The president seems willing to be flexible on some of his prior positions (for good or ill). These are very interesting times.
The most eyebrow-raising development since the “No Deal Until There’s a Deal” Alaska Summit is that President Trump has been talking to allies about the possibility of extending a new American security guarantee to Ukraine as part of an agreement to end the war.
What exactly would these security guarantees entail? And what would they commit the United States to do? At this point, no one is entirely sure.
The New York Times’ Constant Méheut reports that in an early-morning phone call on Saturday, the day after the Alaska summit, Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the offer “would enlist Kyiv’s Western partners to guarantee Ukraine’s defense against new Russian attacks.”
Crucially, Mr. Trump indicated that the United States was ready to participate in such guarantees — a shift from his earlier position that Ukraine’s postwar security should be left solely to Europe.
“This is a significant change,” Mr. Zelensky said on Sunday during a news conference in Brussels. “It’s important that America agrees to work with Europe to provide security guarantees for Ukraine.” [emphasis added]
President Zelensky is right that such an offer by President Trump would be a “significant change.” Such talk has been a non-starter among the so-called restrainer wing of the Trump coalition for years. But iron-clad security guarantees from the West (preferably inside the NATO alliance) are, of course, one of Ukraine’s biggest goals. The delta between the two positions has repeatedly put Ukraine, its supporters in the West, and the restrainers at loggerheads.
In fact, the question of security guarantees was at the core of the famous Oval Office blow-up between Zelensky, Trump, and Vice President JD Vance back in February.
As I wrote six months ago in the aftermath of that debacle:
President Trump’s repeatedly stated position is that his core aim is a cease-fire. He wants to end the killing and the dying.
Zelensky, who says that he also wants to end the war, argues that a cease-fire without security guarantees is simply not enough because Ukraine, the U.S., and Europe cannot trust that Vladimir Putin will stick to anything that’s agreed to.
Detailing the conversation at the time, I wrote that the argument erupted because, after “asking Trump’s permission to respond to Vance directly,” Zelensky asked the American vice president to explain why, after Putin invaded eastern Ukraine and the Crimea in 2014 — in a period that extended over the Obama years, the first Trump administration, and the Biden administration — “nobody stopped him.”
“From 2014 to 2022, people have been dying on the contact line. Nobody stopped him,” Zelensky continues.
During this period, Zelensky reiterates to Vance, many negotiations happened. Documents were signed. Cease-fires were agreed to. “In 2019 I signed with [Putin] a cease-fire,” Zelensky says, and French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel promised Ukraine that Russia’s aggression was finished. But, Zelensky says, Putin broke his word again and again.
In February, Zelensky was indeed willing to agree to a cease-fire, but he would only agree to one if Trump was willing to offer him concrete American assistance should Russia ever attack his country again. At the time, Trump and Vance were unwilling to seriously entertain Zelensky’s point.
Would Trump really now dangle such a significant change in his position — the change that is most coveted by the Ukrainians — in order to get them to agree to land swaps with Russia and a ceasefire?
The devil will be in the details of course, but amazingly, the Times reports that “Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy said that in his call with Mr. Zelensky and European leaders, Mr. Trump had drawn on her earlier idea of guarantees modeled on Article 5 of the NATO pact, which stipulates that an attack on one ally would be defended as an attack on all.”
If this were Article 5 in all but name — outside NATO but with the major NATO powers’ backing and support — would that be enough to convince Zelensky and the Ukrainian people?
Some Ukrainians are understandably skeptical. But one way to increase Ukrainian confidence in the so-called security guarantees would be for European troops to be stationed inside Ukraine in a postwar settlement, something the New York Times says is “an idea that Mr. Trump appeared to entertain, despite previously opposing.”
The deal we end up with — if we end up with a deal at all — may yet be extremely hard to swallow. It may end up being worth opposing on the merits. But the president seems willing to be flexible on some of his prior positions (for good or ill). These are very interesting times.