Trump and Vance are right about Ukraine

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 10, 2025

Vice President JD Vance was right to throw down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office on February 28th. And President Trump is right to seek peace rather than keeping the war going until the last Ukrainian soldier is dead.

I don’t mean this the way other people mean it. I think Zelenskyy is, on balance, a hero. I think his people have fought bravely. I think it obvious that Russia is the aggressor and that Ukraine’s cause is just. About Russian President Vladimir Putin, I have none of the illusions of my own nationalist-populist political tribe. However much Putin may share our desire to push back against the anti-Christian agendas of the modern West he is still, at the end of the day, a man of power seeking to elevate Russia’s status as a great power. America and Russia are fated to have conflicting interests; Alexis de Tocqueville said so a century before the Cold War.

Nor do I mean to suggest that my support for Trump-Vance on the Ukraine War is the only Catholic position. I am of the school of thought—belatedly, in my case—that much of the worldview upon which Pat Buchanan ran for President in the 1990s—and by which President Trump now governs—is more congruent with Catholicism and with the American Republic than the messianic interventionism that has dominated U.S. foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But in the matter of the Ukraine War, faithful Catholics in the U.S. are all over the map. Many U.S. Catholics with familial ties to Eastern Europe are understandably hawks on Ukraine policy, owing to their ancestors’ experience of living too close to the Russian bear. Friends in the Tradition, Family and Property movement frequently post online reminders of Russia’s history of aggression and of Our Lady of Fatima’s warnings. And every Catholic American, whatever their views on U.S. foreign policy, should stand in awe and appreciation of all that the Knights of Columbus are doing to help Ukrainian victims of war.

One can respect faithful Catholics who support the Ukrainian cause—or admire efforts to alleviate the suffering of our fellow Catholics and others in Ukraine—and yet still marvel at the sheer lunacy of those who seem to want to draw the U.S. into a direct conflict with Russia. That is where I am at. That is where I have been all along.

When the Ukraine War began in 2022, I was astonished by U.S. policymakers who wanted to accede to Zelenskyy’s request to create a no-fly zone over Ukraine. The only way to enforce it would have been for NATO pilots to shoot down Russian jets. I questioned the so-called “values of Europe” that we would be defending. (Vice President Vance has since put similar questions directly to the faces of Europe’s foreign ministers.) I noted the West’s broken promise to Russia that NATO would not expand eastward. We can add the West’s broken promise to Ukraine that its territorial integrity would be respected if it gave up its nuclear weapons. The U.S. does not have clean hands here.

I returned to the topic when Time Magazine named Zelenskyy Man of the Year. Again, I don’t fault Zelenskyy for defending his country. But so what? We can still say no to him if the thing he is asking of the U.S. is not in the best interest of the U.S. That was the point of my second Ukraine column, against the lunatics who would push the U.S. into World War III. It was President Trump’s point on February 28th when he responded to Zelenskyy in the Oval Office.

On March 5th I posted on my personal Facebook a meme teasing leftist friends for only being pro-Ukraine because they hate President Trump. Non-leftist Ukraine supporters took umbrage. One of them declared it “bizarre” to claim that leftists would have such a motivation. Perhaps he’s unfamiliar with the left. Another one, a young man, credited Nixon with the insight that Russia would still be imperialist without communism and told me the post-Cold War status quo “that has benefited your generation tremendously” should be defended. Of course the insight was George Kennan’s before it was Nixon’s. And “my generation”—Generation X—did indeed benefit tremendously from a peaceful end to the Cold War. But that was thanks to the World War II generation, which had seen global war firsthand and had wisely guided us for four decades to the Cold War’s peaceful conclusion, so that we would never have to see it again. The Boomers, who by contrast had never seen global war firsthand, took over in the early 1990s and squandered the peace with the broken promises and messianic delusions that eventually contributed to Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine.

None of which to my mind makes Russia less of an aggressor or Ukraine less of a victim. But, contra a third critic, I’m not positing a “false dilemma” of “we either let Putin win or have nuclear war.” Neither are Trump or Vance. Rather, they are—as Ross Douthat correctly noted—“stripping away foreign policy illusions.” Those illusions, Douthat writes, include the pretenses that the U.S. is still a global hegemon in the same way we were twenty years ago; that Europe is strong (again, see Vance’s Munich speech), and that—and this is the toughest part—Ukraine can defeat Russia. See the other Ukraine piece here at Catholic Culture on that point. The bloodbath has to stop.

The Wall Street Journal’s editors reacted angrily to that piece by Douthat, declaring him “Vance’s Boswell.” I’m no one’s Boswell. But I think Vance—and his Boswell—are right. And while I would not declare it the only acceptable Catholic position one can hold on Ukraine, I think I’m in good company.

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.

Show 4 Comments? (Hidden)Hide Comments

• Posted by: grateful1 - Mar. 12, 2025 10:17 PM ET USA

  This war is all the more tragic because it was preventable. Biden's shameful, feckless Afghanistan debacle, followed by his declared willingness to tolerate "a minor incursion" by Russia into Ukraine even as Russian forces were amassing on Ukraine's borders, made the failure of deterrence inevitable. Three years later, Ukraine has no hope of winning, especially when Europe's support has been more talk than action. I pray Trump does better by Ukraine than Biden & Europe did.

• Posted by: andhiggins1954 - Mar. 11, 2025 9:13 PM ET USA

  Excellent analysis and excellent prose.

• Posted by: peterandleslie4790 - Mar. 11, 2025 12:47 PM ET USA

  No, defeating Naziism in WWII was not a messianic delusion. The word "messianic" was used twice in the column, both times in reference to post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy. Read Tony Lake's 1993 "From Containment to Enlargement" speech or George W. Bush's 2005 inaugural, in which he commits the U.S. to "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," and tell me you don't find them the least bit messianic.

• Posted by: philtech2465 - Mar. 10, 2025 7:56 PM ET USA

  The US has supported Ukraine not out of a "messianic delusion" (Was defeating Naziism in WWII a "messianic delusion?) but out of the same desire to keep the peace in Europe that kept our troops in Europe during the Cold. War. If Ukraine were to fall, a NATO country we are obligated to defend, would be next. Ukraine must have a security guarantee from the West to make peace. Otherwise, there will be no lasting peace. Trump made clear he doesn't care about a security guarantee for Ukraine.