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Would Ayn Rand Approve Trump’s Ukraine Strategy? Yes. Here’s Why

By Vinay Kolhatkar

February 24, 2025

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Given this title, I can see heads exploding across the Pacific (I am in Sydney, Australia), especially of the Randroids with Trump Derangement Syndrome. But there are also well-meaning conservatives, Republicans, objective objectivists, and even some libertarians, who are in shock. In shock that President Trump would “betray” a “US ally” and cozy up to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

“…well-meaning conservatives, Republicans, objective objectivists, and libertarians, who are in shock. It is to them that I address this essay.

It is to them that I address this essay.

We always knew, didn’t we, when candidate Donald Trump said in 2024 that he would end the war quickly, what his plan to stop the war was? Pushing Ukraine to accept a territorial deal? But alarm bells went off when President Trump implied that the Ukraine war was Ukraine’s doing. Later, Trump admitted that Vladimir Putin started the war but clarified what he meant—it was within President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s power to avoid armed conflict, and he failed to do so.

Now, to assess Trump’s actions in a Randian framework, we must first have a philosophical framework of the nature of the world we currently live in. And this world is galaxies apart from our planet in the 1960s.

 

World War III Has Begun and It Is Philosophical

Gone forever are the Cold War days. We no longer reside in a world broadly divided into the Free World (the United States and its Western European and Anglophone allies), the Communist Bloc which poses a grave danger to freedom, and the non-aligned countries (typically, poorer, less powerful entities).

Today, the most vicious enemies of the Free World are the enemies within.

Today, the most vicious enemies of the Free World are the enemies within: the neo-Marxist intellectuals who won the philosophical battle in academe and media and profoundly changed the landscape. That neo-Marxist long march through our institutions has already created a new world war. It’s the worldwide battle to shape our minds (see Media Wars: The Battle to Shape Our Minds), to influence us through media, academe, schools, social media, business, art…it’s everywhere.

That long march pushed the political Left in the Free World toward a deep, fascist Far Left—intruding into every facet of our lives, gravely wounding economies with nonsensical (ultra-Keynesian) economics and crippling them with a profoundly unscientific global treaty to zero out fossil fuel usage, curtailing our right of free speech with absurdist “hate speech” laws, directly encroaching on the rights of private owners of platforms in order to police, interrogate, and censor our opinions, and gifting away tens of millions of US taxpayer money to multiple “causes” that perpetuated the Deep State myths elsewhere…the list goes on. So successful was this long march that the conservative side of the political spectrum caved in, in just about every country in the so-called Free World, including the United States.

Finally, there arose a savior, shorn of any pretense to intellectualism or even the genteelness of presidential office.

Finally, there arose a savior, shorn of any pretense to intellectualism or even the genteelness of presidential office, a rude, mannerless, unpredictable freak, who, somehow, against all odds, beat the fascist Far Left in November 2016.

The Global Deep State was not amused. First, they tricked him repeatedly when in office. Then they threw him out in November 2020. Then they tried to exile him into a political wilderness. When that failed, they tried to imprison him on trumped-up charges. When that failed, they tried to assassinate him.

Yet, this admittedly often-unlikeable Lazarus somehow stood steadfast against this avalanche and won another electoral battle in November 2024. This time, though, he was not going to be fooled by the Deep State bureaucrats. Since taking office on January 20, 2025, he has already issued over 80 executive orders against the Global Deep State; more will come before Congress reconvenes.

It’s clear now that Lazarus does indeed have a love of his country. And whatever may be the accuracy of his boasting of a high IQ, he is proving to be politically savvy, much savvier than the intellectuals given to analyzing his policies, intellectuals who invent terms like “Trumpism” to pigeonhole his foreign policy, since they cannot box it as either Jacksonian or Jeffersonian.

But this world war is being fought inside each country almost all over the world, even in countries like Hungary, Poland, India, and Javier Milei’s Argentina, none of whom were prominent in the previous hegemony of the Free World.

The neo-Marxist cancer has nibbled—nay, devoured—much of the West’s real intellectual bastion.

