Esmond Birnie: Trump’s 28 point ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine rewards Putin the aggressor ... and MAGA supporters in Northern Ireland need to wake up to hideous effects of US president's trade and foreign policies

Seamus Mallon once, probably unfairly, said the 1998 Belfast Agreement was Sunningdale for slow learners.

Trump’s “peace plan” for Ukraine, as leaked on Friday, looks rather like Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich agreement with Hitler. His 28 points would reduce the Ukraine to a rump, losing territory vital to its defence. The same happened to Czechoslovakia in 1938. The Czechoslovaks were un-represented at the Munich talks and similarly Friday’s plan was dreamt up by US and Russian negotiators Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dimitriev. Notwithstanding British and EU interventions at the weekend the President is still talking about Thursday as a hard deadline.

It is obvious the Trump plan is amoral if not immoral. The aggressor (Putin) is being rewarded. Admittedly, moral arguments have little sway over this practitioner of “the art of the deal”. I will therefore ask the question whether the 28 point plan will work? No!

Putin is granted his war aims in terms of confirming control of the Crimea plus the four Donbass Provinces. Russia actually gains the 30% of the Donetsk that its army has still to conquer. What is to prevent him of pushing on to Kyiv and Kharkiv after a decent interval? Not much. That phrase “decent interval” comes from the USA’s exit from Vietnam in the early 1970s and this Trump plan does rather feel like a second massive defeat for US foreign policy.

According to the 28 point plan Ukraine’s army would be reduced by a third to 600,000. It would never be allowed to join NATO. The plan does talk of “reliable” security guarantees for post-war Ukraine but how much confidence can be placed on those? Trump has already rubbished NATO’s Article 5 collective security guarantee. His plan envisages moving the USA off-side to become some sort of neutral mediator between NATO and Russia.

Fundamentally, the problem is the relentless expansionism of Putin’s Russia. First, Georgia, then the Crimea and then the eastern Provinces of the Ukraine. Where next? The rest of the Ukraine, Moldova or the Baltics? We have already had Russian drones and aircraft flying into NATO airspace alongside persistent attacks on undersea cables and railway lines coupled with cyber warfare.

The 28 point plan does allow for frozen Russian assets to be used to finance the much-needed repair of Ukrainian infrastructure. Admittedly Trump seems to be trying to engineer a cut in terms of a profit flow to the US. In any case, the Russian economy would gain a lot more through the swift lifting of sanctions.

Some of the 28 points are rather strange. It is stated that Western military aircraft can be based in Poland. They can do that already as Poland is part of NATO. There is a commitment to de-Nazification. That point represents grovelling to Putin’s propaganda about the Ukraine being a successor to the Third Reich. It was, after all, a Russian missile which landed at the Babi Yar site near Kyiv which is a memorial to the 33,000 Jews killed there in 1941.

Trump, alas, does not deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. His plan would not give us a real and lasting peace in eastern Europe. We must realise what is going on here. This is a dangerous process of dividing up the world into “spheres of influence”. Russia will get its “near abroad” and will be able to do within that sphere pretty much what it wants.

Trump presumably gets the freedom to use his aircraft carriers to bear down on the drugs trade in the Caribbean or even perhaps to make a tokenistic intervention in, say, Nigeria. However, we should consider the precedent being set by the betrayal of the Ukraine. Surely President Xi of China will be further emboldened to make a land grab for Taiwan. Remember how the Russian invasion of the Ukraine imposed a severe shock to the world economy back in 2022 in terms of inflation and supply chains but that would be as nothing if the rest of the world can no longer get advanced semiconductors from Taiwan.

The Ukrainian President Zelensky now faces a truly agonising choice. As he said on Friday, the dilemma of losing national dignity or losing any further aid from the US. Given the hideous loss of life in this war it would be very understandable if he caved into Trump’s bullying but he should not. The UK and EU must step up to take the US’s place in terms of supporting Ukraine. Ultimately, if Russian aggression is not stopped at the Dniepr river we will have to fight it closer to home.

Trump certainly has his supporters here in Northern Ireland amongst “conservatives” (broadly defined), some unionist or Christian, or both. Given the evidence of what Trump’s trade or foreign policies mean in practice I would urge such Trump supporters to wake up. In the long run MAGA/“America First” is going to have hideous effects on the US and the rest of the world.

If the Ukraine is forced to surrender to the 28 point plan, or anything close to it, Thursday will certainly not be Thanksgiving Day. To adapt President Roosevelt’s description of the attack on Pearl Harbor, this will be a “day that shall live in infamy”.

Dr Esmond Birnie, independent economist