COMMENTARY: Make peace like sausage — in private
“Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.”
That famous — and accurate — quip is a perfect way to describe the dirty political deals that are made in secret to produce so many important pieces of legislation. But the sausage-making metaphor also applies to high-stakes summit meetings with world leaders, like the ones President Donald Trump has hosted lately in Alaska and D.C.
The whole world watched Trump’s face-to-face meet-up with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, which was the start of negotiations we hope will bring an end to the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine. It was just as well that we didn’t hear what the world’s most famous leaders said or promised to each other behind closed doors.
Trump tweeted afterward that it had been “a great and very successful day” and that everyone involved agreed that the best way to end the war was to skip the idea of a ceasefire agreement and go directly to working on a peace agreement.
Predictably, the mainstream liberal media bashed Trump before the talks for not shaming Putin as a dictator and for putting a thug like him on a world stage. Then, shifting into negative overdrive, they declared the talks a failure. As usual, our corporate liberal media were trapped by their blind hatred of Trump.
They couldn’t praise Trump for starting a complicated peace process that Joe Biden refused to try to do for three years while hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians died.
The Alaska meeting reminded me — yet again — how the liberal media and everyone else in the Free World went bonkers in 1986 when my father walked away from the nuclear weapons summit in Iceland after Gorbachev demanded we scrap our Star Wars missile defense system. You’d have thought my father had pushed the red button to start World War III, but a year later Gorbachev was in Washington signing an arms deal.
Ending the Russian-Ukraine war soon may be impossible for Trump or anyone else. It’s going to take a lot of economic pressure from us and Europe to make Putin sign a peace deal and agree to pull out of eastern Ukraine. We’ll have to threaten him with strict global sanctions that would prevent Russia from selling its oil anywhere on Earth and drive its already war-weakened economy into bankruptcy.
Anyone who’s truly on Ukraine’s side, as I am, wants Trump to succeed.
But it’s going to take a lot of balls — presidential balls followed by congressional balls — to make a lasting peace. And it’s going to have to happen behind closed doors.
The valuable lesson of the Alaska meeting, which we’ve been taught many times before but still have not learned, is how silly it is for Trump or anyone else to try to do these big and important negotiations in public. Americans have watched enough diplomatic sausage being made. From now on, all Ukrainian peace-making negotiations here and in Europe should be in private.
The next time we see Putin, Trump and Zelenskyy together, if we ever do, should be when they announce there’s a peace deal — or no peace deal.
Until then, let’s please all shut the heck up.
Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to reagan@caglecartoons.com.
