Follow this authorMax Boot's opinions

Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, proclaimed after meeting with Trump last month that the former president’s formula was simple and cynical: “He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war. Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own feet.”

Trump aides told The Post that Orban’s statement, which sounded entirely plausible to me, was “false,” even though Trump has not publicly contradicted it. The aides explained that the presumptive GOP nominee’s actual plan is to push for “Ukraine to cede Crimea and Donbas border region to Russia” in return for an end to the Russian invasion.

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If that is Trump’s plan, it is more preposterous than anything Nixon ever contemplated during the Vietnam War. It displays a witches’ brew of arrogance, ignorance and defeatism.

Start with the arrogance: Trump regards himself as the world’s greatest dealmaker despite a long track record, going back at least to 1990 and his first casino bankruptcy, indicating the opposite. As president, he was very good at abrogating treaties — including the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal — but not very successful at negotiating new ones. He announced the Abraham Accords but did not personally negotiate them, as Jimmy Carter did with the Camp David Accords, and he renamed the North American Free Trade Agreement rather than truly renegotiating it. His summits with Kim Jong Un did not produce North Korean denuclearization; Pyongyang’s weapons of mass destruction program is considerably more advanced now than it was when Trump and Kim met in Singapore in 2018.

Of greatest relevance to the conflict in Ukraine was Trump’s ill-fated attempt to negotiate an end to the war in Afghanistan. His 2020 deal with the Taliban was as one-sided as Nixon’s Paris peace accords with the North Vietnamese: Trump’s negotiators agreed to withdraw all U.S. troops within 14 months and free 5,000 Taliban prisoners. In return, the Taliban promised not to allow Afghanistan to become a haven for international terrorists. The Taliban was not required to stop fighting or reconcile with the Afghan government.

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Once President Biden had finished pulling all U.S. forces out, the Taliban launched an offensive that led to its swift takeover of the entire country. Trump now calls the exit from Afghanistan the most “embarrassing moment in the history of our country” and tries to blame it all on Biden, but he set the retreat in motion.

There is no reason to suppose Trump would have any greater success in ending the war in Ukraine without betraying U.S. allies. He seems to have fallen for Russian propaganda — which is prevalent on the MAGA right — suggesting that the war in Ukraine is a minor border dispute that can be easily resolved by handing over to Moscow the Russian-speaking regions it covets: Crimea and Donbas. But, even leaving aside the morality of sacrificing another country’s territory to a brutal aggressor, there is no indication that Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin would be satisfied for long with only a small piece of Ukraine.

The current conflict began, after all, with a Russian blitzkrieg aimed at taking Kyiv. That war plan strongly suggests that Putin, who has repeatedly denied that Ukraine is a sovereign nation, wants to control all of Ukraine. Then, in September 2022, Putin annexed four provinces of Ukraine: Luhansk,........

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