Are America’s interests truly being served in the president’s diplomatic push?
I ’m chagrined — but who could be surprised? — by indications that President Trump’s high-profile exertions regarding the war in Ukraine are a Nobel Peace Prize vanity project. The Dispatch even reports (based on a Norwegian press outlet) that the president cold-called Norway’s finance minister to discuss the award (on the pretext of talking tariffs). Ever since the late Yasser Arafat was honored with the “peace” prize — in between intifadas — it has puzzled me why anyone actually worth giving it to would want it. Alas, I suppose mainstream journos still crave the Pulitzer Prize nearly a century after it was presented to Walter Duranty for lionizing Stalin. And while I have no idea if Trump cares that a master terrorist won the Nobel in 1994, he obviously cares deeply that Barack Obama won it in 2009.
Sixteen years later, Obama’s prize is mainly a punch line thanks to the consensus (even among honest admirers of the former president) that he did nothing to earn it. In Trump’s case, like Obama’s, doing nothing would be infinitely better than seeking praise for his admirable intentions rather than serving America’s interests.
On that score, my position hasn’t changed: The vital American interest is not that the war in Ukraine end and the killing stop, as the president insists. In this, I part company with our recent editorials (here and here) on the subject. I don’t agree, for example, that “Trump’s efforts to come to a deal are welcome” when the deal he’s talking about would accept Russia’s annexation of a fifth of Ukraine, including some territory that Moscow, despite its barbaric tactics, has not been able to conquer in battle. Not when Ukraine wants to keep fighting. Not when, in refusing to accept defeat, Ukraine is inflicting horrific damage on Russia’s armed forces.
It seems to me that we have accepted (or at least chosen not to contest) Trump’s bien-pensant premise, which is that the war — being a war, and therefore being catastrophic in its human toll — must be the worst possible thing. Hence, the thinking goes, a stable cessation of the war at this moment is such a laudable goal that it ought to be pursued. Therefore, we should cheer Trump’s desire and maneuverings to end the fighting, regardless of what America’s interests might be, to say nothing of Ukraine’s. It matters not whether the president is motivated by legacy-building and a craving for transnational-progressive plaudits, or by his gut disdain for wasteful slaughter — which Trump can’t help but see as anything but wasteful because, as I’ve contended in other contexts, uses of force catalyzed by ideology or patriotism seem irrational to someone of his “transactional” nature, although “might makes right” certainly does resonate with him.
I also sense that we have become inured to the president’s flawed calculus of the war, to wit: Because it currently seems unlikely that Ukraine will materially reverse its losses, much less get all of its territory back, we are, practically speaking, negotiating the terms of its defeat anyway, so what’s the point of pouring more American resources into it? Why enable Ukraine to keep fighting for its current and future existence if we can orchestrate a seemingly honorable conclusion?
And that conclusion? A mirage of “Article 5-like” security guarantees that, in about a nanosecond of serious scrutiny, is revealed as a coup for Russia?
I can’t agree with that.
As readers may recall, I am not a delirious admirer of Ukraine. It’s grown some on me through its grit in combating a monstrous neighbor, and I’m convinced that most of it wants to be part of the West. Still, Ukraine has a history of being both deeply corrupt and home to a robust pro-Russia faction (especially the farther east of Kyiv you get). Viktor Yanukovych, the Moscow-friendly president driven out in a 2013–14 coup encouraged by the Obama administration, didn’t spontaneously appear in office in 2010. He was democratically elected with support from about half of voters (and that, after having notoriously tried to steal the election in 2004).
Ukraine also has a neo-Nazi problem. I’m not going to condemn another country for its radicals, antisemites included, when we have our share, too (and when Ukrainians, it bears noting, have elected as president Zelensky, a Jew who ran as an anti-corruption reformer and has led with valor throughout the war). But when we’re giving mega-aid to a country, knowing who the recipients are is not a trivial matter. That’s a lesson we need to remember from the Carter- and Reagan-era aid to the anti-Soviet mujahideen in Afghanistan. That was a worthy effort, but because we were insufficiently careful, anti-American jihadists were aid beneficiaries, and they proceeded to torment us in the decades that followed.
