The Trump administration’s fast-track plan to end Russia’s war against Ukraine has potential and had been gaining traction, but the administration risks undermining its own approach amid chaotic inconsistencies. These inconsistencies partly reflect President Donald Trump’s personalized and ad hoc decision-making process and the confusion to which most new U.S. administrations are prone. But the different messages — sometimes pushing against Russia but more recently attacking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and even reflecting Russian talking points — suggest strategic differences within the administration, roughly between “peace through strength” versus “peace through great power appeasement,” i.e., ceding Ukraine to a Russian sphere of domination.
The Trump administration started strong. After his inauguration, Trump warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that the United States was prepared to increase pressure on Russia if it did not join efforts to end the war. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sketched out the initial and more positive Trump plan in remarks to counterparts in the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels on Feb. 12. The gist of that had been clear for months: a ceasefire roughly along the current frontline, with security arrangements for Ukraine, principally involving European troops.
Hegseth’s remarks were sounder substantively than initial criticism suggested. He called restoration of Ukraine’s internationally-recognized borders of 1997 “unrealistic” but did not suggest that the United States would recognize Russia’s occupation or push Ukraine to do so; he accurately asserted that Ukraine’s NATO membership is not a “realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement,” i.e., negotiated with Russia, but did not take Ukraine’s NATO membership off the table; and while being explicit that the United States would not deploy troops to Ukraine, he left open the possibility of backing European forces in other, critical ways, such as U.S. intelligence, logistics, and, if needed, air power.
This approach could work if the U.S. resists recognition of Russia’s illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory, if it keeps NATO membership for Ukraine on the table, and, especially, if the United States and Europe can work out details of U.S. military support for European military forces inside Ukraine. A robust, even ad hoc, ceasefire that preserves “free” Ukraine independent from Russian occupation, this era’s version of West Germany, could become a strategic defeat for Putin and success for Ukraine, Europe, and the free world.
Europe taking more responsibility is critical substantively and is a key political demand from the Trump administration. And it seemed to be working. The Trump administration has pressed European allies to specify what they are willing to provide to support Ukraine. This blunt approach may be intended to push the Europeans to “put up or shut up.” Some Europeans at least seem to be getting closer to “putting up.” NATO and EU officials with whom I met in Brussels following Hegseth’s speech were thinking seriously about how a European force inside Ukraine could be structured and led. British Prime Minister Keith Starmer essentially accepted the U.S. challenge and is traveling to Washington to flesh it out. French President Emmanuel Macron, who has been forward-leaning on European forces in Ukraine, is also bound for Washington. The French and British are reportedly considering a force of 30,000 to back up the Ukrainians militarily, including through air defense and protection of critical infrastructure. This represents fast movement toward a commitment that seemed fantasy a few months ago.
An Adequate Start…And Then…
The first round of U.S.-Russian talks in Saudi Arabia Feb. 18 seemed like an adequate start: no breakthrough but the beginning of a process. A second round may be held later in February. The Trump administration’s approach — one track of talking to the Russians about improved relations if their war against Ukraine ended and the other track of mobilizing direct military support for Ukraine, a bold move that would strengthen the Ukrainian position — was arguably advancing. It could be the basis for a successful Trump stare-down of Putin over Ukraine should they meet: a potential win.
But things have gone sideways since.
The U.S. administration suddenly demanded preferential access to Ukrainian resources and revenue from its ports. Trump tends to determine U.S. national interests in terms of access to resources, and some U.S.-Ukrainian arrangement to the advantage of both sides could probably be worked out. But the initial U.S. demands were reportedly one-sided and presented in a way that any sovereign government would find hard to accept. The Ukrainians resisted the initial U.S. push and Trump then launched harsh, public attacks on Zelenskyy, joined by Trump advisor Elon Musk blaming Zelenskyy for the war and calling him a “dictator.” Subsequently, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the U.S. economic offer in much more balanced terms, and U.S.-Ukrainian talks on a deal are continuing. But at best, the messaging has been a distraction when the United States and Ukraine need to be pushing the Russians toward a reasonable settlement.
Trump has also pushed the Ukrainians to hold presidential elections as a precondition for negotiations, echoing a Russian demand and enabling a Russian tactic of stringing out negotiations and setting terms to its advantage. The United States has prepared its own draft U.N. General Assembly resolution that is far weaker than anything the U.S. has supported in the past and seems worded to curry favor with the Kremlin. U.S. conservatives used to make a meal of efforts to advance negotiations with Moscow through unilateral concessions and fatuous efforts to show goodwill.
