Exit Strategy – The Dispatch

I’m not betting heavily on the “aligned with Europe” outcome, though, as it would contradict the lesson of the president’s meeting with Vladimir Putin last week. Trump desperately wants to extricate the United States from the war and will grasp at any excuse to do so.

I understand why online criticism in the hours after the Alaska summit zeroed in on how pitifully excited he seemed that Putin agreed with him that the 2020 U.S. election had been “rigged.” Imagine having your narcissism flattered that shamelessly by a negotiating partner—one who’s been known to rig an election or two himself—and sharing it credulously with the American people, as if it proved anything except what a sucker you are.

But pandering to the president about election rigging wasn’t the most effective mind game that Putin played with him. The smartest thing he did came during the brief press conference that the two held after their meeting, when the Russian affirmed Trump’s longstanding boast that the war wouldn’t have happened if he were still in the White House in 2022.

That was cunning, and not just for how it stroked the president’s strongman ego. It reminded Trump that he has no personal stake in the outcome of this conflict. He can wash his hands of Joe Biden’s “stupid war” at any time.

Putin offered Trump an exit strategy. And Trump really wants to take it.

“I had a great meeting in Alaska on Biden’s stupid War, a war that should have never happened!!!,” the president Truth-ed on Sunday.

He made the same point this spring, before his “situationship” with Putin turned rocky. “The War between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s war, not mine,” Trump wrote on social media in April. “I just got here, and for four years during my term, had no problem in preventing it from happening.”

April was a moment of high frustration for the White House. Despite Trump’s bragging during the campaign that he’d broker a peace deal lickety split, negotiations at the time were going nowhere. He reportedly considered washing his hands of the whole business. “If either side continues to block a deal,” the president supposedly told deputies, “we’re just going to say, ‘You’re foolish, you’re fools, you’re horrible people,’ and we’re going to just take a pass.”

His secretary of state echoed the point publicly. “If it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we need to move on,” Marco Rubio told reporters on April 18. “We need to determine very quickly now, and I’m talking about a matter of days, whether or not this is doable.”

If you knew nothing about the war, threats like that might lead you to believe that Russia and Ukraine have similar relationships with the United States and would suffer equally if America withdrew. If you knew a little about the war, enough to understand that Ukraine’s survival depends on weapons from the U.S., you might infer from Rubio’s warning that the Ukrainians had been the unreasonable party in opposing a compromise.

Neither is true, of course. Russia has been the chief obstacle to peace, resisting all U.S. pleas for a ceasefire, yet Ukraine alone stands to suffer if America grows exasperated with Russia’s resistance to a deal and walks away.

I suspect Putin came to Alaska hoping to exploit that perverse “logic,” impressing upon Trump that the peace-at-all-costs he craves depends on Russia getting virtually everything it wants while conceding next to nothing. Possibly the president would agree to those terms, having been convinced that nothing less will ever get Putin to “yes,” or possibly he would conclude that peace is impossible and decide that America has better things to do than remain tangled up in a conflict in which the president has no interest. To Russia, either outcome would have been fine. No matter which option Trump chose, Moscow would benefit.

As of Monday morning, he appeared to have chosen … both. He spent the weekend leaning on Ukraine to accept Russia’s terms and hinted that there isn’t much of a role in all this left for the United States to play. His approach to pressuring Putin reminded me of the joke from The Simpsons: He tried nothing, and now he’s all out of ideas.

The president went to Alaska allied with Volodymyr Zelensky in believing that a ceasefire should precede peace negotiations and that Russia should be sanctioned if it refuses to agree to one. He left Alaska allied with Putin in believing that the war should continue while the two sides negotiate, giving the Russians time to grab more territory as talks proceed, and no timetable for sanctions. By Sunday, Trump was actively broadcasting Kremlin demands: “No getting back Obama-given Crimea (12 years ago, without a shot being fired!), and NO GOING INTO NATO BY UKRAINE,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social.

According to a Ukrainian intelligence source who spoke to The Economist, U.S. officials have become “unbelievably aggressive” in pressuring Zelensky to cede land. But which land? What Putin wants most is Donetsk, a province his army has spent more than a decade trying to take by force. It’s an industrial center and the most heavily fortified part of the front line, a defensive buffer between the war in the east and the rest of the country. The Ukrainians realistically can’t forfeit it.

Instead of placing the onus on Russia to reduce its demands by insisting that key Ukrainian positions like Donetsk are non-negotiable, though, Trump came away from the summit placing the onus on the Ukrainians to start making concessions—and fast. “President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight,” he wrote on Monday. When asked by Fox News what advice he would give the Ukrainians, he was blunt: “Make a deal. Russia is a very big power, and they’re not.”

“Now it is really up to President Zelensky to get it done,” he said during the same interview, which sure sounds like he’s preparing to extricate himself from this process.

Putin recognized that Trump has no ideological commitment to Ukraine or Europe and cares only about peace qua peace, on any terms, in order to burnish his “dealmaker” credentials. To the president, Ukraine agreeing to everything Russia wants—i.e., surrendering—isn’t just acceptable, it’s preferable insofar as it would bring the war to the quickest possible conclusion. And since the U.S. has leverage over Kyiv and not very much over Moscow, applying pressure to Zelensky instead of to Putin seemed to him like the sensible way to make that happen.

