Incoming President Trump and the Russia-Ukraine War

"If Trump wins, there will be an early push for a peace settlement. He will not meet all Russia's demands, but Russia may still provisionally accept, in the hope that Ukraine (and Poland) will reject them, and Trump will then abandon Ukraine,” says Anatol Lieven, head of the Quincy Institute’s Eurasia program.

“We will then have to see whether Trump and his administration have the skill and stamina to conduct a complicated and fraught negotiating process.”¹ [my emphasis]

When it comes to evaluating the Trump II Administration’s approach to the Russia-Ukraine War, my first reference point is the old saying, “It’s easier to get into a war than to get out of one.”

Ironically, Lyndon Johnson was very much aware of that fact. But he wound up blundering into the Vietnam War that destroyed his Presidency and put Richard Nixon in the White House anyway. But he understood that wars are incredibly messy. Unlike the neocon fantasists in the 2000s who were babbling about how a regime-change war in Iraq would be a “cakewalk,” LBJ knew that wars were devilishly complicated. In a call with McGeorge Bundy on May 27, 1964 he said:

I will tell you the more, I just stayed awake last night thinking of this thing, and the more that I think of it I don’t know what in the hell, it looks like to me that we’re getting into another Korea. It just worries the hell out of me. I don’t see what we can ever hope to get out of there with once we’re committed. I believe the Chinese Communists are coming into it. I don’t think that we can fight them 10,000 miles away from home and ever get anywhere in that area. I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out. And it’s just the biggest damn mess that I ever saw.

Bundy: It is an awful mess.

Johnson: And we just got to think about it. Iʼm looking at this Sergeant of mine this morning and heʼs got 6 little old kids over there, and heʼs getting out my things, and bringing me in my night reading, and all that kind of stuff, and I just thought about ordering all those kids in there. And what in the hell am I ordering them out there for? What in the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is Laos worth to me? What is it worth to this country? Weʼve got a treaty but hell, everybody else has got a treaty out there, and theyʼre not doing a thing about it.²

That last line is also particularly memorable. (Hail, boy, ever’body has a treaty!)

This was a couple of months before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which prompted Johnson to make the fatal plunge into a much larger direct US involvement.

But despite his awareness of the risks, he wound up plunging ahead anyway.

In February of 2024, Matthew Burrows assessed the situation in the Ukraine War this way:

The Russo-Ukrainian War risks following the usual pattern of other interstate conflicts since 1946: absent the end of fighting during the first year, conventional wars last over a decade on average. [A truly grim observation!] The most likely endings are a frozen conflict or cease-fire potentially sooner than a decade, and perhaps, over time, a negotiated armistice. Peace treaties have become rare for all interstate wars since 1950. The worst case would be if the Russo-Ukrainian conflict turns into a dress rehearsal for a broader East-West war involving the U.S. and China. Although that outcome is currently far less likely than a frozen conflict or cease-fire, it cannot be ruled out in a world where the major powers are increasingly divided. …

Achieving a successful armistice to stop the Ukraine War would take many months if not years. At the moment, Russia and Ukraine are far from seriously considering an end to the fighting. [This certainly appears to be true in November of 2024, as well.] Putin is feeling confident; the Russian economy is doing well despite sanctions; and Ukraine’s poor counteroffensive might suggest to Putin that Russia could be successful in conquering more territory in the four oblasts — Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia — that the Kremlin has formally annexed. Putin has recently called on the U.S. to begin peace talks that would “cede” Ukrainian territory to Russia — a demand that might be accepted by a Trump presidency but would most likely be rejected by Ukraine and most NATO members.³ [my emphasis]

The triumphalist Western advocates of unlimited aid to Ukraine don’t want to hear how complicated it is for the US and the EU countries to arrange some kind of end to the war. Because many of them imagine this to be a new version of “Afghanistan,” i.e., the idea that supporting a years-long guerilla war against the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan by Islamic jihadist – pardon me, by “brave Mujahadeen freedom fighters” - brought down the Soviet Union. In this fantasy of the past, the USSR becoming a petrostate with all the complications that brought, the expense of maintaining the “Eastern bloc” countries, and the challenge of modernizing the economy while attempting a democratizing political transformation had little or nothing to do with it. Nah, those were just incidental factoids. The US financing a war for Afghans to die fighting against the Rooskies – that was the trick!