I don’t mention Afghanistan for that reason alone. It’s also the aid model I far prefer to Trump’s shifting approaches to Russia and the war. There are clear differences, of course. The ongoing war is in Europe, where our interests, alliances, and the scale of support are all greater; and today’s Russia is a pipsqueak compared to the Soviet Union (more on that momentarily). But the bottom line is that we supported the mujahideen as long as they were willing to fight the Red Army, turning their Afghan jihad into the Soviets’ Vietnam (which, in conjunction with the Reagan military buildup, the Evil Empire was too hollow to endure). Over ten years beginning in 1979, for a modest amount of support and with no American boots on the ground, the Afghans bled the Russians dry. Here’s a hypothetical: If Reagan, à la Trump, had decided in 1983 that the killing was just too much to abide and that the ragtag tribal jihadists had no chance against one of the world’s two superpowers, would the Red Army have pulled out in ignominious defeat six years later? Would the Soviet decline have accelerated to the point of collapse in a heap two years after that?
I know, counterfactuals may have too many imponderables. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
In any event, our Ukraine policy ought to be based on vital American interests, not Trump’s personal goal of an end to the fighting at all costs. Our interests are that territorial aggression not be given international recognition; that the armed forces of Vladimir Putin’s murderous anti-American regime continue to be degraded; and that our main geopolitical rivals (most notably China, Russia, and Iran) grasp that we draw sharp distinctions between war criminals, such as Putin, and their prey — so that Xi Jinping doesn’t get the notion that we’re apt to tell Taiwan it “doesn’t have the cards” to resist a Chinese invasion.
It is not our place to tell Ukrainians to stand down just because our president thinks there has been too much killing. We should instead arm them to the extent that doing so is consistent with our national interests. That extent is not limitless given our other security vulnerabilities and $37 trillion national debt; but it should be high, nevertheless, since the Russian forces that Ukraine is killing could otherwise be arrayed against the U.S. and our allies in future conflicts — a prohibitively expensive proposition in blood and treasure. And since, for those more worried about China than Russia (I’m one of you), nothing will embolden Beijing more than delusional American indulgence of Putin.
If Ukraine at some point decides that the slaughter is too much and that it must accept a settlement that, at least de facto, concedes Putin’s conquest to some degree, we can deal with that when it happens. And I’m not saying territorial concessions are out of the question. For example, in a Wall Street Journal interview, Stephen Kotkin, the peerless historian of Russia, makes a strong case that the goal of retaking Crimea is not merely unattainable (“Crimea is going back to Ukraine the day after Texas goes back to Mexico”); the peninsula’s 2 million ethnic Russians and, thus, the prospects of insurgency and reinvasion by Moscow could render reacquisition of Crimea counterproductive if Ukraine is to “win the peace in the long term” — i.e., become a stable, militarily capable nation integrated in Europe. Russia, however, should be made to earn such concessions, rather than be treated as if it were a hyperpower that can dictate terms.
For now, the Ukrainians remain highly motivated to fight. Our interest is to take the gloves off so they can do just that. So halting are Trump’s moves in that direction, he might as well be Biden — doing just enough to keep the Ukrainians in the ring, but tying their haymaker hand behind their back.
In fact, we learned just this week (from the Wall Street Journal) that the Trump Defense Department has blocked Ukraine from using ATACMS — Army Tactical Missile Systems supplied by the U.S. — to conduct long-range strikes inside Russia, even as Putin pounds Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. In so doing, Trump not only prevents Kyiv from recouping its losses while fortifying Moscow’s refusal to make concessions; he also reverses the Biden administration’s belated, grudging acknowledgment that Ukraine had to be able to play offense.
The reluctance of Trump and Biden officials in this latter regard illustrates that neither administration has valued America’s interest in undermining Putin’s military capabilities and political support. It is remarkable that Trump, who has been so effective in reversing decades of wayward U.S. strategy on Iran — strategy that treated Iranian territory as sacrosanct no matter how many Americans the regime’s proxies attacked — can’t see that Russia’s aggression won’t stop unless it feels at home the kind of pain it inflicts against its neighbors.
To repeat what I’ve said before, Russia is a sickly, shrinking, basket-case country with an economy smaller than Brazil’s — an economy one-fifteenth the size of ours — run by a mafia regime that has robbed its country blind. As AEI’s Russia expert Leon Aron recently put it in the Wall Street Journal:
Time isn’t on Russia’s side. This fact collapses Mr. Putin’s strategy of outlasting the West. What used to look like a marathon is turning into a sprint. . . . Russia is losing soldiers. Some 30,000 of them get killed or seriously wounded every month. These are huge numbers — about a million since February 2022. Mr. Putin is giving out sign-up bonuses that are higher than the average national annual salary, but the number of first-time volunteers might be dipping below the replacement. An estimated 200,000 criminals have been “persuaded” to “volunteer.” Mr. Putin broke his promise not to send raw draftees into combat. Eighteen-year-old Russians were killed or taken prisoner or went missing after Ukraine’s incursion in the Kursk region last year.
