The combination of that weird summit in Alaska with Vladimir Putin and the only slightly less bizarre gathering of NATO leaders in Washington, was the latest reminder that U.S. President Donald Trump is a terrible negotiator, a true master of the “art of the giveaway.” He doesn’t prepare, doesn’t have subordinates lay the groundwork beforehand, and arrives at each meeting not knowing what he wants or where his red lines are. He has no strategy and isn’t interested in the details, so he just wings it.
As we learned during his first term, when he wasted time on those irrelevant reality-show meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, all Trump really craves is attention, coupled with dramatic visuals that suggest he is in charge. The substance of any deal he might make is secondary if not irrelevant, which is why some of the trade agreements he’s recently announced are less favorable for the United States than he claims.
The only reason that anyone pays any attention to Trump’s erratic diplomatic blundering is that he happens to be the president of the world’s most powerful country, and cowardly members of Congress from the cult-like Republican Party continue to indulge his every whim. But when lightweights like Trump, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and amateur diplomat Steve Witkoff go up against the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin or Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, you should expect the latter side to pick U.S. pockets cleanly. Just ask yourself: Is there anything Trump got for the United States, its allies, or Ukraine when he met with Putin in Alaska? Did Putin give anything up? For that matter, what concessions did Trump get from those European leaders who showed up to persuade him not to abandon Ukraine?
Conducting a successful negotiation with a serious adversary requires a cold-blooded and ruthlessly realistic assessment of each side’s interests, power, and resolve. You aren’t going to charm a leader like Putin into making concessions just because he likes you or because you’ve rolled out a red carpet on the tarmac, and you aren’t going to get anywhere by indulging in wishful thinking or making threats or promises that nobody takes seriously.
This last problem has bedeviled Western policy toward Russia and Ukraine for more than a decade. Although most Western politicians and pundits are still loath to admit it, the taproot of the problem is a fundamental asymmetry of motivation between Russia and the West, an asymmetry arising from each side’s perceptions of threat and definitions of vital interests. (For the record, this gap is why some of us warned against going down this road back in 2014). Putin may have any number of reasons for doing what he has done, but the most important was the fear—widely shared across the Russian political spectrum—that bringing Ukraine into NATO was an existential threat to Russia.
Nothing has been more damaging to the Western position on this issue than its foreign-policy elite’s head-in-the-sand refusal to acknowledge that open-ended NATO enlargement—and especially the 2008 invitation to Ukraine and Georgia to prepare applications for future admission—was a strategic blunder. That is the most important of the “root causes” that Putin has claimed must be addressed in a peace deal, and the one that the Western apostles of expansion have been most vehement in trying to deny or ignore. None of this justifies Putin’s illegal preventive war, but it’s hard to end a serious conflict if no one acknowledges and addresses the reasons that it started in the first place.
The uncomfortable reality is that Moscow has been willing to put its economy on a war footing and sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives to achieve its goals, and Ukraine’s Western supporters have not and will not. Ukrainians have made enormous and heroic sacrifices to defend their country, and Western countries have provided Kyiv with lots of money, arms, intelligence, training, and diplomatic support, but it has been clear from the start that nobody else in Europe or North America was going to send their own military forces to fight and die there. (Again, one wishes Western leaders had considered this more carefully back in 2008 or after 2014). There are people who think that NATO should have entered the war itself, and I respect them for being consistent, but they never came close to persuading the relevant publics or their leaders.
The result is that Russia has gained the upper hand on the battlefield, aided in part by some Ukrainian missteps (such as its ill-fated counteroffensive in the summer of 2023). Those who still insist that the only acceptable outcome is for Ukraine to regain all of its lost territory (including Crimea) and then join NATO and the European Union must be asked to explain exactly how they propose to achieve this goal. Until they provide a coherent and persuasive strategy for how this miracle will be accomplished, expecting to gain them at a negotiating table is beyond absurd.
So, was Trump correct to take Putin’s side at the recent Alaska summit and should he resist the blandishments and pleas of the European leaders who went to Washington in the hopes of stiffening his spine? The answer is no.
There are larger stakes at play here, and U.S. and European negotiating strategies should focus on them. Even if some of Putin’s demands will have to be acknowledged in a future peace agreement, others should be summarily rejected, like the demand that NATO withdraw its forces from some of its member states, or that Ukraine be “de-Nazified” and partly disarmed. If Russia insists that it needs to be protected from external forces that it fears might one day be stationed in Ukraine, then Ukraine must be protected from renewed Russian attacks and be allowed the means to defend itself.
The latter concern is why Ukraine and other European countries are interested in some sort of security guarantee, possibly along the lines of NATO’s Article 5 but without formal membership. But this idea faces at least two obvious objections. First, Article 5 is not an airtight security pledge and certainly not a tripwire that automatically triggers the dispatch of allied troops to help a member state that has been attacked. All Article V says is that an attack on one member will be regarded as an attack on them all, and that each member state will, individually and collectively, take “such action as it deems necessary.” Second, and equally as important, why would any sensible country trust a promise or pledge made by Trump, given his lifelong track record of reneging on promises and reversing course without warning? Even if an agreement is eventually reached on some sort of security pledge for Ukraine, why should anyone take it seriously?
There’s also talk about arranging a face-to-face meeting between Putin and Zelinsky, presumably with the United States serving as mediator. That would entail a symbolic concession by Putin, who has resisted such calls in the past, but it is hard for me to believe that such a meeting would produce a lasting peace in the absence of a significant shift in what’s happening on the battlefield and on Ukraine’s longer-term prospects. Once again, it’s important not to be distracted by the drama of personal meetings, which generate a lot of media froth but yield few results (when Trump and Witkoff are involved).
What’s the best one might hope for? Given how the fighting has proceeded, and the reality that Russia cares more about this issue than non-Ukrainians do, Moscow is going to get some of what it wanted. But given the enormous costs it has already paid, and the prospect of even greater losses if Ukraine continues to receive generous external backing, it should be possible to deny Russia what is not in the West’s interests to provide.
Instead of Trump’s on-again, off-again approach, not to mention his eagerness to pick fights with his European allies on a host of other issues, the best way to get the best deal possible is by the following: the United States maintaining a united front with Europe, NATO continuing to provide Ukraine with generous military support, and Ukraine and the United States pursuing serious and well-prepared negotiations with Russia based on a realistic assessment of each side’s bargaining position. If you’re looking for someone to conduct serious and well-prepared negotiations, however, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is not the address I’d pick.
All this makes me wonder about what might have happened had U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris been elected president last November. Although Harris was hardly a great foreign-policy strategist and the Biden administration had made its own share of errors dealing with Russia and Ukraine, there was widespread recognition in Washington (and among Democratic Party elites) that Ukraine was not going to achieve all of its objectives—however desirable and legitimate they might be in the abstract—and that the war needed to be brought to an end once the U.S. election was over. I believe that she would have replaced Biden’s team with other well-qualified advisors, told them to push for that outcome, and continued to back Ukraine to get the best deal possible in a bad situation.
I don’t know if her administration would have succeeded, of course. But it could hardly have done more than Trump has to damage the United States’ reputation as a reliable and competent diplomatic actor.
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