What Trump Needs to Do at the Alaska SummitIf Trump Truly Wishes to End the War, Previous Unworkable Approaches Must Finally be Abandoned...
Ever since US president Donald Trump began a diplomatic process to try to end the war in Ukraine, his efforts have wrought consternation in European capitals, where it is feared that a deal will be stitched up between the Americans and Russians contrary to Europeans’ interests. Desperate not to be sidelined, European leaders have been negotiating among themselves and with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to draw up their own peace plan, which they hope they can impose on Trump. To this end, a European Union summit in March 2025 laid out five conditions for peace, namely:
To date, neither Trump nor Putin has shown much interest in these conditions, and bilateral Russian-American diplomacy has continued, culminating in the presidential summit to be held this Friday in Alaska. This has provoked the Europeans to double down on their efforts to be involved, with a virtual meeting of Zelensky and various European leaders reiterating the five conditions on the Wednesday before the summit. Flanked by Zelensky, German Prime Minister Friedrich Merz told the press that Ukraine must be included in the peace negotiations, that those negotiations should “proceed in the right order, with a ceasefire at the outset,” that “legal recognition of Russian occupation is not up for debate,” and that Ukraine would need “robust security guarantees.” In an earlier article on war termination for Landmarks journal, I noted the problem of “spoilers” – people, institutions, and countries that work to sabotage peace efforts. Merz’s statement indicates how European nations are continuing to act as spoilers in the case of Ukraine. For there is nothing more guaranteed to make the Russians continue the war than the conditions laid out by the Europeans. In my Landmarks article I described what is known as the “credible commitment problem.” Warring parties often will not make peace even when it is clear that continued war is not in their interests because they do not believe that any commitments made by their enemies in a potential peace treaty are credible – in other words, they do not trust their enemies to stand by any agreement. Rather, they fear that their enemies will use any ceasefire to recover and rearm so as to restart hostilities on a more favourable footing. The Russians view the European demand that a ceasefire precede negotiations in this light, and they insist therefore on the opposite – that negotiations should come first and that a ceasefire should follow only when there is an agreement. From the Russian point of view, the war is about security. It is the product of many years of worsening East-West relations, followed by 8 years of war in Donbass, and a growing fear that Ukraine was becoming a Western-armed weapon pointed at the heart of Russia. Whether these fears were justified is another question, but they lie at the heart of Russia’s decision to start a preventive war. A ceasefire that does not address this issue and allows Ukraine to recover from its current parlous military situation, to rearm, and to invite European troops onto its soil, runs the risk, from the Russian perspective, of creating a situation in which Ukraine can in years to come restart the war in order to recapture its lost territories. Even if Ukraine never does so, the danger that it might will put Russia in a state of permanent insecurity. Thus, from the Russian side, a peace process that puts a ceasefire before negotiations, rather than after them, is completely anathema. So too is any peace that provides Ukraine with so-called “security guarantees,” such as NATO membership, rearmament, and the deployment of NATO troops on Ukrainian soil. What the Europeans are proposing ensures that Russia will keep on waging war until it can force Ukraine and Europe to change their position. One might argue that Russia has no right to do so. But this is not an issue of justice. It is an issue of practical reality. Russia is more powerful than Ukraine. It has the military upper hand, and the attritional dynamics of the war strongly suggest that this is a permanent state of affairs. If one wishes to end the war, one therefore has to take what the Russians think into account. Europe is quite clearly unwilling to do so. It falls therefore on the United States to take the lead. To date, the American record in this regard is decidedly mixed, with President Trump seeming to veer this way and that according to which advisor or foreign leader he last spoke to. There are some in the corridors of American power who seem to want to wash their hands entirely of the Ukrainian affair. Vice President J.D. Vance possibly falls into this category, recently telling the Europeans that the US is “done with funding the Ukraine war.” Others, though, like Senator Lindsey Graham, demand that the United States take a much more hawkish line towards Russia. Trump seems to be unable to decide between them. As a result, his diplomacy has yet to adopt a coherent position. At first, it seemed that Trump was hoping that he could persuade Zelensky and Putin to accept a temporary ceasefire. For the reasons mentioned above, though, Putin was never going to agree. This then led Trump to start threatening Russia, but in a manner that was unlikely ever to get Putin to change his position. As I mentioned in my previous Landmarks essay, incrementally increasing pressure on Russia has not only failed to date but is likely to continue to fail in the future. A different approach is needed. For this reason, Trump’s decision to meet with Putin in Alaska is most welcome. The longer the war continues, the worse Ukraine’s position is likely to become, and the worse the final settlement is likely to be. In the meantime, thousands will continue to die every month, while Ukrainian infrastructure will be ever further destroyed. If this fate is to be avoided, and if the war is to be ended sooner rather than later, then some way must be found to push through the spoiling efforts of the Europeans and to pressure the Ukrainian government to make more considerable concessions than it has been willing so far to do. Only the United States seems able potentially to do this, by means of some sort of at least outline agreement with Russia. In this instance, the issue that is of truly vital importance to Russia appears to be Ukrainian neutrality and the future size of the Ukrainian military. If agreement can be reached on this, then the secondary issue of territory could perhaps be dropped…Whether Trump and his advisers understand what such an agreement would have to say is not clear. At present, they seem to be focused on the idea of territorial exchanges between Russia and Ukraine, perhaps with Ukraine surrendering those parts of Donetsk province that are still under its control and in return receiving back those parts of Kharkiv, Sumy, and Dnipro provinces that are currently occupied by Russia. But not only do both Russia and Ukraine reject this idea, but it is a mistake to view the war as primarily territorial in nature. As I noted above, the primary issue is security. In my previous Landmarks article, I observed also that belligerents are often willing to forego secondary objectives if they can obtain something of truly vital importance to them. In this instance, the issue that is of truly vital importance to Russia appears to be Ukrainian neutrality and the future size of the Ukrainian military. If agreement can be reached on this, then the secondary issue of territory could perhaps be dropped, with Russia agreeing to freeze the front lines where they are, and so de facto dropping its claim to the rest of Donetsk, Zaporozhe, and Kherson provinces, while also giving back the territories in Kharkiv, Sumy, and Dnipro. Perhaps also there could be agreement on some form of reparations in the form of using Russian assets frozen in Western banks as a fund to reconstruct Ukraine. These are, of course, just suggestions, but they are indicative of how the Trump administration needs to be thinking. If Trump and Putin can agree on an outline of this sort, the next step in US policy then needs to be to pressure Ukraine and Europe to accept it. That, of course, will require a major reversal in how Washington thinks about the war, given how until now the thinking has been almost entirely about how to pressure Moscow. What is obvious, though, is that if Trump really wants to bring this terrible war to an end, he needs to abandon previous unworkable approaches and strike out in a wholly new direction. This Friday’s meeting with Putin will give some indication of whether he is capable of it.
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