humanistic sense of a deliverance from conflict into a longed-for and enduring state of safety and such concord as is possible when the guns have fallen silent but there is still a lot of hatred in the air.  As the hatred subsides so the meaning of peace matures into the one given generally to civic life in times of ease and gentility, which is only what all peoples expect and deserve from life.

But there are some people in the charmed circles of power … liars and ambitious men, “men of force” ... who hold the expectations of the common man in contempt, and who talk of peace as something quite other than that expectation.  Their meanings tend to be party to the same struggle as the wars they also engage in when they can.  Thus in the Kremlin’s case peace is as much a weapon as any rocket or gun:

During a telephone conversation with US President Donald Trump on March 18, Russian leader Vladimir Putin put forward a number of conditions for the introduction of a 30-day ceasefire with Ukraine. In particular, to stop mobilization in Ukraine and the rearmament of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Kremlin reported.

Trump seems to have been blissfully unaware that Putin’s peace is not at all a shallow and instant thing like his.  It is ideological, public, formal, structured, and purposive.  Its purpose is the expansion of Russia:

“Russkiy Mir” is a Russian quasi-ideology aimed at the expansion of influence abroad and uniting the states considered by the Kremlin as its backyard on the basis of Russian language common history in the Moscow’s perception and Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). As a political concept it gained some importance in 2000s, particularly after Vladimir Putin started using it in his public speeches, making an appeal to the “compatriots” abroad.
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With “Russkiy Mir” Putin’s Russia attempts to establish itself as a civilization-forming state and as a leading geopolitical actor.
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It is also worth mentioning that as the concept, first of all, serves political interests of the Russian authorities, it is populist and adaptive. In such a way under the umbrella of “Russkiy Mir” a number of cultural and historical narratives are united, even though they initially may seem to have no relation to it. Still, in the end, rewriting history with the focus on whitewashing the image of USSR, appropriating the victory over Nazism, labeling every attempt to critically evaluate history as “fascist” also work in favor of “Russkiy Mir”. Putin’s Russia grants itself with the messianic title of the vanquisher of absolute evil – and with the opportunity to fight against what it considers fascism again. Systemic cultural appropriation also adds to the picture. It enables the portrayal of formerly colonized states as having a poor culture, with is partially appropriated and partially discredited, while “Russkiy Mir” is pictured as a culturally rich opposite. The Kremlin consistently discredits pro-democratic policies in target societies, employing disinformation and promotion of destructive narratives, then attempting to offer “Russkiy Mir” as an appealing alternative to such policies.

This is the “peace” which, within the framework of Russia’s war on the Ukrainian people’s will to independence and autonomy, is Vladimir Putin’s guiding light.  Even allowing that the Americans are not providing him with a helping hand, nothing Donald Trump can say would steer him away from it.  But does Trump want to say anything anyway?  What evidence is there that he and his government are moved by the all too western moralities of the post-1945 settlement?  His denial last week of intelligence and satellite imagery to the Ukrainian military – shocking in its suddenness and effect – was perfectly timed for the Russian and North Korean push in Kursk.  It removed Zelensky’s hard-won bargaining chip and cost hundreds of Ukrainian lives.  Taken with the shameful staged assault on the Ukrainian president in the Oval Office it speaks of “right-wing” America’s near-total moral collapse.

It was on display again in Tuesday’s 90 minute telephone call between Trump and Putin, summarised thus by David Blair in the Telegraph:

Putin has played his familiar trick of agreeing to something that binds Ukraine’s hands much more tightly than his own.

But the relative lack of substance in the readout must itself raise suspicions.

Two presidents do not need to talk for 90 minutes to serve up the thin gruel in the public account of their call.

What else did Mr Trump and Putin discuss and what private agreements might they have made?
Ukraine and the rest of Europe are not party to these talks: they can only guess at what could be happening behind the scenes.

The only certainty is that the dismal pattern whereby Putin concedes nothing and offers nothing, while Trump declines to respond with any hint of steel, remains the order of the day.

If the Americans continue in this vein, disavowing any firm, suppressive action to raise the ante against Russia, one will have to conclude that they, too, mouth words of peace when they really only mean conquest, and do so because the global contest of power requires such immorality.

In that condition America will have friends besides Putin: others with visions of a similarly “peaceful” dominion.  For example, as a counterpoint to Putin’s Russkiy mir, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government are advancing the doctrine of Mavi Vatan.  Should Putin achieve his maximalist aims in Ukraine one then waits to see if Viktor Orban can pull together an integralist cohort from among Hungary’s six other neighbours in Middle Europe and the Balkans.  I think it quite likely, given the level of pro-Russian sentiment there, as well as the desire to annex parts of Ukraine that Putin may deign to gift them for the purpose of dividing Europe.  I think humanity is moving ... being pushed, actually ... ever further from the nationalist desideratum of an age of the people’s will, which is a will to peace, yes, but not at the cost of national dissolution and foreign dominion.  It is doing so because it is moving further from democratisation’s fatal, very 20th century transformation of that people into a bloodless demos, a mere electorate governed by a permanent political class.  We are moving once again into an age when “greatness” is sought among the nations of men; but it is a greatness expressed in power over other nations when power is the possession of an untouchable and imperial, authoritarian few.

If that view of the historical process is wrong then we should now see Donald Trump understand the complete humiliation he has suffered at Putin’s hands.  Being useful to Putin only makes him Putin’s idiot - an idiot whom Putin is, of course, pleased to parade before the dictators and big men of the southern hemisphere.  The situation has clarified, perhaps even for Trump.  The debasement of America is fundamental to Putin and Xi’s global Great Game, and no American president can play it and win.  American greatness will not come via American humiliation, but Putin’s and Xi’s greatness will.  They know it, and they will not be separated in their pursuit of it.  Trump’s vanity alone ought to provoke the necessary reaction.  We should then see him double-down on his determination that peace shall prevail, but only if he switches tack to bring Putin to heel before turning to face Xi’s challenge in the Pacific.  That means a full-hearted and massive re-arming of the Ukrainians with the best equipment the American arsenal possesses.  Then, perhaps, another kind of negotiation will be possible.

But, of course, for that to become a reality Trump and his administration must grasp that Ukraine’s strength is America’s strength, and it is first and foremost a moral strength.