Recent peace talks between the United States and Ukraine at Mar-a-Lago went very well, according to President Donald Trump. The problem is that the two countries are not supposed to be in conflict. Under the Biden administration, after Russian leader Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine for the second time in 2022 (the first being in 2014, when the Russians snatched Crimea and parts of the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine), Joe Biden gave Ukraine wholehearted U.S. support by supplying substantial military and economic aid, with U.S. NATO allies following suit.
When Trump took office a second time, he essentially changed sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. He drastically cut U.S. aid to Ukraine and began bullying Ukraine to make concessions to Putin to get a peace deal favoring Russia–including concocting with Moscow a 20-point plan whereby Ukraine would give up even more of its territory than Russia has taken militarily. Recently, Trump even outlandishly said that “Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed.”
Gradually reducing American aid to Ukraine and transferring the war funding to wealthy Europeans would have been a defensible policy. The Europeans, being geographically closer to both Russia and Ukraine, have always had much more at stake in terms of security in the conflict than has the United States. And if the Europeans did not have certain weapons that Ukraine desperately needed, the United States could have sold them to the Europeans, and they could have sent them on to Ukraine. Such a more indirect U.S. policy was probably warranted. It would have lessened the chance of escalation to direct war between the two countries with the largest and most capable nuclear arsenals on the planet.
Yet Trump went beyond that distancing policy, seemingly aiming to weirdly appease Putin by concocting a twenty-point peace plan that was embarrassingly favorable to Russia and then trying to put the screws to Ukrainian leader Zelensky to sign on board. Pulling the rug out from under a friendly country in a seeming attempt to win a Nobel Peace Prize was underhanded, especially when Trump has little chance of winning one, given that he has attacked Venezuela; Iran; Yemen; people and groups in Nigeria, Iraq, and Syria–in addition to threatening Mexico, Colombia, Panama, Greenland, and Canada (at least economically). And Zelensky should remember the broken security guarantees that Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States made in Budapest at the end of the Cold War to get Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, thereby being leery of any such guarantees that Trump promises to get him to sign a one-sided peace deal.
Across past changes from Democratic to Republican administration and vice versa, there has been some continuity in U.S. foreign policy. And although Biden’s “all-in” policy was a bit “over-the-top”—especially with the ever-growing U.S. debt topping both $38 billion and 100 percent of GDP—completely selling out Ukraine was unneeded and shameful.
Putin thinks he is winning the war and will likely reject any peace settlement at this time; Trump should not be blinded to this reality, give up his weird affinity for Putin, and quit bullying Zelensky to make a disadvantageous and unsustainable peace agreement.