You don’t stop a mugger in his tracks by offering him your watch and hoping he won’t come back for the wallet. Yet that, in essence, is the ghastly logic of “land for peace” now wafting around Washington like a bad cigar.
Overnight, the United States’ commander-in-chief breezily suggested Ukraine could “end the war almost immediately” by dropping NATO ambitions, giving up Crimea and giving away a chunk of territory Russia hasn’t even conquered.
In the annals of bad ideas dressed up as common sense, this is right up there with inviting the mugger inside to pick which rooms he’d like to keep. Appeasement isn’t a shortcut to peace; it’s the fast lane to the next disaster.
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European leaders are in town to back up President Zelensky. They must insist that any settlement comes with serious, enforceable guarantees. Fail that test and you’re not ending a war; you’re simply rescheduling it for a later date.
Most importantly, for any agreement to stick, one thing must be non-negotiable: the cost to Putin has to be so steep that he – and any would-be imitators – concludes the venture wasn’t worth the candle.
And let’s be honest, Moscow has in many ways already lost. The blitzkrieg, meant to be over in 72 hours with the fall of Kyiv, has dragged on for three and a half years.
You don’t stop a mugger by offering him your watch. He'll come back for your wallet - Grant Shapps
|Getty Images
Russia has fed its army into a meat-grinder of poor kit and poorer leadership, with estimates running to up to a million killed and wounded, for pitiful gains. Less a strategy; more industrial-scale war vandalism with epaulettes.
Nonetheless, for Europe, this would be a very sobering outcome. We will have allowed our borders to be redrawn by force, and I believe we will have failed our own continent.
For 35 years, since the end of the Cold War, we have trimmed our defence budgets, hoping to dodge this cold bath moment. We have gambled and lost. And leaned too hard on a benevolent Washington to play guarantor of the free world.
As Defence Secretary, I argued – and secured – a major uplift in UK defence spending. Under US pressure, Europe and the UK have since pledged to go further. Good.
Now turn promises into production: more shells, more interceptors, more industrial capacity. By all means, send messages in words, but with a despot on your border, you must send them in numbers.
President Zelensky once warned me that a “frozen” conflict is the Kremlin’s pause button - a launchpad for the sequel. He’s right.
If today’s European intervention is to mean anything, it must set the price of aggression so ruinously high that no tyrant is tempted to stage a rerun. Anything less isn’t peace but intermission - and it will leave Washington wreathed in the stale reek of that bad cigar.