Peter Hitchens

Feb 22, 2025

So, does anyone want to buy a used war, and take it over? 

I can’t think why they would do so. You might as well rush to obtain an unexploded bomb, or a leaking canister of some horrible virus.

Whatever has come over the leaders of Europe, jostling to keep the Ukraine war going when it might at last be ending? This moronic, needless conflict has done this continent nothing but harm.

As an event, it is horrible, a hellish panorama of innocent people shivering without electricity in half-ruined cities, broken homes, broken hearts and broken bodies, hospitals crammed with maimed soldiers, families staring quietly into space remembering when they had a father, brother or son.

And even now press-gangs still roam the streets trying to drag more men off to a war they know is lost. 

And yet I doubt whether one person in 10,000 can work out why it happened, while nobody at all can point to any good it has done or could ever have done.

I have said before that the Ukraine war was not even in the interests of the USA, which worked so hard for so long to bring it about. 

Like the equally bird-brained Iraq invasion, it was the desire of a militant foreign policy faction in Washington DC, inspired by the anti-Russian ultra-hawk Paul Wolfowitz and given impetus by the absurd President George W. Bush.

Bush is possibly the stupidest person to hold high office in all human history.

Of course, such people are bound to exist, but the rest of us do not need to listen to them.

I greatly dislike Donald Trump, and think some of his public statements actively crazy, but if he is prepared to dump the Wolfowitz doctrine and stop trying to make war in Europe, I’m prepared to give him some credit.

For years now I have been arguing here almost alone, against a storm of abuse and slander, mainly composed of dingbat claims that I am a Russian agent.

I warned in 2012, in a dispatch from Sevastopol in the Crimea, and from Donetsk in the Donbas, that petty Ukrainian nationalist spite against Ukraine’s Russian-speaking citizens, combined with threats to end Russian military rights in Sevastopol, were bound to lead to trouble.

I have said for many years that the West will gain nothing by trying to push its Nato military alliance up to the borders of Russia, a view also held by some impeccably loyal Western diplomats, academics and political figures.

No serious state in human history has put up with this sort of thing. England spent much of the Middle Ages fighting to frustrate French alliances with Scotland.

Moscow’s link with Cuba led first to a CIA invasion of that island and then to the 1962 missile crisis, which nearly ended the world. Why, the Americans even objected to Britain having an alliance with Japan in the Pacific, which they viewed as their lake, and they forced us to break off that treaty in 1923.

Sure, we had the ‘right’ to resist this blackmail, but we also had the sense to give in to it. The idea that the USA is a global fairy godmother, smilingly showering its friends with benefits, is and always has been piffle. 

It is a hard-hearted great power that pursues its interests with ferocity and ruthlessness, and would cheerfully have gone to war with us if necessary.

I was right about Ukraine. The war I feared came to pass. It was nothing to do with a fictional desire by Russia to sweep westwards across Europe. Russia lacks the strength to do this, and Putin knows it. 

Yes, incessantly poking Russia in the eye did not justify Vladimir Putin’s invasion. On the contrary, it was a stupid mistake as well as a barbarous act. But it provoked it. And then what?

I was right, too, that the USA used Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia. A direct war between US and Russian forces could easily lead to a nuclear confrontation. But if the USA’s work was done under Ukrainian flags, that was not a risk. Yet Ukraine, even helped by huge piles of money and munitions, could not defeat Russia.

So, goodbye Kiev. All those people who used to tell me I was ‘denying Ukraine’s agency’ in the war can now see that the war always belonged to Uncle Sam, and Ukraine had no agency.

Donald Trump is trying to extract America from yet another foreign policy mess because it turned out to be pointless, as these adventures so often are. 

It keeps happening, going back to Vietnam, but also to Afghanistan and Iraq. The Americans roar in like a hurricane, and depart like morning mist. 

They don’t stay when it no longer suits them. Those who were their loyal allies in those countries will be lucky if they get a helicopter ride out.

Mr Trump can see that President Zelensky can’t agree to peace without being overthrown, so they have bypassed him. In the brilliant novel about Putin, The Wizard Of The Kremlin, this is foretold. 

A Russian character (based on a real person) is asked about Moscow’s view of Ukraine. 

He sneers: ‘What we’re aiming for is not conquest but chaos. If you make the mistake of trusting the West, that’s how it always ends. The West drops you at the first bump in the road, and you’re left all on your own to deal with a demolished country.’

President Trump has hit that bump in the road. He has looked at the balance sheet of the Ukraine war with his property developer’s eye and he has concluded, coldly but rationally, that it is a futile waste of time and money, as it is. So he is brutally ending it.

What could it ever have achieved? China and Israel are more important to him.

Why then are EU countries, some of them severely economically damaged by the war, protesting at its end? Why is Britain acting as if we have been robbed of a noble cause? What did we have to gain from a bout of mud-wrestling between Washington and Moscow?

We have been used, good and proper. America doesn’t really care about us, could have done without our support and now doesn’t really care about how we cope with the demolition site they have left behind.

Time to grow up and worry about our own freedom and independence, while we still have them.