These latest moves by the Trump administration risk weakening or even undermining its own declared objectives in Ukraine, with the United States quarreling with Ukraine’s leaders to the benefit of the Kremlin and to the alarm of the European allies, even as the United States is making a major request of them for military support for Ukraine.
The Trump administration’s policy swings could be tactical or temporary, reflecting Trump’s tendency to keep his friends and adversaries off balance by unpredictable changes of direction. Trump’s slamming of Zelenskyy could reflect his habitual anger when challenged, as Zelenskyy did in rejecting the initial proposal on Ukrainian resource exploitation. Trump could be seeking to pressure Zelenskyy to secure his swift acceptance of a U.S.-Russia peace plan over Ukraine.
Internal Strategic Split?
The Trump administration’s inconsistency on Ukraine may also reflect a strategic split within the administration. Some, more traditional or Reaganite Republicans, may still hold that the United States is better served by acting with its traditional allies with whom it shares common values to contend with its adversaries, a “free world strategy” directed at Russia, China, and Iran. Others may prefer the United States cut deals with autocratic powers as a preferred course. That could be called some version of realism, but it might also be termed a “1984 strategy” from George Orwell’s dystopian novel in which Oceana (the U.S. and the U.K.), Eurasia (Russia), and East Asia (China) divide up or fight over the rest of the world.
A U.S. strategy rooted in support for the free world has deep roots. From its emergence as a world power at the end of the 19th century, the United States opposed the closed European empires of the time. In abundant self-confidence, the crafters of this strategy assumed that U.S. Yankee ingenuity would prevail in a fair playing field and that U.S. values would follow. The United States could shape the world in its own, democratic, image and get rich in the process.
This strategy was articulated in part by John Hay, secretary of state to Presidents William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, through his “Open Door policy” launched in 1899 and 1900, opposing European imperial carve up of China; McKinley’s foreign policy wasn’t only territorial acquisition. This U.S. approach, new for great powers, was expanded by President Woodrow Wilson in his “14 Points” speech to Congress in January 1918. It was expressed again by President Franklin Roosevelt in the “Atlantic Charter” of 1941 that he issued with Winston Churchill and finally put into practice as a cornerstone of the post-1945 order that President Harry Truman helped establish.
This free world strategy was neither clueless “idealism” nor empty posturing. Notwithstanding the many inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and blunders of U.S. foreign policy in the 20th and 21st centuries, including long wars in the Middle East, the order that the United States built and championed after 1945 brought the longest period of general peace in Europe since Roman times and decades of global prosperity around the world. For all the need to fix accumulated problems of trade, inadequate European security contributions, and more, the world the United States set in order after 1945 looks far better than the world from 1914-1945.
Values-Based Order From U.S. Origins
U.S. adherence to a value-based free world order is derived from the unusual origins of the American nation. The United States is not an ethno-state, with identity rooted in shared blood but, as Abraham Lincoln put it in his Gettysburg Address in 1863, “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Moreover, according to Lincoln, that “abstract truth [of the Declaration of Independence is] applicable to all men and all times…a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” The foundational principles of the United States are universal or, one might say, global.
This rough sense of equality, of U.S. national identity derived through universal, abstract values, informed the way in which the United States brought its new-found power to the world. Because the United States was founded on a principle of equality with universal application, it cannot easily dispense with such a principle in its conduct in the world.
There are other views of the best U.S. strategy, including one rooted in what the great historian Walter Russell Mead has termed the Jacksonian tradition, named after President Andrew Jackson. That tradition calls for a narrow conception of U.S. national interests as hard material interests, separate from abstract values. At its best, this can be a realist’s corrective to grandiosity in foreign policy. At its worst, it can lead to the cutting of bad deals with tyrants in the name of hard interests or expediency, a faux version of realism, such as was urged by isolationists prior to Pearl Harbor, who thought the United States should abandon the U.K. and cut a deal with Hitler.
The debate within the Trump administration over Ukraine policy may reflect a longstanding fight between these foreign policy traditions. There is a lot at stake. If the administration holds to its own, best positions about Ukraine and seeks peace through strength, it could succeed in ending Russia’s war on Ukraine on terms favorable for Ukraine, Europe, transatlantic security, and the free world. In the alternative, to the dismay of its friends and delight of its adversaries, the United States could stoop to a dirty deal with a dictator, weakening itself in the process.