Competing real-world interests

Ukraine itself, of course, has very immediate and pressing national interests at stake. They need to stop the war. Large portions of their national territory is under Russian control, some of it formally annexed by Russia. (Annexations not recognized in international law.) The war is basically in a stalemate in a standoff depending on artillery battles. Russia has more artillery shells and the domestic capacity to produce lots more. Meanwhile, the US and Europe are running low on artillery shells due to how much they have delivered to Ukraine.

And Russia has far more personnel resources than Ukraine, also a critical factor in what is essentially a war of attrition. By available measures, the war is very popular in Russia. Aside from the bizarre Wagner Group rebellion led by the since-deceased Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2023, there are no significant political opposition evident, although there has been evidence of a significant amount of draft evasion.

Russia claims to see Ukraine as critical to its national security. In particular, it claims to view Ukraine’s membership in NATO as a major security threat, something about which Vladimir Putin has been publicly and explicitly clear since 2007. Ukraine is a sovereign country. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the much bigger one of 2022 are clear violations of international law.

But from the debates over the first post-1989 eastward expansion of NATO beyond the newly-unified Germany, international-relations “realists” included George Kennan warned that as a very practical matter, Russian governments of any composition would see this as a security threat. The more so the closer the NATO boundaries came to Russia. Kaarel Piirimäe has recently observed, “Curiously, long after the man’s passing, the question about the fallacy or rightness of ‘Kennanism’ seems to be as pertinent today as it was more than sixty years ago.”⁴

Kennan expected that NATO expansion would give rise to undemocratic and anti-Western forces in Russia and would lead to another Cold War, but was certain that official Washington would persist. He was right: it proved easy for Clinton to ignore not only Kennan, … but, more remarkably, the majority of the U.S. foreign policy and scholarly establishments.

There are always roads not taken. Some of them more consequential than others.

Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer even advised Ukraine at the time of its post-Soviet independence that giving up the nuclear weapons stationed on their territory was a risky security move. But US policymakers in particular were convinced that the End of History had arrived, and we didn’t need to pay such close attention to the tacky pragmatic considerations that the grumpy realists warned about.

What would a real diplomatic solution look like?

One (theoretical) possibility is that Russia would agree to withdraw from all of Ukraine’s territory and fund the reconstruction of Ukraine. This is unlikely to happen in this dimension. At least not for a long time and only with major changes inside Russia. Short version: This ain’t happening.

Another plausible solution might be, for instance, some kind of permanent ceasefire with Ukrainian territory currently occupied by Russia (except for Crimea) being somehow demilitarized under international supervision and the status of Crimea being kicked down the road to some future round of negotiations. Russia wouldn’t pay reparations but would undertake comprehensive de-landmining operations in the areas it occupied. And all Ukrainian refugees in Russia including those taken as children would have the option to return to Ukraine. This would be an incredibly complicated diplomatic negotiation to reach such a solution. It is unimaginable based on Donald Trump’s track record that his Administration could ever negotiate such a solution.

Given the right combination of political pressure internally and externally, and also of bribes of some kind to Trump or his family businesses by interested players – this is basically what people mean when they say politely that Trump is “transactional” in his approach to foreign policy – the following is at least conceivable: a Korean-style indefinite military armistice which leaves Ukraine as a rump state with the currently Russian-occupied territories being run by Russia indefinitely. And rump-Ukraine not as a member of NATO, not even as a de facto one.

But even the latter would be a very complex solution with massive diplomatic implications worldwide. And that would require the Russians to be confident they could rely on the unpredictable Trump to hold up his end of whatever bargain was made.

John Feffer in 2023 looked at the “Korean” option for Ukraine:

[T]he [Korean] armistice ended three years of terrible bloodletting. It created an international mechanism to keep the two warring sides from violating the terms of the agreement. And it has proven quite durable, having lasted for seven decades.

But the armistice also didn’t officially end the Korean War. It marked what was supposed to be a temporary truce. Both sides hoped for the reunification of the peninsula, though they obviously had different visions of what that reunification would look like. Nor has the armistice given way to a more durable peace.

The armistice redrew a line through the Korean peninsula that U.S. military officials initially established at the Potsdam conference in 1945 as World War II was coming to an end. That line runs not only through Korean territory but also through Korean families, Korean culture, Korean language, and one way or another the souls of every Korean person wherever they might live.

Until the 1970s, the armistice divided two relatively similar countries. ... But then South Korea struck off in a different direction and became a much more prosperous country, with democratic institutions and a culture open to the world. Reunification seemed structurally feasible 50 years ago, despite the obvious difference in ruling ideologies. Today, the DMZ created by the armistice separates two vastly different worlds.