Peace on Russia’s terms is Trump’s exit strategy from “Biden’s stupid war.” That’s what Putin offered, and the president, in his haste to exit, was eager to relay those terms to Zelensky with a clear insinuation that he should accept. Whenever he starts reminding the world that his predecessor got the U.S. into this mess, he’s looking for an escape hatch and blaming Biden preemptively for his failure to broker a deal.

No wonder, then, that the leaders of Europe scrambled to put together the most hastily arranged transatlantic summit in history today in Washington. Their task is nothing less than persuading Trump that the U.S. isn’t supposed to be a “neutral party” between Russia and Ukraine. Either America has a commitment to Europe’s security or it doesn’t.

The Europeans have been trying to persuade him of that all year.

The last time Zelensky came to Washington, you may recall, he was supposed to sign a deal with the president granting the U.S. a stake in Ukraine’s mineral reserves. (The deal wasn’t agreed to at the time due to, uh, events, but was eventually approved later.) That was a way to keep America invested in Ukrainian sovereignty—literally. If protecting Western liberalism from Russian authoritarianism isn’t reason enough to make the White House prefer Kyiv in the conflict, presumably some ore deposits would.

Later, at their annual summit in June, NATO nations announced plans to boost members’ defense spending as a share of GDP from the traditional 2 percent benchmark to 5 percent. That impressed the president, who’d been after them for years to stop free-riding on American military muscle and meet their obligations under the treaty. “I left here saying that these people really love their countries,” he told reporters after the summit, saying of NATO, “It’s not a rip-off.”

Since 2022, as a percentage of gross domestic product, many European nations have outdone the U.S. in providing support to Ukraine against Russia. And going forward, the Ukrainian war effort will be partly funded by European outlays to American defense contractors.

The consistent message in all of this is we’re doing our part. Ukraine and its European allies are willing to make material sacrifices to ensure that the United States remains committed to Europe’s defense. If that’s what it takes to keep an “America First” president on their side for the long haul (or at least until they rebuild their own defense capabilities), that’s what they’ll do.

The aftermath of Trump’s Alaska summit raised the frightening possibility that it’s still not enough. Our otherwise transactional president, whom the Europeans have been trying to buy off, won’t stay bought. He really, really doesn’t want to commit to long-term antagonism toward Russia on behalf of some rinky-dink country he doesn’t care about, even if the U.S. is getting richer from it. And his fellow travelers on the postliberal right don’t want to commit to it for ideological reasons, because they’re eager to “pivot to Asia” to pursue their pretend crusade against Chinese totalitarianism.

So we have a conundrum: The thing that Zelensky and the Europeans most want is the thing that the president and his supporters are most reluctant to give. To justify making painful territorial concessions, Ukraine needs a commitment from the U.S. and/or other NATO members to fight on its side against a future Russian invasion. Trump isn’t going to do that.

Or is he? The Wall Street Journal reported this on Saturday:

President Trump told European leaders that he was open to offering U.S. security guarantees to Ukraine, according to several European officials, a significant shift in his stance toward America’s role in any end to the war.

…

Putin accepted, Trump said, that any peace would need to include the presence of Western troops in Ukraine as a way of ensuring its durability, according to four of the officials. 

…

The security guarantees as described by Trump on the call included bilateral security commitments and financial and military support for Ukraine’s armed forces by a Western coalition of the willing including the U.S., three of the European officials said.

If that offer lands on the table today, Zelensky and the Europeans will be left with a difficult question: How seriously should we take this? Does Trump mean it, or is this roughly as credible as Putin’s offer to promise (in writing!) not to invade anyone anymore?

For starters, America’s track record on keeping its promises to defend Ukraine isn’t good.

The fact that Trump and the GOP have yet to approve any new military funding for the Ukrainians since Inauguration Day also suggests he won’t keep his word. It’s hard to understand why spending taxpayer dollars to help Kyiv fend off the Russians is unacceptable but spending American soldiers’ lives for the same purpose wouldn’t be.

Furthermore, if this is an earnest commitment, why not invite Ukraine to formally join NATO instead of asking it to accept assurances about some vague quasi-NATO Western force riding to the rescue if Russia attacks again? A “coalition of the willing” could turn unwilling quickly unless the members are firmly bound by something modeled on Article 5. The fact that the president is already saying stuff like “NO GOING INTO NATO BY UKRAINE” maybe tells us something about his own willingness, no?

Trump being Trump, the simplest explanation for his sudden and uncharacteristic openness to guaranteeing Ukraine’s security is that he’s saying whatever he needs to say to execute his exit strategy from the war.

The Ukrainians won’t agree to anything, let alone a concession as momentous as forfeiting Donetsk, without a promise that the U.S. will support a Western military intervention against Russia next time. Meanwhile, the president is desperate to prove that he wasn’t a deluded chump when he crowed that he could and would broker peace in a war where peace has seemed impossible. So he’s going to tell Ukraine what it wants to hear to get to “yes” and trust that Putin won’t call his bluff by attacking again before Trump leaves office.

After all, the president probably really does believe that Russia wouldn’t have invaded if he had still been in charge in 2022. And if he does believe that, guaranteeing Ukraine’s security is a costless exercise for him: He won’t need to make good on his pledge as long as he’s president, and if one of his successors is forced to someday, so what? What’s it to him?

That’s the only way I can make sense of the incongruity of him simultaneously strong-arming the Ukrainians on Russia’s behalf and touting a new alliance that might commit the U.S. to supporting Ukraine in another protracted war against Moscow eventually. He wants out and will give whatever assurances he needs to give toward that end in the belief that he’ll never be forced to follow through.

I hope he’s right about that. More tomorrow.