If supporters of Ukraine — and I count myself among them — want to win the battle for hearts and minds in the United States, under no circumstances can they allow themselves to be seen as the “war party,” while Donald Trump and his MAGA movement claim the mantle of peace.
Yet that’s the relentless messaging from the Trumpist right. In spite of the fact that Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine, and the war would end tomorrow if Putin simply withdrew, it is those of us who support Ukraine who are called warmongers.
In the MAGA narrative, we spout — as JD Vance argued — “moralistic garbage.” Trumpists, by contrast, see themselves as the “realists” willing to tell the public a series of hard truths — most notably that Ukraine’s defenses are failing even with American support, that Ukraine can’t possibly win the war and that it has to cut a deal before it’s ground into the dust.
The response to this argument isn’t just to rebut the individual points but to provide an alternative, genuinely realistic vision for peace on far better terms than the Trump administration is attempting to force on Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Far from being warmongers, it’s those who support Ukraine who are seeking a sustainable peace.
The blueprint for ending the Ukraine war is found on the other side of the world, in South Korea. The Korean War ended with an armistice more or less along existing lines of the conflict, but with American troops on the ground to guarantee South Korean security.
A Ukrainian cease-fire can look quite similar. End the conflict largely on existing grounds and then deploy Western troops to deter Russia. But in this scenario, it wouldn’t be American boots on the ground, but rather French and British. Both countries have already offered to deploy their own forces to maintain peace.
This answer obviously isn’t ideal (South Korea and North Korea are still locked in a frozen conflict) but it’s attainable, and it would preserve both Ukrainian independence and Ukrainian security.
Before we dive into the details, let’s talk just a bit about “realism” in the Ukraine war. I’ve found that realists are very good at describing in detail (and sometimes exaggerating) the scale of Ukraine’s military difficulties while glossing over Russia’s considerable problems. Once you cross that line, however, it’s propaganda, not realism.
First, it’s important to understand that the hourglass is running out for both sides. Ukraine’s weaknesses are well known. It’s far smaller than Russia with a far smaller industrial base. It faces manpower shortages. Absent Western aid, it can’t possibly outproduce the Russian economy. As a result, it’s being slowly driven back from its defensive lines in eastern Ukraine.
But Russian advances have come at a terrible price. The Ukrainian military estimates that Russia lost roughly 150,000 soldiers killed in action in 2024 alone. To put that number in perspective, that’s almost three times the total number of American service members who died in the entire Vietnam War.
Russia will have extreme difficulty replacing losses at that rate unless it orders a major mobilization, which Putin has been reluctant to do. North Korean troops sent to bolster Russian forces have suffered such severe losses that they’ve been removed from the front line.
It’s also losing armored vehicles far faster than it can replace them. Russia has lost roughly half its prewar stocks of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, and many of the remaining tanks in storage are extremely old and inoperable. As the Institute for the Study of War reported, “Some analysts forecast that Russia will run out of its Soviet-era equipment stockpiles by the end of 2025 or in 2026.”
In addition, the Russian economy is struggling under the weight of high interest rates and increasing inflation.
So while either party might be able to achieve some isolated victories — Ukraine surprised Russia by taking a small part of Russia’s Kursk Province last year, for example — it’s hard to imagine a breakthrough for either side. Ukraine may hope it can somehow claw back the territory it has lost in the Donbas, but the failure of its counteroffensive in 2023 showed the difficulty of penetrating Russian defensive lines.
In military terms, neither side has figured out how to restore mobility, or the ability to maneuver, to the battlefield. The combination of artillery and drone swarms make it incredibly difficult to mass the necessary men and equipment to punch large holes in either side’s defensive line.
With both sides of the conflict facing crises, the Trump approach to ending the war is to try to break Ukraine. He’s paused vital American aid. He’s limited the intelligence the United States shares with Ukraine. He’s waging a war of words against Ukraine that’s driving down support for Ukraine in the United States and even generating sympathy for Putin. Americans still support Ukraine more than they do Russia, but support for continued aid to Ukraine is waning, especially among Republicans.
But if we’re talking about realism, how realistic is it to believe that giving Russia a victory in Ukraine is in the long-term interests of the United States, much less the long-term interests of peace?
Putin has launched aggressive wars in Chechnya, Georgia and Ukraine (twice). He intervened to prop up the Assad government in Syria. His pattern is unmistakable. He will continue to be expansionist and aggressive until his military is stopped — and that’s particularly true in Ukraine, which Putin doesn’t even believe should exist.
In a 2023 speech, he said, “There was no Ukraine in the Russian Empire” and claimed that the country was merely the invention of Vladimir Lenin and the Soviet Union.
Even if Putin agrees to peace, how realistic is it to believe that he will keep any of his promises? The exchange that led to the Oval Office blowup between Zelensky, Trump and Vance began with Zelensky trying to explain that diplomacy and international agreements mean nothing to Putin in the absence of concrete security guarantees.
