"Let's not cut a deal."

     "President Trump dialed up pressure on Ukraine to swiftly accept a U.S.-designed peace plan, hardening his position toward the embattled country and its European backers. . . ."

    The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 10, 2025

Journalist Tam Moore disagrees.

He writes that it is in the common interest of Ukraine, Europe, and the world that Russian aggression not be rewarded.

It is the season when Christmas carolers sing about peace on Earth. Tam Moore writes that there isn’t peace. Russia is carrying out an invasion of its neighbor Ukraine. There is an aggressor. There is a victim.

Tam Moore in Vietnam

Moore is a lifelong journalist who worked in television in his early days and then in print, writing for the Capital Press. He was a Jackson County commissioner, elected as a Republican in 1974, back when Oregon Republicans were progressive on civil rights, when there were pro-choice Republicans elected locally and statewide, and when Republicans supported cleaning up the environment.

Guest Post by Tam Moore

Gonna lay down my sword and shield,
down by the riverside, …down by the riverside.
I ain't gonna study war no more. …ain't gonna study war no more.
     Down By the Riverside, African-American Spiritual ca. American Civil War

For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.
     Isaiah 2 3a-4

Advent. Time to think of Peace, Hope, Joy, and Love.

But I can’t get around it this year. Putin’s war in Ukraine is killing non-combatants almost every night. Munition-laden drones and a few precision missiles blast population centers and turn electrical power facilities into scrap metal.

The West encouraged this neo-imperialist Russian attack, first tolerating a 2014 Crimean election favoring a Russian-oriented oblast or provincial government. Russia claimed Crimea. Barack Obama and Angela Merkel fought a diplomatic battle to get European nations to join in financial sanctions. But no fight to eject the Russians.

Obama would later say they “had to pull in a lot of other Europeans kicking and screaming to impose the sanctions that we did and to prevent Putin from continuing through the Donbass and through the rest of Ukraine.”

As Serhii Plokhy observed in is 2023 book, The Russo-Ukrainian War, the 2022 Russian invasion produced a different reaction. There was a clear aggressor, and a victim – the Ukrainian people.

“Russia’s aggression against Ukraine produced a nineteenth-century war fought with twentieth-century tactics and twentyfirst-century weaponry,” Plokhy wrote.

Ukrainians blunted the invasion, and the country mounted fierce resistance. European neighbors and North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states sent material aid.

But here we are with a new U.S. administration perhaps more interested in looking good reality-TV style than in declaring that armed aggression be met with self-defense. And defenders be supported by countries of the democratic West.

Article 2 of the United Nations Charter is forgotten in the process. It says:

Member states must refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.

Armed force should not be used except in the common interest.

When I came home from Vietnam, the Army Reserve sent me to annual summer camps at the Armed Forces Staff College. We studied war. We also knew a lot about the human price paid for waging war.

So this Advent season, the U.S. pushes for trading the Donetsk Oblast for a ceasefire. And massive drone and missile strikes rain down on Ukraine’s cities. Let’s not cut a deal under these circumstances. Hold on to the swords. And use them in the common interest of halting the aggressor.

 

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