Amid Russia’s economic straits, the war, as Aron elaborates, is costing it $300 million a day, consuming 40 percent of government spending and up to 8 percent of GDP. Revenues for energy, Moscow’s core business, are plunging, even as annual government expenditures surge 20 percent year-over-year. The “National Welfare Fund” in which Putin has been stashing oil profits as a hedge against Western opposition since 2008 (i.e., since his annexation of the Georgian territories Abkhazia and South Ossetia) is down to $35 million (from $117 billion) and could disappear in a few months if global oil prices continue their downward trajectory.
A demonstration to Moscow that it is in for a long slog could change the endgame in Ukraine. President Trump would have to exhibit both the will to walk away from the table and awareness that Putin is an enemy (maddeningly, such awareness often seems too much to ask, the mountain of evidence notwithstanding). Serious, lethal, timely matériel support for Ukraine, coupled with secondary sanctions that have real bite against Russia’s business partners (and not just India) and the confiscation of $300 billion in Russian assets deposited in European banks, would be consequential. While Gazprombank, which underwrites Russia’s war machine, has been sanctioned by our Treasury Department, Professor Kotkin observes that it has not yet been removed from the SWIFT banking system that makes global commerce and finance go. I wrote about the Biden administration’s reluctance to press the advantage of SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) at the beginning of the war. But much has changed now: The U.S. has cut off energy imports from Russia, more dependent Europe has dramatically reduced them, and Russia’s other exports have been slashed. At this point, a SWIFT cutoff of Moscow’s key financial institution would create significant hurdles for collecting revenue and financing combat operations.
Note that these measures, which would hammer Russia at a critical moment, would cost the United States very little. Even the military aid, mainly provided by NATO countries, redounds to the benefit of American defense manufacturers while providing our commanders with vital intelligence about how the weapons perform in combat against one of our major geopolitical adversaries.
A final point. Earlier, I belittled the talk of “Article 5-like” guarantees as a coup for Russia. That is because they are illusory. Article 5 is the NATO commitment that an attack on one member country is an attack on all; it triggers the obligation to take action, including potential military operations, against the aggressor. NATO is the reason there are formidable, interoperative armed forces and arsenals arrayed in opposition to Russia. That force infrastructure exists because there is a treaty, a binding legal foundation, in place since 1949. Any expansion of NATO, whether it is admission of new countries or assumption of new military commitments, requires an amendment of the agreement and ratification through each country’s legal process — in our case, consent by the Senate and ratification by the president.
Without a binding treaty, you have nothing. Just ask former President Obama how his Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran nuclear deal) is doing these days. Ask Ukraine what became of the Budapest Memorandum, under which it supposedly got security guarantees from the United States, the United Kingdom, and . . . yes . . . Russia. For all the fanfare and rhetorical assurances (accompanied in the case of the JCPOA by a United Nations Security Council resolution, part of Obama’s machinations to end-run the Constitution’s treaty clause), these were unenforceable executive agreements, not binding treaties. When it got down to brass tacks, they weren’t worth much more than the ink spilt at the vaunted signing ceremonies.
When you hear the term “Article 5-like,” understand that like is the head-fake. Ukraine is not going to be in NATO, the treaty terms for which deny membership to countries that are — like Ukraine — engaged in armed conflict or territorial disputes. And with Ukraine outside the NATO tent, the treaty is not going to be amended to treat it as if it were inside.
Consequently, as Russia (the Budapest signatory) well knows, the United States and its allies are not going to make legally binding commitments to come to Ukraine’s aid if it is attacked. If the conflict were ended now, and everyone stood down under the fiction that it had been brought to a stable conclusion, Kyiv’s rational expectations would be that (a) Russia will invade again once it refortifies, and (b) Ukraine would get no more, and probably less, than the level of support it has been getting to this point. Having taken the measure of the paper tiger that NATO would be absent a strong American commitment to aid Ukraine in resisting Russia’s aggression, Putin appears convinced that he can win a slow, ugly victory.
President Trump cannot alter Putin’s calculations unless he alters Putin’s expectations about the here and now. A stand-down by the West under the guise of “Article 5-like” security guarantees for Ukraine is exactly what Putin expects.