Vance’s Plan

I read Hillbilly Elegy years ago. Liked it lot. So I’ve been watching J.D. Vance. The other day he did an interview. About the Ukraine war.

Trump, Vance said, would sit down with the Russians and Ukrainians and tell them to work out a peaceful settlement, end the war. Vance went on to lay out what he thinks a deal could look like: The Russians get to keep the land they’ve taken in Ukraine. Ukraine would pledge to be ‘forever neutral.’ And to never join NATO.

That sounded a lot like the deal Putin laid out months ago.

Hillbilly Elegy’s a great book. Vance struggled thru hard times. But history tells stories – about hard times – of its own.

Back in 1938 Neville Chamberlain, sitting across the table from Adolf Hitler in Munich, made a deal: He split Czechoslovakia in half, gave Hitler part, what was left became the new Czechoslovakia.

Chamberlain climbed onto a plane, flew back to London, voice happy purred to a crowd in front of 10 Downing Street he’d brought home ‘peace for our time.’

Six months later Hitler rolled tanks into Prague. Took the rest of Czechoslovakia. Invaded Poland. Peace in our time went up in smoke. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war on us.

These days I hear a lot of my Republican friends say, Ukraine doesn’t matter to us. J.D. Vance, himself, has been blunt: He’s against sending another dollar to Ukraine.

But will his deal work out any better than Chamberlain’s?