Certainly, the prospect of U.S. deployments to Ukraine amid a shooting war with Russia ups the ante.
W e’re all familiar with how Donald Trump and his subordinates conduct public negotiations with America’s partners and adversaries abroad. The process usually begins with maximalist demands and threats, and it tends to culminate in concessions from Trump’s targets that he can call a win even if they fall short of the original ask. Sticks first, carrots later. So far, though, that doesn’t describe the second Trump administration’s efforts to coax Moscow to the negotiating table.
When describing the president’s interactions with his Russian counterpart, the White House has projected sunny optimism. Vladimir Putin has, they say, shown openness to the Trump plan for pausing Russia’s expansionist war in Ukraine. We should expect as much from a deal that mimics the failed Minsk agreements’ terms, which froze the line of contact between Russian and Ukrainian forces, functionally ceded the territory Moscow seized by force to the Kremlin, and put Western pressure on the target of Russia’s aggression to preserve the peace Russian irregular forces and proxy fighters routinely violated.
And yet, it doesn’t seem like Moscow is as willing to play along as the readouts that followed Trump’s conversations with Putin suggest. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has already had to walk back a strange and unanticipated concession to the Russians in which he teased de facto U.S. acknowledgment of Russia’s illegal acquisition and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. He’s also clarified that what he meant when he said Ukraine’s accession into NATO was off the table was that it was off the table for now.
Hegseth’s generous dispensation to the Kremlin was swiftly chided by the European side of this complex equation. “It’s not good negotiation tactics if you just give away everything before the negotiations have even started,” said European Commission Vice President Kaja Kallas. “Appeasement will always fail.” Sage advice. Perhaps she’s read The Art of the Deal.
It doesn’t seem like Hegseth’s pivot constituted a course correction, because the carrots have kept coming. “I’d love to have them back,” Trump said of Russia’s membership in the G-7 club of industrialized and (since Russia was ejected from it) democratic nations. “I think it was a mistake to throw them out.” That stance has nothing to do with “liking Russia or not liking Russia,” he clarified. “They should be sitting at the table. I think Putin would love to be back.” Presumably, if that dispassionate policy recommendation is divorced from any personal affection for the Kremlin and the autocrat who occupies it, it must be an inducement for Russian participation in the White House’s peace project. But that, too, wasn’t sufficient.
The Wall Street Journal’s reporters tailing Vice President JD Vance as he makes the rounds in Munich ahead of this weekend’s annual security conference reported on yet another new allotment on offer. “Vance offered to reset the relationship with Russia after a successful agreement over Ukraine, saying that Moscow’s current isolation from Western markets made it Beijing’s junior partner,” the Journal reported.
Can the Russian regime believe its ears? Another “Russian reset”? Imagine Moscow’s relief. After all, the previous five such overtures provided Moscow a reprieve from its deserved global isolation and positioned it to aggressively pursue its expansionist aims in the so-called “near abroad.” Beyond that, Vance’s pitch holds out the prospect of reintegration with the global economy despite its criminal campaign of conquest and subjugation, and without any accompanying demands on it to, for example, withdraw from Ukrainian territory, repatriate the civilians it kidnapped, or compensate Kyiv for the destruction and bloodshed it wrought. What’s not to love?
This time, however, the enticement was accompanied by a stick. “There are economic tools of leverage, there are of course military tools of leverage,” Vance said when outlining a coercive vision of the diplomacy in which the administration is engaged. The Journal’s reporters interpreted this as a threat to engage in direct U.S. military intervention in Russia’s war. “Vance said the option of sending U.S. troops to Ukraine if Moscow failed to negotiate in good faith remained ‘on the table,’ striking a far tougher tone than did Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth,” the report continued.
The rare display of rhetorical muscularity toward the Kremlin will prove a sweet sound to American ears. Trump supporters will welcome the evidence that this administration is willing to play hardball with Russia. Trump skeptics, who are either genuinely predisposed toward containing Russian aggression or politically bound to the anti-Russian position they adopted in the wake of Trump’s first election, will also find the ultimatum agreeable. But will the Russian regime regard the threat as credible?
Certainly, the prospect of U.S. deployments to Ukraine amid a shooting war with Russia ups the ante significantly. Such a mission would put American soldiers at risk of being killed by direct Russian fire or being compelled to defend themselves from Russian attack, which would beget casualties, reciprocity, and the prospect of a cascading conflagration between the two nuclear-armed adversaries. That is precisely what Vance and his acolytes condescendingly (and, at times, nonsensically) insisted supporters of Ukraine’s sovereignty want — war for war’s sake.
The threat is certainly out of character for Vance and Trump. It does not align with either their political priorities or American public opinion, of which Russia is keenly aware. While foreign governments often have a thumbless grasp of the intricacies of domestic American politics, the Kremlin and its diplomats tend to display more sophistication. They will balance this bolt from the blue against all their past experience with Donald Trump and the movement politics at his command.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that Moscow will casually disregard this warning. Russia has reason to believe that the Trump administration is not risk averse. Trump 1.0 oversaw the most comprehensive sanctions regime against Moscow in this century — a regime Joe Biden tried to roll back, with disastrous consequences. It abandoned defunct treaty obligations with Russia, repossessed Russian diplomatic facilities, and expelled Russian diplomats, and it put the squeeze on Russia’s strategic allies such as Iran. Nor was the first Trump administration entirely allergic to the use of military force. It pummeled Russia’s ally in Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons on civilian population centers. It even committed U.S. forces to a combined arms assault on hundreds of Russian Wagner Group forces in Syria — a set-piece battle culminating in the death of up to 200 Russian mercenaries. This is all nothing to sneeze at, and the practitioners of Russian statecraft are unlikely to wholly dismiss Vance’s threat.
But nor is it likely to preoccupy Russian officials. They have successfully dissuaded Western powers from direct intervention in its war so far via the compelling power of nuclear deterrence, and that dynamic is unlikely to change. Likewise, the scales in this balance are weighted on the side of accommodating Russian demands. We don’t know what is being conveyed to the combatants in this conflict in private (to say nothing of the signals Washington is sending to Russia’s co-belligerents in places like Pyongyang and Tehran), but the public diplomacy we’ve witnessed so far indicates that Russia could get most of what it wants in the near term from a negotiated pause in the conflict — at least, until it is better positioned to get everything it wants in Ukraine. It’s therefore possible that Moscow was the audience for Vance’s threat. More likely, Europe and, to a lesser extent, domestic American audiences were.