By David Stockman
David Stockman's Contra Corner
December 20, 2025
Here we go again. The Donald recently offered a constructive 28-point plan that implicitly and correctly identified America's Homeland Security interest in Ukraine as nichts, nada, nugatory and nyet. Yet before the ink was dry the Washington neocon brigade that he foolishly invited back into his government to sabotage it for the second time, did exactly that. This time they pulled the guts right out of the Trump Peace Plan for Ukraine, and did so in plain sight.
To wit, the only thing that really mattered in the original gussied-up word salad of 28-points was that-
- Ukraine would be partitioned roughly along the lines of the pre-1918 Novorussiya province of the Russian Empire, meaning that mainly Russian-speaking Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk and the major parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia would be allowed to secede from the tyrannical, corruption-ridden, Nazi-tainted, anti-Russian Kiev regime.
- the resulting rump of Ukraine would forswear now and forevermore any interest in joining NATO. That is, eschew any possibility of functioning as a Cuba on Moscow's borders just like Khrushchev foolishly attempted with JFK way back in October 1962.
Neither of these so-called "concessions" to Putin would harm America's true homeland security by a whit because Russia with a $2 trillion GDP based on oil, grains and metals is no threat whatsoever to America's $30 trillion high-tech economy.
Nor would they have adversely impacted the so-called "rules-based international order". After all, the latter is but a beard for the Washington-based Warfare State and global empire, which is already bankrupting America and which remains utterly unnecessary for the maintenance of what's left of its liberty, democracy and capitalist prosperity.
In short, the Donald was-knowingly or otherwise-fixing to make like the long-ago Senator from Vermont, George Aiken. The latter correctly and famously told LBJ the way to get out of the Vietnam morass was to "declare victory and go home".
That's essentially what Trump's 28-point plan did. It amounted to packing up and going home just like in the case of that comparable 60-years ago folly that had no bearing on America's security, either.
But apparently to quell the War Party uproar over the plan's correct rebuke to the $300 billion financial and human catastrophe that the Washington War Party and its NATO footmen have visited upon the ashes of the Ukrainian steppes, the Donald unaccountably sent Little Marco Rubio to Geneva last weekend. His remit was to negotiate an acceptance of Trump's 28-point plan by the crooks, sadists and war criminals who conduct the Ukrainian version of Mafia rule in their woebegone nation. But what Rubio actually did was connive with the thieves and brigands who (temporarily) rule in Kiev to essentially disembowel Trump's plan by dropping the aforementioned provisions, which were the only thing that really mattered to the Russians.
Still, Rubio's treachery in plain sight should not have been a surprise to anyone who has actually paid attention (viz, not the Donald) to Washington's machination during recent decades. After all, sending the fox into the hen house to gather the eggs is a hardly an adequate metaphor for what happened in Geneva.
To wit, Rubio was, is and always will be the enemy of America First because he is an inveterate neocon interventionist. After having hung around the Deep Swamp most of his adult life, he has no clue that the entire machinery of the Washington-based Warfare State is about selling arms and conducting live-action military exercises abroad against anyone who fails to cow-tow to the dictates of the war-makers on the Potomac and their auxiliaries and proconsuls scattered around the planet.
In this case, Rubio has functioned as the veritable hand-maid of the pathetic Euro-politicians who endlessly talk gibberish and urge Washington to keep footing the butchers' bill. For instance, here is the reprehensible Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, former German defense minister and full-throated war-hawk, recently talking absolute nonsense about what isn't at stake in Ukraine:
Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to see empires and autocracies back in Europe, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the European Economic Congress in Katowice.
Speaking alongside Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, von der Leyen insisted that she stands for a European Union that is ready to do whatever it takes to protect Europe, and especially Ukraine.
"Putin's war is about redrawing the map of Europe, but it is also a war on our Union and on the entire global rules-based system," she said.
Well, that's rubbish if there ever was such. The only time the borders of Ukraine have been unjustly redrawn at the point of a gun barrel was when Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev did so between 1922 and 1954. That's right, this EU half-wit still wants to embroil the world in WWIII in order to enforce borders drawn by a trio of history's most blood-thirsty tyrants.
As explained below, there never was a country even remotely resembling modern Ukraine until the Soviet communists decreed its existence. Before that, the pieces and parts of the country's history go back to the 1650s when one of the more powerful and brutal rulers of the Cossack Hetmanate, which occupied a small part of today's central Ukraine, abandoned his tribe's historic fealty to the Polish kings and switched his loyalty to the Russians.
After that, the "borderlands" (i.e."Ukraine" in Russian) were all about vassalage in the Russian Empire and the Soviet one which followed.
During the past centuries, in fact, the borders in that region shifted all over the lot and back, as the Mongol, Turkish and Polish-Lithuanian empires arrived and receded, even as the Russian and communist ones in the end expanded. So what's so sacrosanct about the very last version of the map-one that hosted both the murderous regime of Stalin and Hitler's Wehrmacht, too?
Indeed, Europe is rife with borders drawn, redrawn and redrawn again. While von der Leyen was in Poland preaching for border wars in Ukraine, in fact, it might well be asked, which sacrosanct borders of her host country did she have in mind?
After all, for 700 years "Poland" has cavorted around the rivers, plains, mountains and forests of central Europe like a traveling minstrel show. This includes its disappearance entirely at the hands of the Prussians, Russians, Hapsburgs and other lesser powers during the later years of the 18th century and the entirety of the 19th century.
