Trump’s Ukrainian Peace Push and the Shrinking of American Power

Few modern presidents have made foreign policy so theatrical or so transactional as the 47th U.S. President Donald Trump. From flirtations with autocrats to outlandish territorial gambits, his diplomacy has often resembled a business pitch than any strategic doctrine. In this series, we track the shadow of Trumpism abroad - from Beijing to the Baltics, Gaza to Greenland as Trump, in his second coming, is leaving behind not just disruption, but a trail of broken alliances, bruised institutions and a deepening mistrust of America’s word.

PART - 4

Trump’s pivot from pressure to appeasement marks not just a shift in tone, but a potential undoing of decades of transatlantic deterrence.

When Donald Trump boasted last year that he would end the Ukraine war “within 24 hours,” few took him at his word. Fewer still imagined that, within months of returning to power, he would be orchestrating the future of Eastern Europe from a Florida mansion while Vladimir Putin continued his bombardment of Ukraine. Well, they were right to dismiss such ‘fool’s optimism.’

This week, after a two-hour phone call with the Russian president, Trump adopted a new pose: peace would come not through American pressure but through “direct negotiations” between Moscow and Kyiv, perhaps even in the presence of the Pope.

For a man seldom accused of modesty, it was less a diplomatic masterstroke than a cloaked abdication. Far from offering a bold solution, Trump’s overture indicates Washington’s total retreat from a conflict it no longer wishes to own.

Observers – analysts and historians bitterly against ‘Vlad the Invader’ Putin, who have exhorted Europe and the United States to stand up for little Ukraine, have long lamented that the US’ abandoning of the conflict would be a boon to Putin, who has long bet that Western attention spans are short and that American resolve is not infinite.

The question, of course, is what kind of peace is being discussed. Trump has oscillated between claiming he alone can stop the bloodshed (perhaps wishing to snare a Nobel Peace Prize as another laurel for his narcissism?) and asserting that America must stay out of Europe’s “ancient quarrels.”

Putin, for his part, has said any deal must reckon with the ‘root causes’ of the war, namely the Russian code for Ukrainian sovereignty and the latter’s steady westward drift since the fall of the U.S.S.R in 1991.

Since the time of the Tsars, Ukraine has been seen in Moscow not as a neighbour but as a limb - something vital to Russian identity and security, even if it must be subdued to remain so. That mythos survived the Soviet collapse. When Ukraine pulled away in 1991 by joining the club of post-Soviet democracies, it did so with a deep cultural memory of imperial domination, forced famines (the 1930-33 ‘Holodomor’ under Stalin and that of 1921-22 under Lenin) and Russification.

In this context, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, itself a continuation for his ‘unfinished’ task in 2014, was then, not an aberration but a bloody reassertion of that imperial narrative.

For Trump, the allure of cutting a deal is obvious. His foreign policy has always tilted toward strongmen. He praises ‘strength’ and finds NATO encumbrances annoying. In private, he has reportedly mocked Ukraine’s calls for assistance and toyed with the idea of trading territories for peace.

Still, there is method to Putin’s patience. Russian attacks continue unabated, with the largest drone assault of the war occurring just hours after Trump’s conciliatory phone call. Even as he mouths peace, Putin inches forward on the battlefield, testing whether American resolve will waver. This has even left Trump distraught and mortified, if reports are to be believed. After all, Trump, Vance and all the President’s men had done much to shatter Zelenskyy’s ‘halo’ as a modern-day Churchill and darling of the free and liberal West, fighting defiantly against the ‘ogre’ Putin.

Adulation from European chancelleries and liberal elites in Washington had turned a wartime president into a moral talisman at the expense of scrutiny. Yet Ukraine under Zelenskyy’s watch has grown more brittle: corruption scandals fester, opposition voices are muffled and constitutional checks have been strained by martial law. In mistaking charisma for capacity, his backers have overlooked the uncomfortable truth of his institutional incompetence.

Putin’s hostility toward the West, especially NATO, is no recent development. Scholars like M.E. Sarotte, in her brilliant 2021 book ‘Not One Inch,’ have traced how the expansion of NATO eastward after the Cold War was seen in Moscow not as reassurance, but encroachment. The unofficial promises made in the early 1990s about NATO’s limits were quickly brushed aside as former Warsaw Pact states rushed to join the alliance.

