In February 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin met at the Crimean city of Yalta to lay out the shape of postwar Europe. Yalta is typically used as a metaphor for appeasement or cynical realpolitik, and it is both. But it is also a metaphor for consequential diplomacy. The agreements made presaged a Europe separated into different zones, a state of affairs that lasted until the Central and Eastern European revolutions of 1989.
President Trump has been searching for his Yalta in the war in Ukraine since the start of his second term. It’s easy to see why: It could be an appealingly simple, Trumpian transaction, in which the leaders of great powers sit down and determine a course, while minor powers must take what they are given. Like F.D.R., Mr. Trump is willing to compromise on behalf of others. F.D.R. did not insist on full autonomy for Poland and the Baltic republics in 1945, and Mr. Trump has made it clear that he would accept truncated Ukrainian autonomy.
Though at times Mr. Trump’s nonlinear foreign policy has favored Ukraine, when it comes to negotiating an end to the war, Mr. Trump has done almost nothing to empower or include Ukraine and its European partners. His efforts to lay out the shape of postwar Europe are always directed toward President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who, in Mr. Trump’s reading of the world, is understood as the leader of a country with the entitlements of a great power. After almost two years of this, Mr. Trump has succeeded not in resolving the conflict, but rather in making the United States a sideshow to the actual process of peace.
We are in the throes of another such attempt. Mr. Trump has called for a change of presidents in Ukraine. According to Kyiv, the White House has also curbed Ukraine’s access to Starlink satellite internet and delayed the delivery of Patriot interceptor missiles. U.S. officials deny any disruptions. Simultaneously, Mr. Trump has been upgrading relations with Russia, with a deal to purchase Russian diesel and exempting it from new sanctions. Reports of a great-power conference between the United States, Russia and China on the sidelines of a larger summit scheduled for next month conjure a 21st-century Yalta, with China substituted for Britain.
Any such framework for peace in Ukraine is destined for irrelevance. Russia is not basking in the kind of overwhelming victory that gave the Soviet Union its leverage in 1945; it has experienced something much closer to defeat in Ukraine. Mr. Putin is trying to transform an unwon war into diplomatic concessions that the United States has no authority to give — and no ability to deliver.
Eight decades ago, the United States commanded two assets in Europe. One was an immense military presence augmented by the fact that the United States was about to become the world’s sole nuclear power. Having helped to liberate most of Europe from fascism, the United States also enjoyed widespread trust and moral prestige. Mr. Trump has devastated America’s reputation in Europe. He has imposed aggressive tariffs and made territorial threats to Greenland and plans to significantly decrease the U.S. military presence. In Europe, the United States is a fading power, not an ascendant one.
Then there is America’s role in the war itself. Mr. Trump started withholding U.S. military aid to Ukraine almost as soon as he returned to office. He has cut financial support to Ukraine to almost zero and brokered a deal with European countries to purchase matériel for Ukraine from the United States. He has weakened NATO’s Article 5 commitment. He has diminished Europe’s general capacity to deter Russia and, by adding friction to the trans-Atlantic relationship, has made it harder for Ukraine to defend itself.
The subsequent changes in Europe have been gradual, but dramatic. On one level, the transition is to Mr. Trump’s liking. Germany has led the way in expanding European defense budgets, and with its wealth and technological sophistication Europe is on its way to becoming a defense-industrial powerhouse. But this, in turn, is making Europe less deferential to Washington. Europe and Ukraine have an abundance of agency and no desire to be chess pieces on a board. Mr. Trump has done so much to make this war Europe’s war. Now that it is, the most important question is whether Europe — deeply invested in the precedents that the war will set in Ukraine and elsewhere — can maintain a united front. The United States can be a partner, a nullity or an obstacle, but it cannot undo the evolution that it has provoked.
If it chooses to, the United States could further degrade its relations with Europe and Ukraine. It could terminate all support for Ukraine. It could end targeting and intelligence sharing. Mr. Trump might decide to do this after the midterm elections, when he no longer has to face the American electorate, perhaps out of a personal dislike for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or the potential profit in normalizing relations with Russia. But this would probably not be the cause of Ukraine’s defeat.
Mr. Trump can hurt Ukraine, and to a degree he can isolate it diplomatically. He alone cannot decide its future.
Michael Kimmage is the director of the Kennan Institute, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author, most recently, of “Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability.”.
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