Only in 1919 was it resurrected as an in tact nation-in part upon German lands seconded to it at Versailles. And that utterly foolish planking for German revanchism, Hitler and WWII happened for the not so noble reason of American electioneering.
That is to say, US President Woodrow Wilson, who was the Grand Poobah at Versailles, was keen on pleasing the millions of voters among the fair part of the Polish nation which had migrated to Chicago, Cleveland, Gary and elsewhere in the industrial Midwest. So he insisted that the long gone nation of their Old World kin be resurrected, and with ample geographic aspect, too.
At length, of course, Hitler and Stalin redrew Poland's borders yet again under the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1938, cancelling Wilson handwork and returning the German-populated Danzig Corridor to its previous owner. And then, seven years later, Poland's borders were redrawn still another time by a new set of victors, who realigned the borders of "Poland" at the Yalta Conference in a way that satisfied Stalin's aim to recover eastern lands the Soviets lost in the post-1918 civil war.
So all along during the course of the misbegotten NATO expansion and Ukraine intervention adventure, someone should have told the Washington and NATO warmongers to take a long jump off a short pier. That is to say not only how the latest borders of "Poland" were drawn, but how over the last several centuries of history most of Europe's present borders came to be.
They were not drawn by God's deputies on earth or even the statesman of the day--but by the victors of the most recent wars. And in the case of "Ukraine" it is even worse than that, as we amplify below.
Moreover, even a glance at today's map reminds that the border-drawing work of victorious generals and politicians, and occasionally statesman, has always been subject to revision without necessarily making a war about it. And that kind of revisionist work-negotiation of a Ukrainian partition-is exactly what Trump had now offered to Putin-only to see it kicked to the curb by the perfidious former Senator from Florida.
Still, if the Donald is to rescue his Nobel Peace Prize he might well take inspiration from the several major European boundary adjustments of recent times, which remind us that the shibboleth of sacrosanct borders has no roots in actual history.
Thus, the statesman at Versailles decreed the existence of Czechoslovakia in 1919 as a potpourri of nations including a lot of Slovaks, Czechs, Hungarians, Romani people, Silesians, Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Poles, Jews and most especially millions of Germans. So it was subsequently--
- Dismembered by Hitler to bring the Sudetenland Germans home.
- Re-assembled by the Yalta winners to provide a security buffer demanded by Stalin.
- Divided yet again between Slovakia and the Czech Republic on peaceable terms in 1993 to allow mismatched peoples to go their own ways.
Or take the case of the meandering borders of the six autonomous republics of the vanished state of Yugoslavia and particularly its anchor in Serbia. Wikipedia explains the border-making process there as well as can be done:
"(Serbia) achieved de facto independence in 1867 and gained full recognition by the Great Powers in the Berlin Congress of 1878. As a victor in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, Serbia regained Vardar Macedonia, Kosovo and Metohija and Raška (Old Serbia). In late 1918, with the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Serbia was expanded to include regions of the former Serbian Vojvodina. Serbia was united with other Austro-Hungarian provinces into a pan-Slavic State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs; the Kingdom of Serbia joined the union on 1 December 1918 and the country was named the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
Serbia achieved its current borders at the end of World War II, when it became a federal unit within the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (proclaimed in November 1945). After the dissolution of Yugoslavia in a series of wars in the 1990s, Serbia once again became an independent state on 5 June 2006, following the breakup of a short-lived union with Montenegro."
So, puleeze. Enough of the sacrosanct border bull shit!
Moreover, this whirling dervish tale of meandering borders and disappearing and reappearing "nations" also brings us to the aforementioned former Serbian province of Kosovo. Washington and its NATO retainers decreed the latter's independence after 75 days of persuasion with the Serbs.
These messages of persuasion were apparently written on the bombs dropped from a range of NATO aircraft that included about everything in NATO's polyglot winged arsenal that was air-worthy:
"A large element of the operation was the air forces of NATO, relying heavily on the US Air Force and Navy using the F-16, F-15, F-117, F-14, F/A-18, EA-6B, B-52, KC-135, KC-10, AWACS, and JSTARS from bases throughout Europe and from aircraft carriers in the region.The French Navy and Air Force operated the Super Etendard and the Mirage 2000. The Italian Air Force operated with 34 Tornado, 12 F-104, 12 AMX, 2 B-707, the Italian Navy operated with Harrier II. The UK's Royal Air Force operated the Harrier GR7 and Tornado ground attack jets as well as an array of support aircraft. Belgian, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese and Turkish Air Forces operated F-16s. The Spanish Air Force deployed EF-18s and KC-130s. The Canadian Air Force deployed a total of 18 CF-18s, enabling them to be responsible for 10% of all bombs dropped in the operation.
The fighters were armed with both guided and unguided"dumb"munitions, including the Paveway series of laser-guided bombs.The bombing campaign marked the first time the German Air Force actively attacking targets since World War II.
The US B-2 Spirit stealth bomber saw its first successful combat role in Operation Allied Force, striking from its home base in the contiguous United States."
At length, the Serbian borders were redrawn via the persuasive, rule-of-law enforcing powers of NATO missiles, bombs and artillery!
In the process, Serbia's president was captured as a war criminal. When he died just before his trial in a NATO prison from "natural causes", he undoubtedly had not planned to describe the NATO-sponsored border drawing incident that befell his nation as an exercise in the rule of law.
Reprinted with permission from David Stockman's Contra Corner.