Imagine a burglar has broken into your house and is holding two rooms. The president of the neighborhood association announces he will meet the burglar and the burglar's richest backer to work something out. You're welcome to join, but they may start without you. Then he says you really should have settled sooner.
That is Donald Trump's offer on Ukraine. He is willing to sit down with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in Shenzhen on Nov. 18 and 19, possibly without Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and he has suggested Ukraine could send someone else. Call it deal-making if you like. It is a seating chart that tells you who the deal is for.
The Left should say plainly what it wants, because this is a place where our own coalition has real arguments. There are people on the left, and I respect many of them, who are sick of an open-ended war and want a negotiated end. They are right that wars end at tables. But there is a vast moral difference between pressing everyone toward peace and pressing the invaded party to accept the invader's terms. Telling Ukraine it should have settled earlier means telling it to have surrendered territory and people to an occupier sooner. The anti-war position has never been that the victim should have folded faster.
Then there is the guest list. Xi's China has been Russia's economic lifeline. Putting him at the table as a co-arbiter rewards the sponsor of the aggression and makes Beijing a power broker over a European border. It also tells every autocrat watching that big powers settle other countries' fates among themselves. A Left that believes in self-determination, and that spent decades condemning great-power carve-ups, should be loud about this.
The most revealing part of this story is the small one. Zelenskyy told bipartisan lawmakers that Starlink and Starshield service had been degraded and that U.S. intelligence sharing had been interrupted, leaving Ukraine without advance warning of Russian attacks. Warning of attacks means sirens, shelters, and whether a family is in the kitchen or the basement when a missile arrives.
Now look at the accountability. Elon Musk says the government and Trump are responsible. Marco Rubio says the United States didn't cause it. Trump says he doesn't know who ordered any interruption and wants to find out. Someone switched something off, or let it degrade, in a war where lives depend on it, and the president, the secretary of state, and the owner of the network offer three different stories. That is not oversight. It is a shrug dressed up as an investigation.
Democrats should resist the urge to treat this as purely a Trump scandal. Ukraine's dependence on a single billionaire's satellite constellation began before this administration, and Washington let a private citizen's mood become a variable in military planning. The lesson is that no democracy should rely on one man's company, or one president's whim, for the battlefield awareness of an ally it claims to defend. Public infrastructure and public rules are the answer, and Congress should demand them.
It is telling that Richard Blumenthal and Thom Tillis, a Democrat and a Republican, are saying together that funding Russia, limiting satellite communications and weakening air defenses would prolong the war, not shorten it. That is the sober case. Peace does not come from starving the defender and flattering the aggressor. It comes from making continued aggression more costly than stopping.
If Trump wants a settlement, he can have one in which Kyiv is in the room, Europe is in the room, the intelligence flows, and the satellites stay on. Anything else is not peacemaking. It is a transaction among powerful men over people who aren't allowed to speak, and Congress should say so before Shenzhen.