The armistice saved lives. But it has also institutionalized a deeply hurtful division.⁵ [my emphasis]

The very fact that the armistice was based on a line established among the Second World War allies at Potsdam – just like the demarcation lines between West and East Germany - gave that solution an international political and legal credibility that any such settlement for Ukraine reached by a Trump Administration is ever likely to have. At least not on this plane of existence.

John Lough at Chatham House outlines Putin’s conditions for a settlement as including the following: (1) demilitarization of Ukraine; (2) Ukraine must be a neutral country; (3) acceptance of Russian annexation of Crimea and the two eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk; (4) an end to Western sanctions against Russia.⁶

And he observes:

Trump might readily agree to these terms. But to do so without evidence of reciprocal flexibility by Putin will expose him to accusations of naivety and weakness as a negotiator.

Trump could easily brush aside claims that he was outsmarted by Putin. But a charge that he was a weak negotiator would offend his vanity and damage his image in the view of Chinese policymakers – who will be watching closely.

It is fair to assume that Trump will want to avoid this perception since he has worked hard to create the impression that China, Iran and others should continue to fear him in his second term.

Sveto Yefimenko explains the limits on the the prospect for Trump making a Ukraine peace settlement in light of the NATO countries’ unwillingness to back away from their foolish formal declaration in 2008 that both Ukraine and Georgia would someday become NATO members. Ukraine’s government itself, of course, would have to be part of a peace settlement.

Trump’s new administration has yet to reckon with a timeworn international relations concept: the dreaded commitment problem.

The problem goes like this: when negotiating, say, the terms of a peace treaty, states have a difficult time making credible promises not to use force in the future because the state whose power is ascendant will have a powerful incentive to renege on the treaty and grab more land later on. Consider the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine agreed to give up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the United States, and the UK. A weak post-Soviet Russia, swept up in the friendly mood of the 1990s, gave security assurances to Ukraine.

Two decades later, a resurgent Russia annexed the strategically valuable Crimean peninsula. Eight years later, it launched a full-scale attack on a country whose sovereignty and territorial integrity it had once promised to respect.

The lesson for Ukraine is bitterly clear: Russian security guarantees cannot be trusted. This time around, it is not clear who would guarantee Kyiv’s security following a possible peace deal, especially if Moscow continues to find NATO troops on Ukrainian soil to be unacceptable.⁷ [my emphasis]

We’ll see what Trump can deliver. Hint: Don’t hold your breath for a peace settlement.

From Deutsche Welle English⁸:

1. Vlahos, Kelley Beaucar (2024): Ukraine War well beyond Trump-Harris election. Responsible Statecraft 11/05/2024. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/harris-trump-election-ukraine/> (Accessed: 2024-14-11).

2. Telephone Conversation Between President Johnson and the Presidentʼs Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy). State Department Office of the Historian. <https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v27/d53> (Accessed: 2024-14-11). In a call of this nature, one should not that this was a focused, non-public interchange between the President and a key advisor. Johnson was sounding out Bundy’s reactions to his formulations, not composing the text for a policy statement or a historical essay.

3. Burrows, Mathew (2024): Ending the War in Ukraine: Harder Than It Seems. Stimson Center 02/22/2024. <https://www.stimson.org/2024/ending-the-war-in-ukraine-harder-than-it-seems/> (Accessed: 2024-14-11).

4. Piirimäe, Kaarel (2024): ‘Geopolitics of Sympathy’: George F. Kennan and NATO Enlargement. Diplomacy & Statecraft 35:1, 182-205. <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/09592296.2024.2303860?needAccess=true> (Accessed: 2024-14-11).

5. Feffer, John (2023): Korean Armistice, Ukrainian Ceasefire. Foreign Policy in Focus 08/16/2023. <https://fpif.org/korean-armistice-ukrainian-ceasefire/> (Accessed: 2024-14-11).

6. Lough, John (2024): Can Trump do a deal with Putin on Ukraine? Chatham House 11/12/2024. <https://www.chathamhouse.org/2024/11/can-trump-do-deal-putin-ukraine>  (Accessed: 2024-14-11).

7. Yefimenko, Sveto (2024) What Trump’s Reelection Means for Russia. Foreign Policy in Focus 08/16/2023. <https://fpif.org/what-trumps-reelection-means-for-russia/> (Accessed: 2024-14-11).

8. How Trump's personnel choices could affect the war in Ukraine. DW News YouTube channel 11/12/2024. (Accessed: 2024-14-11).