If I were president, I would end the war by assuming Vladimir Putin just wants to be given a new can opener

After spending months denying that Vladimir Putin had any intention of invading Ukraine, Jacobin’s head red-brown apologist for imperialist aggression had to pivot to arguments that the invasion was everybody else’s fault. The next iteration in this game is to claim that the real warmongers are people who think that Ukraine has the right to defend itself from unprovoked imperialist aggression. This is evidently a profoundly embarrassing line of argument on every level. So to square the circle, keep asserting that Vlad the Dove just wants Joe Biden to pinky swear that Ukraine won’t join NATO and everything will be fine!

There is no military solution to this war that doesn’t make things much, much worse. It may not sound as viscerally satisfying, but the solution to this is the same one that was rejected in the lead-up to this invasion, that numerous leading foreign policy voices urged, and which looks better every day this horrible war goes on: a mutually acceptable negotiated settlement that guarantees Ukraine’s territorial integrity (and gives Moscow a road back from what at this point looks like a disastrous miscalculation) while addressing Russia’s long-standing security concerns.

Ah, yes, the easy answer here is to simply give Vladimir Putin what he wants to address his security concerns while maintaining Ukraine’s territorial integrity, even though he has made clear many times through both words and actions that Ukraine’s territorial integrity is his security concern and he will not accept any settlement that maintains it! I see no flaws whatsoever in this analysis, except that Putin is not also being asked to provide a pony.