U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump’s time window for action on the Ukraine conflict is short. His list of options is not long. He boasted before the election that he’d have the conflict solved in 24 hours. His campaign hyperbole can be forgiven, but he has raised expectations that a solution is at hand.
Trump has his work cut out for a range of reasons. A narrowly framed set of transactional proposals is likely to fall flat. Only a willingness to countenance a grand paradigm shift in regional and, indeed, global security could deliver on the hopes of peace upon which, in part, Trump rode to electoral success.
This calls forth a willingness to engage in statecraft in the grandest terms. It also requires an acceptance of the end of American omnipotence, and with it the era of unipolarity.
Little time for decisive action
After his inauguration on Jan. 20, Trump will have a small window for decisive action. A few days ago, before Christmas, Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban asserted that Europe had lost the war in Ukraine despite its attempts to deny it. He didn’t say “the West,” and didn’t mention the United States.
Orban is creating a rhetorical window in which the incoming Trump administration can act decisively to change the trajectory of the conflict and, perhaps, bring it to an end sooner rather than later. It’s a rhetorical window because in this formulation, Orban’s adversaries in Brussels and other Western European capitals (Paris, Berlin, London, etc.) can be blamed for the defeat and humiliated accordingly. Meanwhile, the U.S. — a key player behind the war as trainer and hardware supplier to Ukraine’s military — can wash its hands of the debacle.
In this political/rhetorical configuration, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy can also be blamed for the loss, despite the U.S. providing unprecedented levels of aid. The argument would be that Zelenskyy was given exorbitant levels of support but squandered it through bad decision-making, ignoring the advice of the collective Western military command and failing to get on top of rampant corruption.
The quicker Trump can act the less likely he will be tarred with the brush of Biden’s failure. That’s the optics anyway.
The time window for Trump is, however, short. Delayed actions and a continuation of the conflict amid ongoing U.S. support makes the failure Trump’s as well. It is now increasingly clear, except for Ukrainian diehards and their backers, that Ukraine is losing the ground war. All but the most ideological also recognize that Ukraine has no chance of turning the tide. Russia is winning the war of attrition, and in all likelihood can continue its sustained march towards the Dniper River and, perhaps, beyond.
Vladimir Putin has from time to time spoken of “Novorossiya,” echoing sentiments of those in Moscow who have been increasingly hard-line on the imperatives of bringing Odessa and other regions west of the Dniper back into Russia. The longer the war goes on the more likely Russia will expand further westward.
Various ideas have been flagged by those close to European leaders, and to Trump — including his Ukraine attache Keith Kellogg — as to what a cease-fire-cum-peace proposal might look like. Europeans are talking about a NATO “peacekeeping force” securing a no-man’s land along a frozen combat line. This idea of a freeze simply won’t fly with the Russians, and is fanciful in light of the realities on the ground.
They all speak of improving Ukraine’s negotiation position, though it’s hard to see how this can realistically be accomplished. The rhetoric seems to be baked-in but increasingly hollow.
Options
If Trump’s time window is small, his action window is as well.
• He could of course escalate the conflict, to mark a difference from the approach of the Biden administration. He has, according to leaks, claimed that he would have bombed Moscow in response to the special military operation. True or not, any escalation now would run counter to Trump’s public rhetoric. So, on face value, this would be unlikely. (Congress could, of course, seek to push Trump toward escalation, indicating some of the domestic challenges Trump is likely to encounter from the outset.)
• He could try some form of persuasion to bring about a cease-fire as a prelude to peace talks. Trump has threatened intensification should Putin refuse to come to the table, but this seems to be hollow talk given the parlous state of the U.S. military production system.
Putin is unlikely to respond to what is likely to be a Trump bluff, and so the attritional war will continue, with Oreshnik missiles underpinning Russian confidence.
• Trump could offer to accede to Putin’s stated terms to get the parties to the table — that is, that the four Donbas Oblasts are forfeited (Crimea also), that Ukraine forswears its ambitions to join NATO and that it constitutionally enshrines neutrality forever. This would be the minimum necessary to initiate talks and would clearly signal a Western defeat. That being the case, will Trump do this and run the risk of being tarred with the brush of military defeat?
New security architecture
Russia has every reason to be skeptical about promises from the West, including the U.S., in light of the admissions from Merkel and Hollande of duplicity over the Minsk agreements, and the role of the UK and U.S. in scuppering the Istanbul peace talks in the spring of 2022. Russia is on the front foot militarily and is in a position to continue to grind its way to what it would consider total victory.
In this context, the proposed security agreements between Russia and the U.S. and between Russia and NATO (proposed by Russia in late December 2021), are likely to be put firmly back on the table. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov admitted as much in a recent expansive interview. This will be a bitter pill to swallow, for Europeans and the U.S. establishment.
Times call forth the statesman?
Trump badly wants to wash his hands of the Ukraine debacle, and Putin knows it. The rest of NATO are petrified at the prospects of facing Russia on their own, even though their actions strongly suggest that they don’t really believe Russia is a direct threat to any of them. (If they believed that, they wouldn’t be resisting Trump’s demands for increased defense spending.)
Trump must move post haste to avoid being ensnared in the mess. For this to work in terms of a prompt and positive reaction from Russia, he needs to throw Europe (Brussels) under the bus and move on. Otherwise, the defeat in Ukraine won’t just be NATO’s under Biden’s watch; it will also be Trump’s.
The domestic and transatlantic reaction is likely to be apologetic. If Trump seeks to negotiate a peace in narrow transactional terms, the chances of success are slim. If he is to stare down the neocons who continue to bay for war in Europe and Asia, he will need to rise above not only the fray but also his own self-brandished identity as a transactional wheeler-dealer.
To win the multipolar peace, Trump will need to acknowledge that the U.S. and the collective West have been beaten, and the era of unipolar primacy is over.
For this, Trump will need to become a statesman par excellence.
