What Trump 2.0 Means for Ukraine and the World

Donald Trump assumed office on Monday with the stated intention of ending the war in Ukraine. A longtime critic of NATO—an alliance that Ukraine hopes to join—and an admirer of Vladimir Putin, Trump has worried supporters of Ukraine who think he may force the country to make severe territorial concessions. (Many of Trump’s allies in Congress have already tried to end the military aid that the Biden Administration consistently offered Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in 2022.) More broadly, Trump spent much of the transition period alternately mocking and threatening U.S. allies such as Canada and Panama, including refusing to rule out militarily occupying the Panama Canal. He also speculated about annexing Greenland.

I recently spoke by phone with Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, about what Trump’s foreign policy might mean for Ukraine, and for the world. Wertheim is no fan of Trump, though he is a so-called realist in matters of foreign policy: he is skeptical of American military action abroad and a critic of what he considers the open-ended commitment that the Biden Administration offered Ukraine. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Trump’s approach to foreign policy may be different than it was in his first term, whether the West is in part to blame for Putin’s attack on Ukraine, and whether the U.S. can ever really offer Ukraine sufficient security guarantees.

For people like you who have had concerns about the shape of the American commitment to Ukraine, what is your hope about what a new Presidency could usher in?

This is not a prediction, but it’s an opportunity to lift the taboo that unfortunately arose quickly after Russia’s full-scale invasion, on seeking a diplomatic settlement to the war, and hopefully to resolve the conflict within a short amount of time. This is especially appealing at this point, given that it’s hard to argue that Ukraine is in an advantageous position. For people like me, who have been supportive of aiding Ukraine but critical of the relatively unconditional way in which the Biden Administration went about it, the opportunity now is to find a way to end the conflict that ends up being in the United States’ best interest and hopefully Ukraine’s best interest, too, given the realities that Ukraine faces.

I never thought that this conflict was going to end in a complete Ukrainian territorial victory—in other words, in Ukraine being able to retake all the territory that Russia seized from it, whether that’s going back to the pre-February, 2022, lines or to 2014 [when Russia took Crimea and areas of eastern Ukraine]. And, in fact, neither did many officials in the Biden Administration. So I think already, with the victory of Trump in the election, this political taboo on a discussion about how, realistically, this devastating conflict could come to an end has been lifted. That said, I am quite concerned that it’s going to be very hard to find a durable settlement.

You mentioned the somewhat “unconditional” support that Biden offered Ukraine. But many Ukrainians and some critics of the White House would say that Biden’s support didn’t go far enough: he ruled out deploying American troops or making any direct attacks on Russia. Many times in the past two years, the White House has taken a long time to authorize certain things, such as the transfer of fighter jets or whether Ukraine can use U.S. weapons to strike inside Russia. On both of those things, and on many others, the White House has eventually gone along. But is it fair to say “unconditional”?

The better word, I think, at least publicly, is “deferential.” The Biden Administration has had a publicly deferential approach to Ukraine when it comes to matters of war aims and war termination. So you’re absolutely right that when it comes to specific requests that Ukraine has made, like setting up a no-fly zone early in the conflict or requests for any number of weapons systems, the Administration has clearly said no to some of those, or it said, “Not now; maybe later.”

But the Administration has also not pressured Ukraine into seeking negotiations, and in fact has maintained that really it would somehow be illegitimate for the United States to pressure Ukraine into a negotiation, that this is really Ukraine’s fight. And it has avoided contradicting Volodymyr Zelensky’s maximalist war aims, which have included taking back all Ukrainian territory lost to Russia. To be perfectly clear, that is a completely fair and just goal. It’s just one that seems unachievable, at least without direct NATO military involvement in the conflict, which is not in the offing.

You recently wrote, “Trump’s outlook has an inviting quality. It indicates that although he may have important ideas and instincts about international relations, he has few set plans and abides by few orthodoxies.” What did you mean?

I was referring to what I called Donald Trump’s philosophy of history, which is “We’ll see what happens.” This is his answer to Barack Obama’s long arc of history that bends toward justice.

Trump’s not a big M.L.K. guy.

No, he’s not. But I was trying to give advice to foreign governments. There’s going to be a particularly wide set of possible policies that this Administration could adopt. If you look at some of the personnel that have been appointed so far, some seem like fairly traditional advocates of American global military primacy. Secretary of State designee Marco Rubio, for example, seemed like a pretty straightforward neoconservative figure when he ran for President against Trump, in 2016. On the other hand, you have the Vice-President, J. D. Vance, and some of the appointees for the Defense Department, who seem more interested in completing the so-called pivot to Asia and drawing down U.S. military commitments in Europe, and possibly in the Middle East, but, in any case, in trying to focus the United States more rigorously on the challenge from China.

I wanted to tell allies in East Asia that perhaps their interests would be better realized if the United States intervenes less militarily around the world and adopts more of a focus on Asia. It’s clear that Trump has many different personas when it comes to foreign policy, and they contradict each other, right? One of them is Trump the China hawk, the guy who likes “peace through strength.” But then there’s Trump the aggrieved nationalist, who seems to want to get into conflicts with just about anybody, including allies. But Trump does have another persona in there, which is Trump the dealmaker and the peacemaker, and we saw an expression of that persona—we didn’t see much of it, frankly—in his first term. And I was quite critical of Trump’s foreign policy in his first term, but we might see more of it in the second term.

He may not have a clear vision, but I can’t imagine him ever saying that he really likes his Western European allies. I can’t imagine him ever speaking well of NATO. I do wonder about the strength of any peace deal in which the U.S. President making it has no credibility. Ukraine is going to need a security guarantee, but we know there’s no way Trump wants to offer security guarantees, nor would he be fully trustworthy on any security guarantees that were on offer. Trump’s attitude, which has been consistent, toward this area of the world would seem like a problem for any peace deal.

