If you’re in a legal battle, it’s a good thing to know who your lawyers are. Your down-the-street golfing buddy is probably a poor choice when you go up against a major corporation.
So, let’s take a look at the ‘Trump Team.’
The president’s chief negotiators are a team of two, supposedly a tag-team of sorts, neither one of which has any experience in the tables of diplomacy, unless you count their failures in Iran. They are negotiating, as I write this, hosted in Abu Dhabi among three representatives…Russia, the United States, and Ukraine, essentially a two against one confrontation.
The players include,
Jared Kushner, Trump’s son in law, married to his daughter Ivana, and a partner in a number of family businesses, including possible future ventures in Russia.
Steve Witkoff, not a diplomat, in what is, essentially, a diplomatic effort. He is a real estate developer, longtime personal friend of Trump (if such people actually exist) and no doubt a financial benefactor in whatever results from these meetings.
The Russian delegation has three at the table, Putin’s presidential aide and chief negotiator, the head of Russian military intelligence, and Putin’s deputy foreign minister. Three steely-eyed professionals witha great deal to lose, and only their president’s approval should they win.
Ukraine brought their head of Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service and chief negotiator, Zelenskyy’s chief of staff (former military intelligence chief), and the parliamentary leader of Zelenskyy’s political party. All able people, one would hope.
Leaning in from Europe, but only as observers, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the European Union, and NATO have all sent representatives for consultations. Putin is not at all happy about their being there, but the Ukrainian side certainly needs cheerleaders, and they’re dressed for the occasion, pom-poms in hand and all smiles.
I have been led to believe that no agreement will be made without Putin’s and Zelenskyy’s personal approval, so the whole deal is essentially a shouting match for a world audience.
It certainly is not Truman, Stalin and Churchill at Potsdam.
But then, in all fairness, Truman didn’t have the advantage of relying upon Beth Truman’s husband (she didn’t yet have one) and Harry’s old Kansas City mobsters.
But a vision comes to mind of Putin and Trump smiling down and holding each other’s hand across the length of the negotiating table while their minions pull off a show for world audiences.
I have another vision as well, and another hope.
The vision is of Zelenskyy in place of General Washington in that famous painting of Crossing the Delaware, and the hope that goes with it is that Ukraine gives up not a single square foot of the nation for whom they fought so valiantly, and with such determination.
Not only the soldiers, and the inventor-manufacturers of the world’s most modern drones, but the mothers cradling their babies in cold basements for weeks, that turned to months, that turned to years.
And then, there is the other side.
I see young men here in Prague, in fancy clothes and fancy cars, with Ukraine license plates. They spend no time in cold basements, rocking their children to sleep, with plaster falling on their shoulders. And, again, the vision of Washington crossing the Delaware comes to mind.
There were young men there as well, on shore, and warming their feet before a roaring fire at an inn, their well-groomed horses tied…the BMWs of their day.
No one remembers them, nor will they.
Two presidents, one in a nation-yet-to-be, and the other in a nation-yet-to-be-free, will resonate in the public memory for decades and centuries yet to come.
France came to the side of the former, ruled by a king, an ocean away.
The United States of America, forgetting that favor of 250 years gone by, abandons a country in need, also in the grip of a man who would be king, and also an ocean away.
Perhaps Europe will remember.
Perhaps not…
The news today is not encouraging:
(alJazeera) “Two days of talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials, mediated by the United States, have yielded agreement on a prisoner exchange but failed to make a breakthrough on ending the war, which is nearing the five-year mark.
“Russia’s chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, said at the talks in the United Arab Emirates capital, Abu Dhabi, on Wednesday that both sides had agreed on a large-scale prisoner swap and that mutual understanding had been achieved on some issues.”
But Trump and Vlad will no doubt talk it over, and share a few chuckles…