Anti-Trump commentators are dismissing as a failure the president’s initiatives to end the Ukraine war. Their lapse of judgment is comparable to the silence of many of the same people about the end of the illegal invasion of foreigners across America’s southern border and the attempt to depict the destruction of the Iranian nuclear program as a mere inconvenience of a few months. Even more absurd is the anti-Trump complaint that practically everything he’s doing is an attempt to divert attention from the Jeffrey Epstein affair, a matter in which he has absolutely zero exposure.

There are occasional green shoots of hope that the national political press are trying to recover some credibility after the fiery crash of their effort to derail Mr. Trump’s presidency, and a number of the more obnoxious and dishonest commentators have been liberated to spend more time on podcasts no one listens to. Yet this habit dies hard and it becomes every week more piquant to see them trying to wrestle with the fact that the tariff program has been an overwhelming success and that President Trump has achieved what his four immediate predecessors conspicuously failed to do and has converted the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into an effective and equitable, participatory, alliance. NATO is now almost united in perspective and rearming on a scale that no other power or combination of powers could match. 

No one with any standing to do so said a word about peace in Ukraine until Mr. Trump began the pursuit of it. It will be remembered that it was Mr. Trump who gave Ukraine the Javelin anti-tank missiles, escalating from President Obama and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s esoteric contributions to Ukrainian resistance to Russia of helmets and blankets. President Biden had no strategy: He would merely supply Ukraine to the last Ukrainian and proudly explained that he was defending “every square inch of NATO,” though no part of NATO was under threat.

A review of what Mr. Trump has done reveals his skill in these complex international crises. He saw that a Russian conquest of Ukraine, to which Mr. Biden was resigned at the beginning of the war, would be a disaster, not only because of its injustice to the Ukrainians and their right to secede from the Soviet Union, but because NATO would be exposed as a paper tiger that could be safely ignored and Russia would at a stroke, revoke the largest single ingredient of the West’s great and bloodless strategic victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

Mr. Trump also, as I have had occasion to mention before, here and elsewhere, recognized that it was a legitimate aim of the West to show some recognition of Russia’s historic claim on Ukraine, while securing an independent, sovereign Ukraine with slightly modified borders, and also to create conditions in which Russia could without embarrassment extract itself from a suffocating embrace with Communist China and re-engage with the West, where the culture of Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy belongs.            

The first step was to do the necessary convincing of the Europeans and Canadians that their individual and collective interest required that they pull their weight in NATO and reactivate it as a serious alliance with coordinated strategic objectives. In the name of being an impartial mediator, Mr. Trump pretended to be somewhat equivocal about the merits of the Russian and Ukrainian positions, even though it was well known that he considered the Russian invasion to be completely unjustifiable and something that could not be permitted to succeed. The Trump-deranged galleries jubilantly erupted cock-a-hoop that Mr. Trump had abandoned the cause of liberty and had been effectively captivated by President Vladimir Putin. In these circumstances, which did not actually exist, it was time for Europe to rearm, and it has pledged to do so. This is an unambiguously good thing for America and for the West generally.                

Then it was time to try to narrow the gap between the protagonists. With their increasing defense budgets, the Europeans would be able to buy the most sophisticated military equipment in the world from America and pass it on to Ukraine. As this would not cost the United States anything, paleolithic isolationists among Mr. Trump’s followers would have no cause to complain, and Ukraine would be finally enabled and encouraged to make this aggressive war as intolerable for the civilian population of the country that initiated it as the Russians have made it for the Ukrainians. Mr. Trump also demonstrated in the imposition of secondary sanctions on India and on the heels of his numerous victories in bilateral and multilateral tariff negotiations, that American secondary sanctions on Russia would do grievous harm to the economy of that country.

Mr. Trump reduced his deadline to Mr. Putin to 10 days from 50 days and delivered that message to him personally, while saying that it was not his role to dictate terms to Ukraine. This enlightened the Russian leader about the American position and the very positive meeting with the European leaders at the White House last week demonstrated the reconstruction of the Western alliance and the emergence of a coordinated and comprehensive plan to coerce Russia into making concessions if it could not negotiate an agreement directly with Ukraine.   

If it has not been done already, it is now time for NATO to enlighten the Ukrainian leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky, of the approximate point at which the alliance is prepared to assert maximum pressure on Russia to end the war. If Messrs. Putin and Zelensky cannot get to that point or one near it together and end the war by themselves, it will be time for NATO, led, as always, by America, but with meaningful collaboration from its re-energized allies, to state the terms on which it is prepared to exert maximum pressure on Russia: Extensive shipments of the most sophisticated weapons with extended rules of engagement and the imposition of comprehensive secondary sanctions.

At that point, if not before, it will be another huge disappointment to the Trump-haters to see how quickly he adds peace in the worst European war since 1945 to his growing list of second term achievements. It has been a sophisticated, methodical, well-paced reconstruction of the Western alliance and development of an irresistible military and economic strategy to establish Ukrainian sovereignty, end the war, and create the conditions for a rapprochement with Russia, not least by demonstrating the power of the West.

It will, as always, be a pleasure to see the gallery of domestic and foreign Trumpophobes masquerading as independent journalists and learned commentators, trying to devise a dark storm cloud to obscure that silver lining. We have seen it all before, and I predict that it is about to be re-enacted. Under the circumstances described, Russia could not continue the Ukraine war for a month, and if Mr. Putin is remotely as clever as those who think he habitually outsmarts Trump believes he is, he will avoid the humiliation. If he does not, he will deserve the setback he will receive — the gloomy confected, anti-Trump consensus, as usual, is bunk.