In other words, capitulation is the path to further conflict.
But history gives us another alternative — continued resistance until Russia understands that its attacks are unsustainable. Ukraine has proved that it has the will to stand and fight. It has proved that it can inflict catastrophic losses on Russian forces. Russia has to learn that it is in no position to dictate the terms of peace.
And don’t listen to any Trump official who says we can’t afford to help Ukraine. The Trump administration is proposing tax cuts that increase the deficit by orders of magnitude more than total American spending on Ukraine.
It’s hard to take fiscal complaints about the roughly $120 billion that the United States has spent helping Ukraine defend itself, when Trump is proposing adding $2.8 trillion in additional debt through his tax plan.
There are times when the United States does have to lean on its allies. In 1953, South Korea rejected the armistice agreement. It wanted to keep fighting until reunification. We agreed to the armistice with China and North Korea anyway, but we also gave South Korea the most ironclad security guarantee — an American military presence. In fact, roughly 28,000 troops remain in South Korea today.
I’ve experienced that American commitment firsthand. In 2010 — when I was a JAG officer in the Army — I was deployed to South Korea to participate in Operation Key Resolve, a military exercise involving a simulated North Korean attack. I saw the tight connection between American and South Korean forces, and I could see that the North has no hope of conquering the South so long as our alliance remains intact.
The results speak for themselves. South Korea has enjoyed decades of peace. It has become one of the world’s most prosperous and powerful democracies. America is stronger and more secure because our South Korean ally has grown powerful.
In Ukraine, there’s an even better deal (for Americans) on the table. Britain and France have stepped up and offered to guarantee peace with their own militaries. Both of those nations are nuclear-armed, and the presence of their forces would present a powerful deterrent to any future Russian attack.
If Ukraine wanted to continue the war even if Russia offers a cease-fire and Britain and France are willing to send troops to guarantee peace, then it would be appropriate to lean on the Zelensky government.
But I doubt that will be necessary. In fact, in a 2024 interview with Fox News, Zelensky said he would not “legally acknowledge any occupied territory of Ukraine as Russian.” The key word there is “legally.” One does not have to legally agree to Russian annexation to agree to end hostilities.
Zelensky went on to say, in fact, that “We cannot spend dozens of thousands of our people so that they perish for the sake of Crimea coming back.” Instead, he indicated that he hoped to recover Crimea “diplomatically.”
A cease-fire with European security guarantees fits with long-held American desires to “pivot to Asia,” to project more power in the Pacific. China is ultimately more dangerous than Russia (it has a smaller nuclear arsenal but a much larger economy and much larger conventional forces), and European nations (which are ramping up their own military spending) can deter Russia even if we concentrate more of our forces in the Far East.
Negotiating peace will be difficult. Neither side is likely to simply roll over anytime soon. Ukraine will reject any “peace” that constitutes a surrender of its freedom and independence, and Putin isn’t willing to permit an allied military deployment on Ukrainian soil.
But the failure of military force eventually made men as vicious as China’s Mao Zedong and North Korea’s Kim Il Sung agree to an armistice in the Korean War. There is no reason (yet) to believe that Putin is more intransigent than two of the 20th century’s worst dictators. It is by supporting Ukraine that we give peace a real chance.
Some other things I did
It will not be easy to fix what Donald Trump is breaking. That was the focus of my Sunday column. A new president could change course, but our allies have learned a lesson that they won’t soon forget: America can’t be trusted.
Even if Democrats sweep the midterms in 2026 and defeat the Republican candidate in 2028, that lesson will still hold. Our allies will know that our alliances are only as stable as the next presidential election — and that promises are only good for one term (at most).
It’s extraordinarily difficult — if not impossible — to build a sustainable defense strategy under those circumstances. It’s impossible to enact sustainable trade policies. And it’s impossible to conduct any form of lasting diplomacy. If agreements are subject to immediate revocation with the advent of a new administration, will any sensible world power rely on America’s word — or America itself?
This week we also published my conversation with Jessica Riedl, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, who is one of the nation’s most-respected experts on the federal budget. We’re both fiscal conservatives, and we both dislike DOGE, and here’s just one reason:
French: The implication of what you’re saying is that DOGE is causing an awful lot of disruption to federal operations without doing anything material to address the long-term fiscal challenge America is facing.
Riedl: I would call what DOGE is doing “government spending-cut theater.” The targets they’re going after are not where the money is. D.E.I. contracts, Politico Pro subscriptions, federal employees, foreign aid. Some of it is essentially a rounding error, but they are targets that hit a lot of cultural touchstones for a lot of conservatives. DOGE is really a distraction from the spending increases and tax cuts Congress is really doing right now.
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