There are specific things one can take issue with when it comes to Donald Trump’s efforts to bring an end to the war in Ukraine and lower tensions with Russia—his public browbeating of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, for instance, or his decision to preemptively lift sanctions on Russia without extracting any concessions in return. But for months, the consensus among the liberal press and the Atlanticist establishment has been that the entire project on its own is inherently suspect, an act of treachery, surrender, and, of course, 1938-style appeasement. 

“Forcing Ukraine to cede land will only increase Putin’s imperial appetite,” warned the Atlantic Council shortly after Trump’s win. Labelling the peace plan he recently put forward “one-sided” by pressuring Ukraine to concede territory, the New York Times charged that the president “plays into Putin’s hands,” echoing the German defense minister’s words that any territorial concessions are “akin to a capitulation” and widespread accusations from European officials and others of appeasement. Zelensky himself has somewhat conspiratorially claimed that “Russia has managed to influence some people on the White House team through information,” a claim echoed in mainstream reporting. 

But arguably the line was set by Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) in her response to the State of the Union address in March, in which she accused Trump of “cozying up to dictators like Vladimir Putin” and said that “as a Cold War kid, I’m thankful it was [former president Ronald] Reagan and not Trump in office in the 1980s. Trump would have lost us the Cold War.” 

Yet ironically, Reagan was attacked in almost the exact same terms that Slotkin and others use for Trump, and for doing almost the exact same thing: trying to negotiate with the Soviet Union and to improve relations between the two nuclear superpowers while the Soviets were in the middle of a similarly brutal invasion of Afghanistan. But, for Reagan, that criticism came almost entirely from Cold War hawks on the hard right.