Someone really should explain to Mike Pompeo how peace deals actually work
Former US Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo seems irked that the Ukraine conflict could end without Russia groveling and handing over concessions on a silver platter.
That’s because Russia is objectively winning on the battlefield. Even some establishment figures capable of independent thought have finally caught on. British historian Niall Ferguson has been saying since September that despite all the West’s punitive efforts, he struggled to imagine any scenario other than Russia “nevertheless grinds out a victory.”
Newsflash for Pompeo: The winning side making concessions for a ceasefire – beyond the ceasing of fire – isn’t how peace deals work, genius. But try explaining that to Pompeo, who has spent the past few years talking about Putin like he’s the guy Ukraine’s totally going to beat up in the school parking lot.
“The adversary here, Vladimir Putin, has – to best I can tell – conceded literally nothing to date. And while they say there’s 90 percent agreement, I doubt that Vladimir Putin thinks that the relevant 10 percent that remains is anything he’s willing to give up on,” Pompeo said recently in a TV interview. He added that the US should be heading in the opposite direction from denouement, to “impose far more punishing costs” on Russia. Clearly someone who has never met a loss that he was interested in cutting.
Did the Nazis, as they were being flattened by the Allies in World War II, get to dictate peace terms? Or how about the Brits, who lost to the American colonies in the Revolutionary War? Pompeo’s logic would have demanded that Britain call the shots for the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and insisted that Independence Day be canceled because it’s offensive to the losers.
Russia would clearly be giving something up in any peace deal. Contract lawyers know that a promise to refrain from doing something is a perfectly valid consideration in a binding agreement. So promising not to flatten Ukraine or grab more territory would be a legitimate concession. What’s Ukraine getting in exchange? Peace. Duh. Is that not enough of a prize?
It’s much more likely that what neocon warmongers like Pompeo really mean when they worry that Russia won’t be made to give anything up for peace is that Moscow won’t have paid the same price that the neocons imagined in their fantasy War Room.
Guys like Pompeo live in a parallel universe where Russia has been losing. “Despite what some would have you believe, Vladimir Putin is not winning,” he wrote in October. ”Putin can bluster all he wants, but he isn’t winning this war – and we shouldn’t let him,” Pompeo said in March. At the time, Pompeo qualified Ukraine’s “winning” as having not yet lost the entirety of the Donbass to Russia. That’s like saying someone’s winning at life because they haven’t yet been thrown out into the streets after missing several rent payments.
A year earlier, Pompeo imagined that all Ukraine needed for a slam dunk victory was magical Western fairy dust: “One of the things I hope we see is not only the United States, but Europe as well, permitting Ukraine to win, indeed willing them to win, indeed providing them the research they need to achieve victory.” Surely this oblivious cheerleading, totally detached from reality, had nothing to do with the fact that shortly prior, Pompeo had been named to the board of Ukrainian telecom operator, Kyivstar. A “multimillion-dollar Ukraine gig,” the New York Post called it.
Neocon dreams include decimating the Russian economy to maintain Washington’s hegemonic advantage on the global playing field. At least as far back as 2022, Pompeo was talking as though Moscow was a non-playable character in a video game, incapable of reacting or adapting to Western impositions. “By aiding Ukraine, we undermined the creation of a Russian-Chinese axis bent on exerting military and economic hegemony in Europe, in Asia and in the Middle East. This would further devastate the lives of Americans and our economy here at home,” he told the Hudson Institute.
And there it is. Pompeo sounds like he thinks it would be bad for the US if it actually had to do what it constantly preaches: compete with China and Russia for the European and other economies by attracting partners through values like democracy, free market capitalism, and limited government. Maybe because the US isn’t so good at that anymore – and those values have eroded enough to give competitors an edge.
Instead of ideological seduction, Pompeo has deployed classic neocon fear campaigns, gaslighting allies like those in Europe into compliance with Washington’s worldview in the same way that they scare up cash for defense from the folks at home. “We don’t want our European allies hooked on Russian gas through the Nord Stream 2 project any more than we ourselves want to depend on Venezuela for our oil supplies,” Pompeo said in 2019, three years before the Ukraine conflict escalated. Now, the US is getting oil from Venezuela, but Europe is still diligently working to fulfill US demands to become less dependent on Russian gas, to the benefit of American supply. “This need, this desperate need for diversification is why we exported more crude oil last year to countries all across the globe,” Pompeo added, apparently ignoring that Europe buying Russian oil is itself a form of diversification. Something that European brass was too brainwashed by Washington to realize, to the detriment of their own people.
Pompeo’s neocon fantasies may fill social media feeds and think‑tank briefings, but reality isn’t going to deliver his wish list. It almost never does. Maybe just from his pals in Europe. How many times are these warmongering fantasists going to learn this before their magical thinking universally becomes a laughingstock?