To put it bluntly, the Free World is no longer free, but fascist. America’s European “allies” now have hate-speech laws that can imprison you for years merely for honestly critiquing a religion. The neo-Marxist cancer has nibbled—nay, devoured—much of the West’s real intellectual bastion. Meanwhile, the Communist Bloc is now more fascist, too—more fascist than communist. China is a perfect illustration of this transformation. Intrusive governments control rather than own means of production, but they intrude even more so now into the private lives of people. They dictate morality, too, requiring a Gaia worship based on a scientific hoodwinking of the public. The Soviet Russia that rode an expansionist ideology to unite the workers of the world, to get them to lose their chains, is no more. It died on December 26, 1991.

But a fascist Russia lives on, led by a dictator with long memories of the previous world, of suffering immense loss of life at the hands of Germany in World War II, nervously watching an aggressive NATO move east—way more than promised (“not an inch more”), indeed, hundreds of miles more.

Was there a deliberate plan to goad Putin into war? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, said so; economist Jeffrey Sachs said so; political scientist George Friedman said so. See also, for instance, Carus Michaelangelo’s review of Scott Horton’s book, Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine. Here are three excerpts:

With the closing of the Cold War, and the USSR dissolving, the US faced a crisis of success: what use is the NATO military alliance without the Soviet enemy to align against?

The solution was to adapt NATO. NATO must gradually absorb more European nations, while leaving Russia out in the cold—contained and encircled, in an even worse position than during the Cold War. NATO must expand its mission to keep European peace and expand Western democracy, or wither on the vine.

Throughout [Bill] Clinton’s term, the Clinton administration fed Russia the lie that claimed NATO’s mission was becoming political, rather than military, so agreeing not to expand NATO would be admitting that NATO’s mission was to contain Russia. He even said he would leave open the possibility of Russia entering NATO. But Horton shows they had no intention to do any of this.

Note also that NATO, after impeding Karl Marx, ended up joining the neo-Marxists. By accepting the climate scam as real science, it became an enemy of all people. In World War III, NATO is aligned with the Global Deep State.

 

For Rand, Individual Rights Always Trump the State

Now let’s ask the big question: What is a nation-state’s obligation when war breaks out somewhere else? Philosopher Ayn Rand did not see any moral obligation for the United States to enter the theatre of war, to risk life and limb of American soldiers for the freedom of some other people.

Above all, Rand stood for individual rights. Here’s what Rand said about the draft (“The Wreckage of the Consensus,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 226):

Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man’s fundamental right—the right to life—and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man’s life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.

If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state’s discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom—then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man’s protector any longer. What else is there left to protect?

Neo-cons, take note.

 

Morality In a Realpolitik World

Every Ukrainian has individual rights, but to flee the country to avoid martyrdom is a choice not given to them. How many of them care for a little redrawing of the lines around Donbas and Crimea? Zelenskyy has no moral right to commit a conscripted army to a raging war with the Russian Bear. The estimated total dead or wounded on both sides, including civilians, reached one million in September 2024, according to the Wall Street Journal, a heavy price paid by two already-shrinking populations.

Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 were barred from leaving the country; they still are.

The Biden Administration encouraged Ukraine to lower the conscription age in from 25 to 18. He didn’t have to say, “Now that you have lost many of your young adults, let’s send some of your teenagers to death.” Ukraine opposed it but, nevertheless, tried other methods to encourage teens to martyr themselves. Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 were barred from leaving the country under martial law; they still are.

Radio Liberty reported that:

Footage shot outside the Okean Elzy concert at Kyiv’s Palace of Sports on October 11, 2024, showed officers dragging a man in civilian clothes across the pavement as he shouted in protest and onlookers chanted “Shame!” “Military recruiters showed up at these events, among many others across Ukraine in recent days, looking for men who had not registered for service under a long-debated and highly controversial military mobilization law.”

Russia also has conscription. But Putin holds the biggest nuclear football on earth. The C.I.A. hasn’t eliminated him. So, he has to be contained.

