Two months after the Operation Midnight Hammer strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities and the ceasefire with Israel that soon followed, President Trump has once again upended conventional foreign policy wisdom. After years of escalatory rhetoric, moral posturing and seemingly endless funding packages, Trump’s twin high-profile summits with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other European leaders in Washington offer the clearest road map yet to finally end the tragic war in Ukraine.
And perhaps the toughest part for the foreign policy establishment to swallow: It would come to pass not in spite of Trump’s nationalist “America First” instincts, but because of them.
Three and a half years after Putin’s February 2022 invasion, the Russia-Ukraine war is a humanitarian catastrophe and a financial sinkhole. It has often seemed to be an intractable quagmire; the permanent foreign policy class has no idea how to even begin to end it. Ever since Russian tanks first rolled into the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, Western elites have clung to fanciful, idealistic slogans — “as long as it takes,” “until the last square inch” and so forth — while sending oodles of U.S. taxpayer dollars to a deeply corrupt country at an alarming clip.
No one in President Biden’s neoliberal blob had any plan to stop the killing. Trump does. And he’s showing us yet again how a sober realism — not liberal internationalist fantasy — can yield results.
It begins with clarity of purpose as it pertains to the American national interest. Trump has never pretended that the precise delineation of the historically disputed Russia-Ukraine border is a question that implicates the United States’ vital interests. Simply put, Ukraine isn’t in NATO. If the invaded country were a NATO country like Estonia or Latvia, this would be a different conversation. But that’s not the case.
Trump also understands the parties well. He knows that Putin is an inveterate autocrat — not a “democrat-in-waiting” who just needs a few more Harvard Kennedy School seminars to fall in line. And he also recognizes that Zelensky, Churchillian cosplay notwithstanding, is the president of a still-fledgling post-Soviet republic mired in venality and a dubious commitment to Western-style liberalism. Putin is a horrific thug, yes, but he is a rational actor; Zelensky is less barbaric than Putin, but his maximalist ambitions have been overinflated by years of Western ego-stroking.
Enter Dealmaker-in-Chief Trump — the man who has already secured ceasefires or peace deals between Israel and Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan, India and Pakistan, Cambodia and Thailand, and Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Based on what we can glean from the recent summits with Putin and Zelensky, Trump’s “art of the deal” strategy for a grand Russo-Ukrainian peace accord seems to center on four principles: neutrality for Ukraine, land swaps, reconstruction guarantees and enforcement mechanisms.
Neutrality means Ukraine doesn’t join NATO — period. There will be no more inching ever eastward for NATO — the sort of reckless expansionism that helped sparked this conflict in the first place. Ukraine must remain sovereign — a necessary concession from Putin, who still dreams of reconstituting Soviet-era “Greater Russia.” It will become a bridge state not wholly dissimilar to Belarus, minus the repressive dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko. Zelensky has at times seemed insistent on eventual NATO membership for Ukraine, but he has also equivocated. He will have to compromise; Russia has a legitimate security interest in a buffer zone on its western border.
If there is a peace deal in the offing, land swaps and territorial compromise will be the toughest pill to swallow. This is where Trump, the sober and emotionally detached realist, stands a better chance of succeeding than his ideologically inclined White House predecessor. Crimea will remain with Russia — that is both the historical and the present, on-the-ground reality. The borders of the Donbas region — full of ethnically/linguistically divided Russian/Ukrainian towns — must be redrawn too. The granular cartographic details are beyond our scope, but the general guiding principle should be self-determination and peace over permanent strife and proxy war.
Third, Trump is reportedly working with European partners to create a Marshall Plan-style economic reconstruction package for Ukraine — as long as a peace deal holds. The all-important carrot for Ukraine here is economic revival, not NATO’s Article 5 missiles. The mineral rights deal inked earlier this year between the U.S. and Ukraine provides more in the way of economic inducement.
Finally, enforcement. A Russia-Ukraine deal likely cannot survive on good intentions alone. Trump’s model will require teeth. The enforcement details remain to be seen — and Trump’s MAGA base would rightly resist a NATO-style mutual defense guarantee. Unlike NATO’s tripwires or Biden’s moralistic blank checks, Trump’s enforcement model must be transactional and rooted in national self-interest. Getting this part of the deal right will be crucial.
Ending the Russia-Ukraine war would save countless lives, stabilize Europe’s eastern flank and — perhaps most important — finally permit the U.S. military to focus on deterring its top 21st-century geopolitical threat, Communist China. By already bringing us closer to peace than his predecessor ever did, Trump is again reminding Americans that the purpose of foreign policy is not moral preening, but the pursuit of the national interest.
The war in Ukraine has raged far too long. If Trump can bring it to a close, with a deal that both Moscow and Kyiv can live with, then he will have achieved what no Western leader since 2022 has had the courage to even attempt in earnest.
And perhaps, if successful, he’ll finally get that elusive Nobel Peace Prize.
Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. @josh_hammer
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