To safeguard U.S. interests, the next president must be clear-eyed and tough on how Russia will try to exploit negotiations.
As President-Elect Donald Trump prepares to seek a negotiated settlement to the worst European war since 1945, he confronts in Russia a counterparty with real bargaining power. Over the three decades since the end of the Cold War, Russia has become a serious international player, with greater military-industrial capacity than Europe and one of the world’s largest land armies, as well as the world’s second-biggest nuclear arsenal. Russia has also been coordinating its Ukrainian war effort with Iran, China, and North Korea, creating in effect a New Eurasian Axis.
The peace talks are set to begin at a time when, despite American and European military assistance to Kyiv, Russian forces are advancing westward and Ukrainian resistance is close to its breaking point. As Ukraine’s former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba told the Financial Times recently, “If it continues like this, we will lose the war.”
Although many in the Republican Party question the fact, the United States has a major interest in Ukraine’s survival and a durable settlement. With the biggest population of any Eastern European country aside from Poland, Ukraine has significant mineral resources and is a major agricultural exporter. Though impoverished by war, the country has also developed an impressive defense-tech sector.
If Russia succeeds in its aggression, the Baltic states would be next in line. Russia may also have interfered in Romania’s recent election in an attempt to install a pro-Kremlin president. In short, there is no reason to expect Russian ambition to halt at Ukraine’s western borders. Trump has expressed skepticism about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but the best way to prevent Moscow from testing the treaty’s Article 5 mutual-defense clause is to preserve an independent Ukraine. Even so, the U.S. negotiating team must learn from history that Russia does not negotiate in good faith, but sees diplomacy as a way to freeze rather than resolve a conflict, to build military leverage, and to split allies.
If the U.S. is to end the Ukraine war in a way that satisfies American interests, it must counter Russia’s strategy and build military, as well as economic, leverage over Russia. This will require not just surging aid to Ukraine and tightening the sanctions regime, but also imposing costs on Russia and its allies across Eurasia, including in Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific region.
The process will be tense and risky. Washington must ensure that Kyiv avoids the trap of a mere cease-fire and reaches a settlement that can endure. In America’s favor is that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s position has been weakened by the sudden collapse of his client Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. That is a weakness Trump must now exploit.
Western diplomats tend to view fighting and talking as entirely distinct; when they begin negotiations, they typically set out a minimum viable position first and then make preemptive concessions as tokens of good faith. The Russian tradition of strategic thinking approaches diplomacy quite differently. From the Soviet Union’s earliest years, Moscow viewed warfare and political action, including diplomacy, as unitary. Negotiations are just another tool to improve one’s political position; the objective, as with military operations, remains the enemy’s subjugation, or at least its exhaustion.
Moscow’s negotiators seldom see talks as a route to a genuine, durable settlement, at least not initially. Instead, by controlling the pace of negotiations, Russian diplomats seek to wear down their adversaries psychologically. They are also likely to try to divide the U.S. from its allies.
This approach has a clear Cold War precedent. In Korea and Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its partners stalled negotiations, insisting on the most pedantic points, accusing the U.S. of bad faith, and starting with outlandish demands that, if the U.S. were to satisfy them, would have amounted to capitulation. After the mid-1960s, the Soviets understood the extraordinary risks of a general war with NATO. Exploiting its relative strength in the mid to late ’70s, the U.
