Days after threatening to abandon peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, the Trump administration last week produced the outlines of a proposal to end the war between the two countries. The proposal, which is being viewed as President Trump’s “final offer,” completely blindsided Ukraine and America’s European allies, and for good reason: It heavily favors the aggressor. Ukraine has already rejected it.
In addition to reportedly freezing the current territorial lines, prohibiting Ukraine from joining NATO, and lifting sanctions on Russia that have been in place since 2014 when it annexed the Crimean Peninsula, the proposal offers Moscow a diplomatic gift that would set an extremely dangerous precedent: formal recognition of its control over Crimea.
Acceding to Russian control of Ukraine would break with an over-eight-decade, bipartisan tradition of opposing the changing of international borders by force. This policy was first articulated in 1940, after the Soviet Union annexed the three Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
The acting secretary of state, Sumner Welles, issued a statement that would come to have a profound impact on American foreign policy and international relations. “The people of the United States are opposed to predatory activities no matter whether they are carried on by the use of force or by the threat of force,” Welles said. “Unless the doctrine in which these principles are inherent once again governs the relations between nations, the rule of reason, of justice and of law — in other words, the basis of modern civilization itself — cannot be preserved.” More than 50 countries followed America’s lead in refusing to recognize the puppet governments installed by Moscow in the three annexed countries.
The United States maintained its nonrecognition policy after allying itself with the Soviet Union in June 1941. Later that year, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain produced the Atlantic Charter, envisioning a postwar world order governed along liberal principles like self-determination, democracy and free trade. The two nations also expressed their “desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.” Over the next 50 years, the United States stayed true to the letter and the spirit of the Welles Declaration, acknowledging the exiled governments of the Baltic States as the legal sovereigns of the territories they did not actually control.
Along those lines, offering de facto recognition of Russia’s control over Crimea, as the Trump plan proposes with regard to Ukraine’s eastern regions, would be a reasonable concession. Russian troops and military matériel are facts on the ground that cannot be wished away. But the U.S. providing formal recognition of the Crimean annexation would overturn the policy of every American president since Roosevelt, including Mr. Trump.
In 2018, during his first administration, secretary of state Mike Pompeo reiterated the basic tenet that the United States would not legitimize territorial aggrandizement by recognizing Crimea as Russian territory. “As we did in the Welles Declaration in 1940, the United States reaffirms as policy its refusal to recognize the Kremlin’s claim of sovereignty over territory seized by force in contravention of international law.” Nothing that has occurred over the past nearly 7 years justifies a repudiation of this commitment to principle and tradition.
Alas, longstanding principles and traditions have never had much influence on Mr. Trump’s decision making. The most charitable explanation for this impetuous plan is that it’s a product of his impatience with diplomacy and desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump repeatedly said that he would end the war within 24 hours of being inaugurated. When that didn’t happen, he tasked an envoy, the retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, with solving the conflict within 100 days.
The likelier motive for Mr. Trump’s proposed acquiescence to Russian colonialism is that it’s a genuine reflection of his worldview, namely, the principle that might makes right. Mr. Trump either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that this conflict began 11 years ago when Russia launched an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. That this act was gravely immoral, never mind illegal, does not factor into Mr. Trump’s geopolitical calculus.
Threats to run for a third term notwithstanding, Mr. Trump is a lame-duck president, which makes him more prone to take rash actions on the international stage. As his own threats to take over Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal suggest, he is sympathetic to the idea of big countries taking over smaller ones, and he is behaving far more erratically in the realm of foreign affairs than he did in his first term. That he might become the first American president to confer legitimacy on the annexation of another country’s territory is a real, and terrifying, possibility.
The war in Ukraine is not, as another British prime minister once said about a European territorial dispute that quickly escalated into the most destructive conflict the world has ever seen, just a “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.” Assenting to Russia’s annexation of Crimea would have global consequences.
Other dictatorships, having witnessed the world’s leading democracy endorse such a flagrant violation of the most basic principle governing the relationship among sovereign states, would feel emboldened to do the same. “Giving Russia de jure recognition of occupied territories would send the world the signal: Go ahead, invade a sovereign country, change its borders; it’s all good,” the former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves told me. If the United States were to recognize Crimea as Russia it would join the august company of Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela.
Those who support bestowing an imprimatur of legality upon Russia’s annexation of Crimea contend that, like the territories Russia controls in its other frozen conflicts, the land Ukraine has lost is never coming back. The same, however, was said about the Baltic States. For most of the Cold War, the prospect of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania regaining their independence seemed remote, if not fantastic. In 1975, The Times reported that, while American officials doubted that “formal recognition” of the Soviet occupations would “come soon,” they believed it was “inevitable.”
Yet the United States and its allies persisted in refusing to accept the subjugation of the Baltic States, and when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, they were liberated. Today, they are members of the European Union and NATO with consolidated democracies, market economies and increasingly confident places on the world stage.
After 11 years of grinding conflict, it’s entirely understandable that Mr. Trump wants to end this war. But he must not mistake a temporary cessation of hostilities — which is all that his proposal would achieve — with a just and lasting peace. Unless Ukraine is provided with an explicit security guarantee (which in all likelihood means NATO membership), Russia will just bide its time until the moment is opportune for it to invade again.
Whether Mr. Trump is in or out of office when this happens, it will destroy his legacy.
James Kirchick is a contributing Opinion writer.
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