Will Russia have the chance to challenge NATO on the cheap?
B ack when the president and his officials were searching for a rationalization to frame the Ukraine mineral rights deal as something more than grubby extortion, one that stuck was the notion that Moscow would be intimidated by U.S. presence inside Ukraine.
“The American presence will, I think, keep a lot of bad actors out of the country or certainly out of the area where we’re doing the digging,” Trump said during an April cabinet meeting. That was a dubious claim at the time. It’s downright preposterous now.
Overnight, Moscow launched one of the largest barrages of missiles and drones at Ukrainian population centers in weeks — a feat, given the scale of the Russian bombardment over the summer. At least 574 drones and 40 missiles rained down on targets inside Ukraine, including on a major U.S. electronics manufacturer positioned in a remote western region of the country on the NATO border. Fifteen people were wounded in the attack on what Volodymyr Zelensky called an “ordinary civilian enterprise, an American investment” — a maker of “such familiar household items as coffee machines.”
The factory was “clearly targeted,” according to Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin. And it’s not the first time a U.S.-operated firm has been attacked by Russia inside Ukraine. In July, a Boeing plant near Kyiv was damaged “in what appeared to be a deliberate strike on the US aerospace company,” the Financial Times reported. “Russia continues to destroy and humiliate U.S. businesses in Ukraine, targeting companies that invest and trade on the U.S. stock markets,” Andy Hunder, the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine, fumed. “Russia is not only destroying Ukraine – it is undermining U.S. leadership, values, and U.S. business.”
This is something to bear in mind as Western powers contemplate the prospect of “security guarantees” for Ukraine that would be underwritten by NATO troops stationed inside the non-NATO country. If that is still an option.
According to Donald Trump, it once was. At the close of last week’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Trump told his European counterparts that Putin would accept “the presence of Western troops in Ukraine as a way of ensuring [a peace deal’s] durability,” the Wall Street Journal reported. That concession — really the only concession on offer from Putin in Alaska — served as the basis for a multilateral European summit in Washington earlier this week. Trump himself said it would not be a “problem” to put “boots on the ground” with U.S. support. Indeed, the U.S. might even contribute to that operation from the “air.”
But a subsequent Russian-language statement from the Kremlin reaffirmed that Russia “categorically rejects” that outcome. “To discuss security guarantees seriously without Russia is a road to nowhere,” said longtime Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. If there is to be a foreign presence in Ukraine (besides that of the Russians and North Koreans, of course), the Chinese should play a role in guaranteeing Ukraine’s safety, Lavrov added.
None of this is serious. It is evidence of the games Russians play with the diplomatic process and with those naïve enough to think that Moscow engages with it in good faith. In retrospect, the recent flurry of diplomatic activity we’ve witnessed looks like so much theater. There were a lot of sudden movements and many loud noises but little that could be described as genuine progress toward even a limited cease-fire, much less a durable peace deal. The dynamic on display over the last several days — with Putin and the Europeans competing against one another to out-flatter Trump, each impressing on him that the other side is the true obstacle to peace — is not all that distinct from the one that prevailed in March and April.
And yet, despite Moscow’s games (the Kremlin also rejected the prospect of a bilateral Putin-Zelensky meeting after the Russian president reportedly agreed to one in a call with Trump), there are reasons to suspect that Moscow would welcome the briar patch into which the West is threatening to throw it.
The Europeans have talked up the provision of “Article V–like” guarantees to Ukraine, which would render the debate over Ukraine’s NATO accession an academic exercise. But NATO’s mutual defense provisions are more than just a piece of paper. They are tangible in the form of the tens of thousands of troops who rotate in and out of permanent bases on the alliance’s frontier. They’re backed by forward-positioned weapons platforms, training exercises, and integrated combat systems and command-and-control procedures. These are the sorts of things that Moscow can see and believe.
It’s difficult to even imagine such an ad hoc status quo, so you can imagine how seriously the Kremlin takes this initiative. And if Europe satisfied its commitments to Ukraine by shuffling a few hundred Dutch soldiers around the country, it wouldn’t just fail to reproduce the conditions that kept the Soviets out of the Fulda Gap and the North Koreans on their side of the DMZ. It would provide Russia with a low-risk opportunity to achieve its singular geostrategic objective in Europe: breaking the NATO alliance.
If NATO were to superficially integrate Ukraine into the alliance’s security architecture without extending to Ukraine that architecture, or allowing it access to procedural mechanisms that make Article V real, Russia would have the chance to challenge NATO on the cheap. Indeed, the temptation on offer to Russia would be provocative, even if Putin wasn’t already dead set on swallowing up Ukraine.
The U.S. president seems at least somewhat vexed by the fact that the drama of Anchorage and Washington, D.C., did not translate into real diplomatic progress. In a Truth Social missive, Trump scolded Joe Biden, with all due justification, for failing to properly provide Ukraine with offensive weapons when they were needed. Some of Ukraine’s supporters may take solace in that statement of support of Ukraine’s war effort, but it is indicative of why the Trump administration has failed to navigate this conflict as well as it has others.
When Trump officials, especially those who are hostile to Kyiv, talk about Russia’s war in Ukraine, they discuss it the terms of domestic American politics. They are forever referring to the “neocons,” the “globalists,” and “warmongers” destined for history’s ash heap. And yet, none of these parties is waging war on Ukraine and imperiling U.S. interests. By not complicating peace talks between India and Pakistan, Azerbaijan and Armenia, and Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo with irrelevant domestic political hobgoblins, perhaps Trump officials allowed those initiatives to avoid the complexity that has frustrated their efforts in Europe.
Getting to something resembling peace in Europe merely to show your domestic detractors that it can be done is a recipe for a flawed arrangement and a prelude to more war. The continuation of this conflict is not ideal, but it will continue so long as the aggressor believes he can achieve his objectives through force of arms. For those who insisted that the West was the provocative party in this war, conceding that Putin is the problem will be a hard pill to swallow. The sacrifice of pride is, however, far preferable to the sacrifice of U.S. strategic influence and leverage in Europe in advance of another, even more terrible war over the control of Ukraine. It may be time for Trump to go back to the drawing board.