For the Kremlin, Ukraine’s desire to follow suit was the final provocation. Though democratic and sovereign, Kyiv’s westward orientation was, to Putin, a geopolitical betrayal and a personal humiliation.

Eminent Sovietologist Robert Service, in his ‘Kremlin Winter’ (2019) describes how Putin’s worldview is deeply coloured by grievance, a sense of betrayal by the West, paranoia about internal dissent and nostalgia for the empire. Ukraine, with its democratic aspirations and cultural independence, represents a threat not just to Russia’s strategic depth but to Putinism itself.

To frame all of this merely through Trump’s bluster, however, is to miss the larger point. This is not simply about one man’s ego or another’s ambition. It is about whether the post-1945 order, in which borders are meant to be inviolable and might not always make right, still holds. For Europe, that order has been hard-earned. For Ukraine, it is existential.

For the Biden administration, military support to Ukraine was seen as a bulwark against an allegedly revanchist Russia. The Trump administration, by contrast, has framed the war as a distraction from domestic woes, a distant quarrel not worth American treasure.

Putin’s insistence on addressing the ‘root causes’ hints at what any future peace will likely involve: concessions. Whether that means Ukraine giving up Crimea, accepting permanent neutrality or halting its EU and NATO ambitions remains unclear. But for Zelenskyy, even discussing such matters feels like betrayal. His presidency was forged in defiance in standing up to an invasion that was meant to collapse the Ukrainian state in days. Any deal that smacks of appeasement would undercut everything his country has endured since.

Historically, peace deals crafted under duress rarely last. The 1938 Munich Agreement, which handed Hitler the Sudetenland, bought only months of peace. More recently, the Minsk agreements signed in 2014 and 2015 after Russia’s earlier incursions into Ukraine were violated almost as soon as the ink dried.

Ukraine’s own history complicates the narrative further. In World War II, parts of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, especially the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) under Stepan Bandera, sought to resist both Nazi and Soviet forces, aligning tactically with the former. Bandera’s legacy remains deeply divisive: in western Ukraine he is seen as a freedom fighter; in Russia and parts of eastern Ukraine, as a fascist collaborator. Putin’s propaganda machine has exploited these ambiguities to the hilt to frame the Ukrainian state as ‘neo-Nazi’ in its essence.

Wars of this magnitude are rarely solved through summitry alone. Ceasefires require verification. Withdrawals demand monitoring. Trust, once broken, is hard to rebuild. Ukraine’s options are not infinite. The war has drained its economy, displaced millions and shattered infrastructure.

As Trump sees it, wars are not won by principle but by deal-making. A version of the Trump Doctrine involves carving Ukraine by ceding Crimea and parts of Donbas to Russia in return for a ceasefire, NATO withdrawal guarantees and access to Ukraine’s vast mineral reserves.

It is no secret that Ukraine sits atop enormous stores of critical minerals - lithium, rare earths, titanium - resources that will define the green and digital economies of the next century. Western firms are already courting Kyiv for long-term access. Trump, with his businessman’s mindset and a Rolodex of extractive industry allies, views peace talks as the start of a resource negotiation, with American companies rewarded for ‘reconstruction’ and ‘stabilisation’ rights in whatever rump Ukraine remains.

He will likely bypass traditional diplomats in favour of loyalists and emissaries like Erik Prince or Jared Kushner. The venue could be Mar-a-Lago, the Vatican or Camp David, wherever the optics suit. What matters to Trump is the ‘win.’ If Putin plays along, Trump can boast of having ended a war “Obama and Biden couldn’t.”

But if a Trump-brokered deal cements Russian territorial gains and opens up a scramble for postwar profits, the cost could be far greater than diplomatic embarrassment. It will mark the formal end of the American-led world order with a handshake, a press release and a limp promise to “make peace great again.”

(In our concluding piece tomorrow, we look at how Trump hopes to replicate his peace-by-deal instincts in the killing fields of Gaza, where the script is older, the stakes higher and the illusions more costly.)