Trump’s Ukraine peace plan faces a familiar foe in Washington
Trump has alternately blamed Ukraine and Russia for failing to end the war. The reaction to his new peace plan shows that the problem is closer to home.
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Since taking office in January with a pledge to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine, President Trump has alternately blamed each side for his failure to follow through.
The fallout from the disclosure of Trump’s new 28-point peace plan has exposed where the real blame lies. In a longstanding tradition, Washington’s bipartisan foreign-policy establishment and European NATO allies have worked relentlessly to sabotage Trump’s attempt to end a war that has already killed hundreds of thousands.
Trump’s initial plan would have Kyiv agree to painful concessions, including ceding all of the Donbas region to Russia; freezing the line of contact in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, thereby granting Moscow more land there; and permanently abandoning a bid to join NATO. According to the Wall Street Journal, the plan reflects “Trump’s prioritization of ending the bloodshed over maintaining U.S. support for the target of the Kremlin’s 2022 all-out invasion.”
One might argue that attempting to end the bloodshed is, in fact, a way of supporting Ukraine, especially since it is losing the war. But according to the Beltway consensus, the only way to support Ukraine is to continue sending its overmatched forces off to die. Longtime GOP Senator Mitch McConnell accused the White House of “appeasing Putin” in pushing an agreement “disastrous to America’s interests.” Republican colleague Thom Tillis declared that the US “should not do anything that makes [Putin] feel like he has a win here.” Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu even suggested that Zelensky should reject the deal because “Democrats will flip the House of Representatives next year,” and will presumably have no interest in stopping the bloodshed.
United in outrage, war hawks moved quickly to gut Trump’s initiative. First, a group of Republican Senators declared that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had told them that Russia authored the peace plan. Those who embraced this view ignored the fact that Trump’s plan contained several non-starters for Moscow, including a cap on Ukraine’s military that far exceeds what was negotiated in Istanbul in April 2022, and the use of more than $100 billion in frozen Russian funds for Ukraine’s reconstruction, with the US guaranteed a hefty windfall. (In a letter of protest, Belgium prime minister Bart De Wever wrote this week that a similar plan for the theft of Russian assets would mean that the European Union is “effectively preventing reaching an eventual peace deal.”)
Even though Rubio claimed that he was misheard, the Senate outrage emboldened his effort to alter the plan in line with Ukrainian, European, and Beltway objections. The new Rubio-edited plan deleted critical sections on Ukraine ceding territory to Russia and renouncing future membership in NATO. These changes, the New York Times noted, “are exactly the provisions that Mr. Putin cares about most,” leading administration officials to predict that he “is likely to dismiss the new draft out of hand, which would lead to a long and drawn-out negotiation.”
Given that war hawks do not want any negotiation, the next step was to discredit the negotiators. In an extraordinary security breach, Bloomberg published the transcript of an intercepted October phone call between Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and top Putin aide Yuri Ushakov. During their conversation, Witkoff offered advice on how Kremlin officials should speak to Trump and signaled that the US would accept Russia’s acquisition of the Donbas province of Donetsk.
The leak sparked another round of bipartisan uproar. Yet instead of condemning an act of espionage against a top US diplomat, Beltway critics took aim at the act of diplomacy itself. Republican Rep. Don Bacon lamented that “Witkoff fully favors the Russians,” and therefore “cannot be trusted to lead these negotiations.” Lieu, the Democratic Rep., went further and declared Witkoff to be an “actual traitor,” who is “supposed to work for the United States, not Russia.”
Trump has stood by Witkoff and plans to send him to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin next week. The bipartisan proxy war alliance is determined to ensure that the mission fails. Trump’s initial plan, Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick remarked, has “added urgency to the process” of imposing sanctions on Russia’s trading partners, and “we’re going to just take a much more aggressive posture.”
Washington’s aggressive posture toward anyone seeking peace in Ukraine is nothing new. Since the Maidan coup of 2014, any attempt by Trump or his predecessor Barack Obama to move towards a compromise with Russia, particularly in Ukraine, has met fierce resistance from the national security state and Capitol Hill.
The prevailing view toward Russia – and disregard for the elected US president’s own preferences – was expressed back in April 2014. That month, with the help of CIA chief John Brennan, the Maidan coup had turned into a full-blown proxy war pitting the new US-backed Kyiv government against Russian-backed Donbas rebels. Even as Obama was privately expressing doubts about an escalation in Ukraine, a group of anonymous senior US officials declared an underhanded Cold War in his name. According to the New York Times, Obama, or more accurately his advisers, had decided that the US will “never have a constructive relationship with Mr. Putin,” and was accordingly now “focused on isolating... Russia by cutting off its economic and political ties to the outside world,” and “effectively making it a pariah state.”
To ensure that Russia would remain a pariah, Obama’s aides treated him in similar fashion. In February 2015, Obama supported France and Germany’s efforts to broker the Minsk II accords, in which Kyiv pledged to grant limited autonomy to the Russia-backed Donbas regions and, tacitly, to stay out of NATO.
The permanent foreign policy establishment had other plans. Just as Minsk II was being finalized, Obama’s own senior State Department official, Victoria Nuland, met with some of his staunchest political rivals, including veteran Republican Senator John McCain, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference and discussed how to undermine the peace pact. Leaked details of the Nuland meeting caused a stir in Germany, but were widely ignored in the United States. (A rare exception was the late Robert Parry, a veteran journalist and founder of the independent outlet Consortium News. The following month, Parry accurately predicted that the Nuland-abetted “sabotage of Minsk-2” will “disappear into the memory hole.”)
Resisted by his own hawkish cabinet and a bipartisan coalition on Capitol Hill, Obama ultimately failed to push through a peace deal in Ukraine. His successor fared even worse. Not only did Trump fill his first White House with neoconservative principals who opposed his stated calls for better calls with Russia, but he faced the additional pressure of being framed as an asset of Moscow in the manufactured “scandal” known as Russiagate.
In February 2017, just weeks into Trump’s first term, Michael Flynn, the rare cabinet member who actually shared the president’s goal of improving relations with the Kremlin, was ousted after the leak of phone conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. The Flynn-Kislyak calls were used to manufacture a controversy in which Flynn was falsely accused of floating sanctions relief as payback for Russia’s alleged (I would argue fictitious) 2016 election help to the Trump campaign, and then lying to cover it up. In reality, a declassified transcript later showed that the two barely discussed the issue of sanctions beyond a few inconsequential words. They did discuss the Obama administration’s expulsion of 35 Russian officials over alleged “Russian interference”, where Flynn’s only words amounted to urging a “reciprocal” and “even-keeled” Kremlin response to avoid a diplomatic crisis.
Precisely because he had advocated restraint and engaged in the act of talking to Moscow to achieve it, Flynn – just like Witkoff today -- was targeted by entrenched war hawks with different priorities. From the start, Trump recognized that Washington’s endemic hostility to engagement with Russia would cost lives. Russiagate, he complained in November 2017, “gets in the way” of improving US-Russia ties, “and that’s a shame because people will die because of it.”
Eight years later, amid a new push by Trump for peace in Ukraine, the same Beltway forces are working to ensure that a lot more people will die as a result of their intransigence.