Time to negotiate with Ukraine. That’s the main message I got from Tucker Carlson’s interview last week with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
If President Nixon could negotiate with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, and President Reagan with Mikhail Gorbachev, then President Biden needs to negotiate with his Russian counterpart over the Ukraine War and nuclear arms.
Let’s look back to 1972, a year I remember well because I was 17 and highly interested in the election of Nixon against Sen. George McGovern, an antiwar Democrat. The United States was defending South Vietnam against communist North Vietnam’s Easter Offensive. Hanoi sent down a massive tank army, which was blown apart by American air power. Although Nixon had withdrawn most American troops by then with his “Vietnamization” of the ground forces, 762 Americans died that year.
Yet just before in February, Nixon flew to Communist China for his famous summit with Chairman Mao Zedong, who was aiding Hanoi. Nixon had long been a hard-core anti-communist. Hence the phrase that has entered pop culture, “Only Nixon could go to China.”
Just as momentous, that May Nixon flew to the Soviet Union for the Moscow Summit with Brezhnev, who also was aiding Hanoi, to sign the Salt I nuclear arms limitation treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
I was an avid reader of William F. Buckley’s anti-communist National Review in those days and joined them in opposing the summits. But Nixon turned out to be right. Arms control prevented the world from being blown up. Russia and China now have capitalist economies, as does Vietnam. It unfortunately was united under Hanoi’s communist regime in 1975. But a decade later it switched to capitalism. Biden visited Hanoi just last September.
The major powers have to negotiate. Go to the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda to see the exhibits on how a brilliant though greatly flawed man did it.
In the interview, Putin said just before he launched the invasion on Feb. 22, 2022, he “talked” to Biden. “I said to him, then, I believe that you are making a huge mistake of historic proportions by supporting everything that is happening there, in Ukraine, by pushing Russia away.”
He also brought up how just weeks later Russia was negotiating a peace agreement with Ukraine in Turkey to end the war. Which would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But then Biden sent British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to Kyiv and Ukrainian President Zelensky followed his “demand or persuasion” to cancel the agreement. “And it’s very sad to me because, as Mr. [David] Arahamia put it, ‘We could have stopped those hostilities with war a year and a half ago already. But the British persuaded us and we refused this’.”
Johnson strongly denied the claim. In fact, last November Arahamia, the head of Zelensky’s ruling Servant of the People Party, said in an interview, “They [Russia] were ready to end the war if we took neutrality—as Finland once did—and made commitments that we would not join NATO. This was the key point.”
I have been studying Russia for more than five decades. And the U.S. Army taught me Russian before I spent 1979-82 in a signals intercept unit in what then was West Germany. I can assure you the Russians never would allow Ukraine to join NATO, which then could plant U.S. nuclear missiles 200 miles from Moscow.
Would the U.S. allow Russia to position nuclear missiles, say, 90 miles from Miami? I’m referring of course to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It was resolved because President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev negotiated. Soviet missiles were removed from Cuba and, in a then-secret deal, U.S. missiles were taken out of Turkey.
This should be easier because the Russians no longer are communists, seeking to force the whole world to follow the dictates of Marxism-Leninism. Today they don’t demand we read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky or listen to Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky.
Nixon’s 1972 summits sealed his re-election. A summit with Putin over Ukraine and nuclear arms would boost Biden up from his current low poll numbers. It’s time to make the peace among the nations.
John Seiler is on the SCNG Editorial Board and blogs at johnseiler.substack.com