Part 2: A Plan So Bonkers Even William Spaniel Can See It
- john raymond
- 2 minutes ago
- 3 min read
The leaked 28-point peace proposal for the war between Ukraine and Russia—crafted in the name of a deal, but all too clearly serving Moscow—has triggered widespread alarm.
What makes the reaction especially telling is that William Spaniel—a political scientist who habitually frames his commentary in neutral terms rather than partisan or even moralistic ones—spent his recent video walking through this plan and openly mocking it.
He does not invoke the traitor-general hypothesis; yet his verdict is withering: the plan is amateurish, incoherent, self-defeating and structurally unworkable. When a scholar who refuses to use incendiary labels basically calls your document “complete and utter horseshit,” you have to ask: how bad must it be—and why is it being proposed?
Spaniel’s critique in his own tone
In his review, Spaniel picks apart the language and logic of the document point-by-point:
He notes the misuse of terms: “NATO expansion” instead of “enlargement”; the treaty name confusion (mentioning START I instead of New START); spelling mistakes on Ukrainian geography (e.g., the Dnipro River).
He highlights how the plan demands that Ukraine constitutionally renounce NATO membership, while all 32 current NATO members must amend their statutes to forever exclude Ukraine—a procedural impossibility.
He draws attention to guarantees that are rendered hollow: Ukraine is to cap its armed forces at 600,000, ban NATO troops on its soil, and then be expected to trust a “security guarantee” whose text offers only vague “decisive coordinated military response” without specifying who exactly will show up, when, or under what legal mechanism.
He ridicules the “European fighter jets” clause as an oddity—as if someone found a sentence on the internet and shoe-horned it into a peace document without context.
The tone throughout is incredulous and sardonic. “Yep, that’s in the document. Someone actually wrote this.” Spaniel clearly believes the drafting process lacked expert input. Yet, interestingly, he stops short of concluding this reflects a conscious betrayal of the alliance. He treats it as bad policy, not treason.
Why Spaniel’s refusal to call it “traitor-general” actually strengthens the argument
Here’s where his critique becomes even more significant:
Because Spaniel doesn’t assume a captured asset inside the alliance, his standards are minimal. He expects rational actors pursuing credible bargains among sovereign states. On those terms, this plan fails spectacularly.
If someone like Spaniel can dissect the document and conclude: “This is not sustainable; it makes no sense for Ukraine; it undermines credible deterrence,” then it becomes impossible to regard this as merely misguided.
The gap between his expectation (rational negotiation among equals) and reality (a document heavily skewed toward one side, drafted in strange language, with impossible enforcement mechanisms) opens the space for the traitor-general inference. Because if it doesn’t make sense under normal alliance logic, then what logic does it make sense under?
The structural verdict: Spaniel sees garbage, we see betrayal
The fact that Spaniel laughs at the document for its amateur syntax, fudged technical clauses, and internal contradictions does not mean the document lacks purpose. On the contrary:
The territorial clauses (recognizing Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk as Russian; freezing Kherson/Zaporizhzhia) give Russia exactly what it fought for.
The ban on Ukrainian NATO membership and troop caps dismantle Ukraine’s future deterrent capacity.
The economic reintegration of Russia, unfrozen assets, profit shares for U.S. firms embed Western interests inside Russia’s recovery.
The enforcement mechanism placed under President Trump’s chairmanship gives dominance to his political network.
Spaniel names the dysfunction; our interpretation fills in the system: dysfunction designed to serve Moscow and undermine Ukraine.
Implications
If you treat this as a serious peace bargain among equals, you will conclude: “This plan is unworkable and should be abandoned.” That is the only plausible rational conclusion from Spaniel’s walkthrough.
If you treat it as a tool of capitulation, you see: the plan never needed to be workable in the traditional sense—it only needed to shift frames and weaken Ukraine’s position.
Spaniel’s reluctance to attribute motive can actually makes his analysis more credible. He uses neutral theory; he does not accuse. Yet he ends up exposing the same structural logic we attribute to a traitor-general setup.
The Only Rational Conclusion
When the most conservative analyst watching the war says your peace plan reads like gibberish, it is time to stop pretending this is a well-intentioned compromise.
Spaniel doesn’t say: “This is betrayal.” But he does say: “This fails on every technical metric of negotiation.”
Combined with the broader background of President Trump’s alignment with Kremlin interests, that failure is not accidental. The plan’s absurdity is the feature.
And the fact that Spaniel sees that absurdity—even as he refuses the label—should make the rest of us stop asking if this is betrayal, and start asking how far the betrayal is meant to go.