The conventional wisdom is that “appeasing” Putin will encourage Xi Jinping to invade Taiwan. But there is a reason why Lazarus was meeting Putin in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, of all places. To create a whole new alliance, opines George Friedman—an alliance of the great oil producers of the world, a new US pivot to Russia to ward off the authoritarian alliance of Jinping and Putin (with Kim Jong Un as a groupie carrying water for his two “rockstars”). The three great oil powers, the US, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, may also strike an irresistible deal that spreads Gazans out into the Gulf countries—who cares for a Riviera as long as Hamas is removed from Israel’s doorstep? Two deals in one setting and in one sitting? Perhaps.

Now Putin will get on board since he can save face with redrawn lines, given promises on both sides—to keep the peace, and to let a US-led peacekeeping force on the other side of a new line—which allows Lazarus to ask for rights to rare minerals. See how quickly Sir Keir Starmer came to Trump’s party uninvited with offers to insert British troops as part of a peacekeeping force? “Make them pay their way” will also be accomplished.

Zelenskyy was sulking at not being invited to the party, laughing off a demand for rare-earth mineral conquests. But he needs Starlink for civilian and military use. Trump’s new best friend, Elon Musk, owns Starlink. Has Zelenskyy already acquiesced? Maybe not, but he will soon shake hands with the Russian dictator; the writing is on the wall.

Lives will be saved. The insane war will stop. Putin will be contained.

 

The Stoppable, Avoidable, Unwinnable War

Following the invasion in February 2024, then Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett served as a mediator at the request of Zelenskyy. Conor O’Keefe reports:

In the series of talks that followed, Bennett described both sides as making “huge concessions” in pursuit of a ceasefire.

But Kyiv’s Western backers were resistant to the truce. At a special summit on March 24 [2022], NATO decided not to support or approve the peace negotiations. Still, Zelensky and Putin kept at it. And on March 29, the two sides reached an agreement.

So why didn’t it happen? Well, it may have started to. In early April, Russia withdrew its forces from northern Ukraine, around Kyiv.

But then, according to Bennett, former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, and the leader of the Ukrainian delegation to the talks, David Arakhamia, the West pressured Zelensky to abandon negotiations and fight.

O’Keefe later attested in June 2024: “Even with its extensive conscription laws, Ukraine does not have enough soldiers to break through Russia’s now heavily fortified lines, much less to drive Russian forces out of all the territory claimed by Kyiv.”

There is zero US national interest in continuing to send money and military aid for an unwinnable, stoppable war that was avoidable. Perhaps the only people served are the neo-cons and their cronies in the weapons industry.

Meanwhile, World War III, which is winnable, will continue given that France, UK, Germany, and other “allies” are still in the grip of neo-Marxist fever. The unwinnable war diverts our attention from the real war.

Rand would have discovered an America saved from fascism by a political oddity and expressed her immense gratitude to him.

Rand had already dissected the real philosophical war when it was in the making. She would have discovered an America saved from fascism by a political oddity and expressed her immense gratitude to him. She would not have warmed to his unfathomable ways of negotiating. She would have abhorred his apparent anti-intellectualism. But she would have espied the breakdown of the Free World, the hypocrisy of continuing a proxy war against a Soviet empire long since dead, and the diversion of continuing an involvement in a war so obviously not in America’s interest. She would have detected that NATO itself had become a traitor to the cause of freedom.

In closing, let’s quote Rand again (“The Wreckage of the Consensus,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 226):

A volunteer army is the only proper, moral—and practical—way to defend a free country. Should a man volunteer to fight, if his country is attacked? Yes—if he values his own rights and freedom. A free (or even semi-free) country has never lacked volunteers in the face of foreign aggression. Many military authorities have testified that a volunteer army—an army of men who know what they are fighting for and why—is the best, most effective army, and that a drafted one is the least effective.

Not many men would volunteer for such wars as Korea or Vietnam. Without the power to draft, the makers of our foreign policy would not be able to embark on adventures of that kind. This is one of the best practical reasons for the abolition of the draft. [Emphasis mine].

Perhaps President Trump has the savvy to understand this instinctually rather than intellectually. His deal, if it pulls through, stops the war, restrains a twitchy dictator, and may even reward the US financially for brokering a peace and manning a peacekeeping force.

Now, while they have Trump in the Oval Office, the US should focus on reconfiguring NATO to support actual freedoms.

 

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