Donald Trump’s push for peace in Ukraine has left the West aghast and with good reason. The man expected to pull America off the world stage seems determined to have a hand in every conflict. The candidate who campaigned on fear of World War III is set on upending the rules that prevented it for 80 years. The self-styled master negotiator is giving away the game before it begins, ceding Moscow’s main demands before Vladimir Putin even agrees to come to the table. Long-time American allies—including in all the capitals of Europe—have been left out of talks about Ukraine.
The outcome in Ukraine is to be determined, but what is certain is the damage to the international order—perhaps permanent damage. Tensions between Washington and Europe dominated this weekend’s Munich Security Conference, and on Monday anxious European leaders will gather in Paris to plan a collective response.
The administration’s diplomacy is inscrutable. First, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said one thing—that there could be no return to Ukraine’s prewar 2014 borders, no Ukrainian membership in NATO, and no American peacekeeping troops in Ukraine. John Coale, America’s deputy envoy to Ukraine, said the opposite: the U.S. had not ruled out NATO membership or restoring Ukrainian territory. Then, Vice President J.D. Vance dramatically shifted the tone, threatening increased sanctions on Russia and sending U.S. troops to Ukraine, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to reassure Kyiv, declaring that the U.S. has “a stake in Ukraine’s long-term independence.”
But no one can ignore Hegseth’s initial comments. Trump himself has repeatedly said that Biden should never have promised Ukraine NATO membership, and he seems inclined to concede Putin’s top demands—that Kyiv give up the 20 percent of Ukraine held by Russian troops and renounce membership in the transatlantic alliance.
Still, this isn’t the end of the matter. Moscow’s broader demands—that NATO pull back from Central Europe and leave Ukraine defenseless by slashing Kyiv’s army and withholding more shipments of Western weapons—have yet to be discussed. Putin has been playing nice, but he may yet overreach, offend Trump, or walk away from the talks.
Preliminary talks between the U.S. and Russia will begin next week in Saudi Arabia. They are expected to focus on arrangements for a summit, not substance.
Many Ukrainians are still in shock at the unorthodox way Washington is pursuing an agreement, with Trump at the center of the conversation rather than the parties involved. But resentment is muted by realism.
The word “betrayal” comes up increasingly in Ukrainian conversations about the West. But Ukraine has a long history of being let down by its supposed allies, including the U.S. and Europe, which have repeatedly promised but failed to guarantee Ukrainian security since Kyiv gave up its nuclear weapons in 2008. The share of the Ukrainian public that stoically understands the difficulty of returning to the country’s prewar boundaries—those of 2014, before Putin seized Crimea, or even 2022—has been growing steadily for 18 months, with 38 percent agreeing in December that “to achieve peace as soon as possible and preserve its independence, Ukraine must give up some of its territories.”
And some Ukrainians still seem hopeful about Trump—nothing could be worse, the argument goes, than Joe Biden’s approach of giving Kyiv enough to fight but not defeat Moscow. They also know their options are limited. “In all the difficult situations, you have a chance,” Zelensky said last week. “But we will have low chance . . . to survive without [the] support of the United States.”
The outcome in Ukraine will inevitably be bitter. After three long years of war and heavy losses, Kyiv is having to make peace at a time when Russia has the advantage. But even if Ukraine comes away with the best possible deal, there is trouble ahead for the Western alliance. Last week’s maneuvering laid bare three flashpoints where Trump’s approach is fundamentally at odds with Europe’s beliefs and the values that undergird the coalition.
The first warning sign, already flashing red for European leaders, is where they fit in. Neither Elon Musk nor Vance, who traveled to Germany last week to hector leaders about free speech, hesitate to interfere in European elections. But Trump’s understanding of leadership is all about Trump. He wants to win the Nobel Prize and be the first president in 100 years to expand American territory. The idea that you win for a team—a nation, its influence, its ideals, or the Western alliance—comes second, if at all. To be sure, Trump wants to make America great—but it’s hard to see him caring much if he doesn’t get the credit.
He’s blind to American global strategy since World War I—a strategy based on the idea that our alliances strengthen us. Our allies may be smaller, poorer, and weaker than we are. In the decades after World War II, they inevitably were—and Trump is not wrong to argue for some rebalancing. It is time for Europe to spend more on its defense, and most European leaders are moving in that direction. But even with these imbalances, we and our allies are stronger together, and it’s a two-way street—we need them as much as they need us..
The second flashpoint is what Trump hopes to gain in Ukraine and Europe. He often talks about saving lives in Ukraine. “I just want to see people stop being killed,” he told reporters in the Oval Office after his call with Vladimir Putin—and maybe he does. But he has always measured success in money—in this case, the value of Ukraine’s rare earth reserves. He makes no effort to pretend otherwise. “I want the equivalent, like $500 billion of rare earth,” he said on Fox News early last week. “Otherwise, we’re stupid . . . . we have to get something.”
Contrast Trump’s goals and Biden’s. The former president made mistakes in Ukraine. Many Ukrainians believe his caution is why Russia has the upper hand. But his $120 billion in U.S. aid ensured Ukraine’s survival, and his rationale was beyond reproach—a shining tribute to America’s long-cherished ideals. “It’s about standing for what we believe in,” Biden said in February 2022, “[for] the right of people to determine their own futures, for the principle that a country can’t change its neighbor’s borders by force.” Valuable as the rare earth metals may be, there is no contest.
The third and final flashpoint for Europe: Trump’s grasp of the threat. We’ll never know what he thinks of Putin. In February 2022, he described the invasion of Ukraine as a stroke of “genius.” And still today, he seems enamored not only of Putin’s strength but also of the former KGB operative’s carefully cultivated image as manly and cunning. But much more important and potentially damaging, Trump seems blind to Putin’s animosity toward the West.
The Russian leader is convinced that “arrogant Western elites” are behind the war in Ukraine and that Western power is a threat, and he has repeatedly warned that Moscow will fight back as need be, including with nuclear weapons. Perhaps Trump dismisses this as rhetoric. But what about Moscow’s so-called “gray war” in Europe—bombings, arson attacks, attempted assassinations, and more, growing ever more frequent and dangerous? Does Trump believe this aggression will end if there is a ceasefire in Ukraine? Few Europeans do.
Putin plays Trump shamelessly, laying on the flattery and favors. After the election, he hailed Trump as a “real man” for getting up after the first assassination attempt. More recently, the Russian leader has been parroting the campaign boast that there would be no war in Ukraine if Trump had been president. And then this month came the release of long-imprisoned American teacher Marc Fogel, a move that Moscow rightly calculated would trigger a phone call from the White House.
Trump is obviously prey to flattery, a vanity made worse because he doesn’t get what’s most dangerous about Putin: the Russian strongman’s open disregard for the will of other countries—for Ukraine’s right to exist and choose its path, joining NATO and escaping Russia’s sphere of influence. Trump appears to see nothing wrong with this. He sympathizes with Moscow’s insistence that Ukraine be barred from NATO. And just as Putin believes strategic interests give him a right to Ukrainian territory, Trump believes he has a right to Greenland, Panama, and Canada—territories he says are of vital strategic importance.
Bottom line: Trump has no basis for objecting to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The only difference, so far, between Putin in Ukraine and Trump in Greenland and Panama is the leverage Trump is brandishing—money and threats rather than naked force.
What Trump forgets is that China is watching. The outcome in Ukraine will color its stance toward Taiwan and, more broadly, the West—and sadly, it isn’t hard to guess the lessons Beijing is taking away as it looks on a now gravely weakened Western alliance.
