For reasons of culture and history, Russians respect strength. They despise weakness and enjoy devouring those who offer it.
President-elect Donald Trump prizes himself as an artist of effective negotiation. Trump’s negotiations delivered some dividends in his first term. The former president transitioned U.S.-North Korean relations from the precipice of war to an eccentric but welcome detente. Trump reached a major trade deal between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Trump secured increased defense spending commitments from NATO allies and financial burden-sharing agreements from South Korea.
The problem is that the pre-eminent foreign policy negotiation Trump wants to pursue in his second term will be far more complex than any that he faced in his first term. Namely, negotiations to resolve the war in Ukraine. A negotiated peace to this conflict will be possible only if Trump pursues an accord of viable sustainability rather than social media saleability. Getting such a peace will require Trump to do two things.
First, he will have to sideline Viktor Orban. Until today, the Hungarian Prime Minister has wooed the former president with sweet whispers of Trump’s genius, claims of Putin’s easy amenability, and promises that Trump can end the war by cutting off Ukraine’s access to arms. But what Trump has yet to realize is that Orban is an American enemy who is only very thinly camouflaged in allied clothing. Ultimately, Orban is a political prostitute for Xi Jinping and a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin. His advice is antithetical to U.S. interests and Ukraine’s survival as a democratic state.
That Ukrainian factor leads to the second and most predominant concern vis-à-vis prospective peace negotiations. Any viable peace will require Trump not simply to counter Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s more unrealistic expectations. It will also require him to impose functional pressure on Russia to enter into serious negotiations. If Putin believes that he can spin Trump with promises to freeze the conflict in return for speedy sanctions relief, he will do so to a very negative effect. Putin will rest and reconstitute his military, invent a Ukrainian affront, and then re-invade when the time is right. Perhaps four years from now. Perhaps six years from now. Or perhaps two years from now.
However, if Trump insists on Western security commitments for Ukraine as part of any peace accord, a durable peace is possible. France, the U.K., and Poland have shown signs they would offer support for such an arrangement. And such an arrangement would be crucial because Russia is not going to re-invade Ukraine if it knows the West will join that future fight.
Of course, navigating this process won’t be easy. Such an arrangement would likely require at least a tripwire European force on Ukrainian soil with U.S. pledges of supporting reinforcement. It would also require continued sanctions on Russia to ensure it carried out basic protocols under any deal. If Putin believes he has free rein to secure a peace that is manifestly in his favor, Ukraine will keep fighting. It will do so because its very existence will be on the line. Ukraine will do so for the very same reason as the Baltic States and Poland joined NATO: because it knows that the Russian security elite believes Ukraine ultimately belongs to Russia.
In dealing with Putin, Trump will have to learn from the utter failure of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel in her Minsk II peace accord between Kyiv and Moscow. The lesson is that trusting Putin at his word without mechanisms to hold him to his word is about as healthy a course of action as jumping into a blood-filled river infested with bull sharks. Fortunately, Trump has a successful case study from his first term to guide him. He need only look at his withdrawal, along with NATO support, from the Intermediate Forces Nuclear Treaty in response to unrepentant Russian breaches of that treaty.
This means that Trump must employ American leverage to secure a viable peace accord. If Trump acts in the vein of his 2017 sanctioning of the Nord Stream II pipeline and threatens to sanction major as-yet shielded arterial nodes of the Russian economy (such as its sanctions evading energy exports and access to global financial markets), Putin will take notice. If Putin keeps playing negotiating games and Trump, in reply, provides Ukraine with weapons systems that the Biden administration has been unwilling to provide, Trump will allow Ukraine to impose costs on Putin that will force him into more serious negotiations. Crucially, if Trump sanctions Chinese manufacturers and banking institutions at scale, Xi Jinping will tell Putin to cut a deal or risk losing Beijing’s economic lifeline. Europe will have to at least match this American support if such a pressure campaign is to succeed. But it can succeed.
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The key question, then, is whether Trump is serious about reaching a Nobel Prize-worthy art-of-peace deal on the Ukrainian war. Or, whether he is interested merely in congratulating himself on X and Truth Social.
History will reward the former choice. The latter choice will turn Trump into Russia’s most valued useful idiot and help to disintegrate the Western security structure.