Six Wars He Never Ended

Trump’s fantasies of global peacemaking collide with Zelenskyy’s reality and Putin’s tanks waving the Stars and Stripes.

It was advertised as a summit, but let’s not kid ourselves: what played out in Washington was a geopolitical intervention. Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived as the sober man in the room, the Europeans shuffled in like weary family members who’ve seen this movie too many times, and Donald Trump staggered through the script as the patient in denial. Meanwhile, out on the battlefield, Putin’s tanks provided the perfect metaphor, rolling across Ukrainian villages flying both Russian and American flags. If you wanted a picture of how Trump’s antics translate into Kremlin propaganda, there it was: Moscow’s armor wrapped in the Stars and Stripes.

Zelenskyy spoke plainly about dead children and abducted families. “Today there have been a lot of attacks and a lot of wounded people and the child was dead, a small one, a year and a half old,” he said, reminding the world what’s at stake. He pressed for prisoner exchanges and security guarantees. Trump, meanwhile, responded with carnival arithmetic: “A lot of people last week. I mean millions of people killed.” Millions, in a week. Intervention rule number one: confront the patient with reality, however awkward it gets.

And he did promise his enabler a call. “We just spoke to…I just spoke to President Putin indirectly and we’re going to have a phone call right after these meetings,” Trump said with the guilelessness of a teenager reassuring his dealer he’ll text as soon as Mom goes to bed. Putin, Trump explained, was “expecting my call when we’re finished with this meeting.” The White House may have hosted the intervention, but the patient was already sneaking out to phone his supplier.

Trump couldn’t resist a little authoritarian cosplay in the middle of it all. When Zelenskyy explained that Ukraine’s constitution forbids elections during wartime, Trump smirked: “So you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, understood.” Half-joke, half-trial balloon, fully dangerous. Pair that with his tirade against mail-in ballots, “If you have mail-in voting, you’re not going to have many Democrats get elected”, and you could see the imagery: Russian tanks in Ukraine flying U.S. flags, Trump in Washington carrying Putin’s water.

If the Oval Office session was the confession tape, the follow-up with European leaders was the basement circle. One by one, the allies said the same thing: ceasefire, security guarantees, unity. NATO’s Secretary General stroked the ego, “Dear Donald, you broke the deadlock”, while Ursula von der Leyen reminded him that abducted children must be returned: “Every single child has to go back to its family.” Germany’s chancellor raised the obvious: “I can’t imagine that the next meeting would take place without a ceasefire.” Intervention rule number two: everyone has to read from the same script.

And this wasn’t just sentiment, it was a direct response to war crimes. The International Criminal Court has already issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and his children’s commissioner for the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children. Independent investigations have exposed a state-run pipeline moving kids from occupied Ukraine into Russia and Crimea, forcing “re-education,” illegal adoptions, and new passports, while blocking families from finding them. The U.N. has called it abduction; many experts call it trafficking. Ukrainian children aren’t collateral damage, they’re loot, spoils of war treated like prizes to be distributed to loyal Russian families.

And while Europe pressed the point, the optics outside supplied the sharpest contrast. Russian tanks rumbled forward under dual flags, as if to announce that Trump’s America was already in tow. In Alaska, U.S. troops had literally been photographed on their knees rolling out a red carpet for Putin’s arrival. It was the symbolism of surrender masquerading as diplomacy, an image too perfect for Russian state TV to have scripted better.

Trump’s response was to wander off into fantasy. “In the six wars that I’ve settled, I haven’t had a ceasefire,” he bragged, as though ending the Congo wars or resolving the India–Pakistan conflict were just errands between golf rounds. In Trump’s telling, the machetes in Rwanda were laid down at his request, the decades-long frozen conflicts of Central Africa melted because he asked nicely, and Tehran’s nuclear program was “obliterated” by the sheer force of his branding. It’s a fantasy universe where history itself rearranges to grant him the starring role.

Then came the NATO tall tale. He congratulated the alliance for supposedly jumping from “2% to 5%” defense spending, a leap so fantastical it makes Jack’s beanstalk look like sound accounting. This is the man who once tried to shake down NATO leaders like tenants in one of his casinos, now claiming they’ve delivered tribute beyond their wildest dreams. He even tossed in a phantom “largest trade deal in history,” a deal so large that no one, not the markets, not the press, not even the people allegedly in the room, remembers it happening. It’s the same Trumpian pattern: declare victory in conflicts you never fought, boast about agreements that never existed, then bask in applause that never comes.

But the hallucination isn’t harmless. Putin doesn’t even need to argue with him anymore, Trump provides the propaganda free of charge. What he brags about in Washington, the Kremlin rebroadcasts as validation. Intervention rule number three: when the patient rewrites history, someone else weaponizes the script. And right now, that script is being played out in Ukrainian villages where the only “red carpet” is the rubble flattened by Russian armor.

The Europeans kept circling back. Italy claimed credit for the Article 5 model, Macron suggested a quadrilateral summit, Britain’s Keir Starmer framed security for Ukraine as security for all of Europe, and Finland’s president drew on his nation’s history with Russia: “We found a solution in 1944. And I’m sure that we’ll be able to find a solution in 2025.” While they spoke of ceasefires, treaties, and guarantees, Trump nodded, smiled, and promised that in “a week or two weeks” it would all be over.

By the time Trump thanked the press for being “generally fair” and shuffled the leaders out the door, the intervention had achieved what interventions usually do: clarity, not cure. Zelenskyy put children, prisoners, and sovereignty at the center. Europe put ceasefire and guarantees on the table. Trump put himself. And in Ukraine, Putin’s tanks kept on rolling, draped in Russian and American colors, a battlefield meme too perfect to be accidental.

This was a group of leaders staging an intervention for a man who thinks he ended “six wars” and still can’t stop phoning the Kremlin like it’s his sponsor. The flags told the real story: one for Russia, one for America, flying side by side on Putin’s tanks. That’s what happens when the addict won’t admit there’s a problem.