The bosses are considering a deal. Last week Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin talked privately by phone about the fate of Ukraine. Trump had indicated beforehand they would chat about “dividing up certain assets” in that country. Then Volodymyr Zelenskiy was told how the bosses planned to manage the violence, to rein it in a bit. The underbosses worked on the details this weekend in Saudi Arabia. Peace is promised but slow walked.
Anger at Trump’s deference towards Putin runs deep in Ukraine and across Europe. Amid this understandable reaction, it can be difficult to see the many sources of Trump’s conduct towards Ukraine. It all seems very patronal and personalistic. But Trump’s disposition emerges from a movement and coalition that explains his actions in much larger ways.
The first set of explanations is geopolitical. Trump’s stance towards the Ukraine war is a disinhibited expression of America First. Ukraine’s fate is not a vital interest of the United States. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special adviser on Ukraine, articulated this indirectly to the Washington DC foreign policy establishment recently. “President Trump has committed to the American people that he will put the interests and security of our citizens first, and he will keep our nation out of endless wars.” US involvement in Ukraine, he implied, was a case of “imperial overreach”.
This sentiment is not new, but it resonates in today’s America, and, to his supporters, justifies Trump cutting Ukraine off from US aid.
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There are other geopolitical rationales. Trump’s loud complaint to Zelenskiy in the Oval Office – “You’re gambling with World War three” – voiced his anxiety about the heightened risk of nuclear war from the Biden administration empowering Ukraine to attack deep into Russia.
It’s true that Russia almost used a nuclear weapon in October 2022. In the Trump camp and beyond there was genuine fear that a US-Russia proxy war over Ukraine could trigger nuclear devastation.
Some Trump foreign policy officials have long argued that the US needs to aggressively pivot from containing Russia to confronting China. Indeed, China hawks in the Trump administration, such as Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz, believe that Russia could be a potential partner in the US effort to contain China. Trump likes this “reverse Nixon” idea, of a bold leader (guess who) uncoupling Russia and China.
A second explanation for Trump’s Ukraine policy is ideological. JD Vance’s Munich security conference speech articulated the new ruling ideology, a populist conservative backlash against contemporary liberalism. Combining deeply conservative Catholic thinkers such as Patrick Deneen, from Notre Dame University, and techno-futurist libertarianism, from Silicon Valley, this creed sees “liberal elites” everywhere, suppressing free speech, mocking people of faith and plotting to replace rooted ethno-nations with “parasitic migrants”.
Liberalism, Deneen argues, has morphed into a radical leftism of “gender ideology” and “wokeness”, or DEI for short. Put differently, traditional white patriarchal privilege must be reasserted.
This new ruling party ideology justifies the disturbing attacks on US government and non-government agencies in Washington DC by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge). The dramatic firing of employees from USAid, the US government’s development aid agency, not only endangered millions dependent upon its medical programmes in Africa and elsewhere but stopped life-saving projects in Ukraine, the largest recipient of USAid funding.
The push to dismantle the US’s foreign media network, the Voice of America, is justified by the claim that it promotes “radical leftist” propaganda. The US Institute of Peace, a non-profit organisation, has been forcefully occupied by Doge.
This self-sabotage of US soft power is stunning, a gift to authoritarian states everywhere. Caught up in the ideological war between “woke liberalism” and “populist conservatism”, Ukraine is a bystander victim, opposed out of spite because it is seen as a cause of Biden and liberals. Many populist conversatives go further and ideologically identify with Putin’s Russia.
The third driver of Trump’s Ukraine’s policy, though, is personalistic. In pursuing peace in Ukraine, Trump is fulfilling a campaign promise. But he is also seeking vindication and revenge. He believes Putin would never have invaded if he were president. His view is that Biden’s weakness, especially the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, invited Putin’s action – and only he can make peace because he has Putin’s respect. That he is doing so by forcing Ukraine to accept a Russian-dictated peace is the price Zelenskiy has to pay for favouring Biden down the years.
But Trump being Trump, he is also working transactional angles, with opportunities for enrichment. The minerals deal allows him to present himself as getting something for the United States for all its aid to Ukraine. This plays into his favourite narrative: he is putting an end to the rest of the world ripping off the United States.
But there is also talk about American ownership of Ukrainian energy plants and rumours of sweetheart deals for well-placed Americans, should the US and Russia normalise their relations.
Finally, it is well known that Trump covets the Nobel Peace Prize. Obama got it for nothing, he thinks: he should get it for a great peace deal.
Trump’s embrace of Putin, and abandonment of Ukraine, are not particularly popular with the American public. People, though, are preoccupied with the economic precarity brought on by Trump’s tariff policies and slashing of public sector jobs, and an unfolding constitutional crisis. Thus, the Trump administration is likely to enjoy considerable latitude in its dealings with Russia and Ukraine for the immediate future. But the European Union and Ukraine have lots of agency too. One consequence of the US’s exit from hegemony under Trump is that any dictated big boss peace will not work. No more Yaltas. Geopolitics is different now.
Gerard Toal, a professor at Virginia Tech, is the author of Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe
