Putin's New Simp: JD Vance

Wars end in victory, not negotiation.

There are bad takes, and then there are “Did this guy sleep through the 20th century?” takes.

JD Vance (R-Waiting For Trump To Die), appearing on NBC this weekend as the latest MAGA hand-puppet for Putinism, decided to roll out a little amateur-hour ahistorical twaddle over the Trump team’s desire to hand over Ukraine to the ravening madman and MAGA dream-date Vladimir Putin:

“This is how wars ultimately get settled. If you go back to World War II, if you go back to every major conflict in human history, they all end with some kind of negotiation.”

Ladies and gentlemen, this is not merely wrong. It is not merely dumb. It is not merely the verbal equivalent of putting your hand on a hot stove and screaming “why is it hot?” It is historically ignorant, and catastrophically, embarrassingly, lethally wrong.

Because when JD Vance says “wars all end with negotiation,” what he’s really saying is that America should push Ukraine to cut a deal with Vladimir Putin. He’s soft-selling a Russian military dismantling and the concomitant genocide of Ukraine. He’s auditioning for the Neville Chamberlain fan club. And he’s advertising, loudly, that he neither understands history nor the stakes of the present fight.

Let’s start with the obvious: World War II did not end in a negotiation. We did not allow the Nazis to continue to govern a few of their seized territories. We did not allow Imperial Japan to hold Manchuria or the Philippines.

It ended when the Allies marched across Europe, bombed Germany flat, and forced an unconditional surrender in 1945.

It ended when the United States island-hopped across the Pacific, sank the Japanese fleet, unleashed wholesale killing machines in the form of United State Marines and the U.S. Army Air Corps, firebombed the Japanese homeland to cinders, and when the message wasn’t getting through, we invented a portable sun and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki.