When President Donald Trump was in office, liberal activist Noam Chomsky called him “the worst criminal in human history.”
But in a recent interview, as the conflict in Ukraine grinds on with no end in sight, Chomsky said that in all the world, Trump is the one man who has offered a reasonable way to find a solution to the war Russia launched with its invasion in February.
The 93-year-old Chomsky is a long-time critic of American foreign policy who has espoused radical causes since before World War II.
In an interview Tuesday with Thijmen Sprakel of EduKitchen, Chomsky said that "there is, fortunately, one statesman in the United States and Europe who has laid out ... who has made a very sensible statement about how you can solve the crisis."
He said that a sound plan for ending the war would include “facilitating negotiations instead of undermining them and moving toward establishing some kind of accommodation in Europe … in which there are no military alliances but just mutual accommodation.”
Chomsky said that the leader he was referring to “didn’t say it, but it’s something like what George H.W. Bush, the first Bush, not the second, proposed in the early ’90s, in his, when after the collapse of the Soviet Union, proposed what they called a partnership for peace, which would be open for Europeans generally or Asians as well.”
“Emmanuel Macron in his initiatives trying to contact Putin suggested something similar,” he said, referring to the French president’s efforts at diplomacy with Russian leader Vladimir Putin before the war began.
“So going back to the one Western statesman -- he didn’t mention all of this but he suggested something similar: move towards negotiations and diplomacy instead of escalating the war, try to see if you can bring about an accommodation which would be roughly along these lines,” Chomsky said, saving the name for last.
“His name is Donald J. Trump,” he said.
As noted by Mediaite, Chomsky has not changed his tune about Trump in general, saying the former president is not his “favorite person.”
“But let’s tell the truth: He’s the one person who’s said it and it’s the right way out,” he said. “Others have said it too but not in high positions.”
Last month, Trump said the leaders of Russia and Ukraine should hammer out a long-term peace agreement.
"It doesn’t make sense that Russia and Ukraine aren’t sitting down and working out some kind of an agreement,” he said in a statement on April 18.
“If they don’t do it soon, there will be nothing left but death, destruction, and carnage. This is a war that never should have happened, but it did,” Trump said.
“The solution can never be as good as it would have been before the shooting started, but there is a solution, and it should be figured out now — not later — when everyone will be DEAD!” the former president said.
Trump has said the war would have been averted if he was in the White House.
“I knew Putin very well," he said in an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity last month.
“We talked about it a lot, [Putin] did want Ukraine,” Trump said. “But I said, ‘You’re not going into Ukraine.' He would never, ever have gone into Ukraine.”
via wnd