Well, that is already a problem for the NATO alliance as a whole. But you’re right. One way things could go is Trump basically selling out the Ukrainians and deciding he’s sick of this war, and he doesn’t want to aid them. Maybe he doesn’t even get a deal, but he goes to the Europeans and says, “It’s your problem. You figure it out.” And what we get is Russia fully completing a conquest of Ukraine.

I don’t think that that’s a likely outcome because even Trump would know that politically such an outcome would be damaging to him. He would not look strong. And he himself criticized Biden for the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which Trump put in motion. So he seems to understand that that kind of outcome is not a positive one. Nevertheless, I share that concern.

But the question of security guarantees for Ukraine has always been a difficult one. It would’ve been a difficult one had Biden or Harris won the election, too. Because the fact of the matter is that the United States and NATO as a whole have not come to the defense of Ukraine when it has been attacked by Russia. The alliance did not do that after 2014, and it hasn’t done that after 2022. And, in fact, when President Biden took the use of force off the table even before Russia’s full-scale invasion, that was one of the least controversial aspects of his policy toward this war. So the idea that the United States, whether under Trump or a more conventional President, was going to make a commitment to come to the direct military defense of Ukraine in the future always suffered from a credibility problem.

That said, I do think Ukraine will need some form of security guarantees. Something that the Biden Administration already offered last summer was essentially to formalize the relationship that the United States has had to Ukraine through this war, which is to say that if this war ends and Russian reinvades, the United States would again aid Ukraine through the extensive kind of support that we’ve provided. That’s a highly credible form of guarantee because the United States has done it before. And it doesn’t suffer from some of the problems in offering Ukraine NATO membership, which could be provocative to Russia.

Even if Ukraine doesn’t get NATO membership, if it were to receive a NATO-style security guarantee, the Russians would actually have an opportunity to shatter the Article 5 commitment across the entire alliance by testing it in Ukraine and showing that the alliance was not serious about defending Ukraine or that only some members of the alliance were willing to take that step. [Article 5 states that an attack on one member state of NATO is essentially an attack on all member states, and must be defended collectively.] So I think the optimistic case would be that perhaps we end up roughly where we either would’ve ended up or should have ended up had a Democrat prevailed in the past election.

Is there somewhat of a contradiction between saying that Biden has offered pretty unconditional support to Ukraine and what you said in this last answer, that the U.S. has basically shown that it won’t come to Ukraine’s defense if attacked, and therefore we already have somewhat of a credibility problem?

Forget the term “unlimited” or “unconditional.” What I’m trying to say is that the Administration was remarkably deferential toward the Ukrainian government when it came to war aims and war termination. Even on the question of NATO membership, although I don’t think that the Biden Administration wanted to see Ukraine join NATO, certainly not while the war was ongoing, the Biden Administration also did not shoot down that idea. In fact, it promised in the most recent NATO summit, hosted in Washington, this summer, that Ukraine had a brightly lit bridge to membership, and that Ukraine’s future in NATO was “irreversible.” I am concerned that some in Ukraine, including at high levels, think that NATO membership is the solution for Ukraine and actually think that it is a realistic outcome. I don’t think that would’ve been the case even if the Democrat prevailed in the election.

So, your argument is basically: Look, we shouldn’t invite Ukraine into NATO because we’ve already shown that we’re not going to send Americans to die for this conflict.

Yeah, that’s a central part of the argument, right? If you think about what the United States did to make its commitment during the Cold War to West Germany credible, we’re talking about stationing huge numbers of forces in West Germany, and nuclear weapons. And right now the people who favor Ukraine joining NATO sooner rather than later aren’t talking about that at all. So I’m really concerned about the kind of magical thinking that has developed around the NATO commitment: this idea that a mere piece of paper is sufficient to provide deterrence against a Russia that’s clearly aggrieved and aggressive and has a decent chance of trying to invade Ukraine in the future.

That’s totally fair, but I think that if you asked most Americans whether U.S. troops should defend Latvia in a war, they would say no. They probably don’t know that Latvia is part of NATO and that we are, in some sense, committed to defend Latvia, and that that’s the whole point of a collective-defense alliance.

You’re totally right. But this is a problem for NATO, and for countries like Latvia. Because, from a Ukrainian perspective, they’re saying, “Why did these countries right next to us get into NATO and we didn’t? After all, we’ve just been fighting the Russians. Don’t we deserve it?” And they do deserve it. If the question is about who deserves it—yes, sure. The fact is that the entire NATO alliance needs to take a fresh look at how it provides deterrence and defense going forward against Russia. When we admitted Latvia, along with six other countries, in 2004—go back and read the entire Senate debate over this seemingly solemn commitment. It’s a very short assignment. Senators virtually gave no consideration to whether the United States would or should come to the defense of those countries. This was the end of history, so they thought that once those countries were in NATO, the problem would never arise. And now we’re actually confronting this new reality; on top of which, we have Donald Trump coming into office for the next four years.

My argument is that Europe has a greater interest in defending European countries against Russia than the United States does. That would be true even if not for current political dynamics in the United States. That would be true even if not for the fact that the United States is overstretched trying to manage a whole range of security problems across the globe. So really we should be transitioning to European leadership of European defense.

In 2022, before the war began, you wrote of “how tragic and ironic it would be if war were to occur because Russia feared the highly unlikely possibility of Ukraine joining NATO and the United States refused to foreclose this possibility which would not be in its interest anyway.” Given how far Putin has been willing to go, do you think that if we had foreclosed that possibility, then the invasion wouldn’t have happened?

I think it depends on when that possibility would’ve been foreclosed. Had we never gone down the road of attempting to bring Ukraine into NATO, starting with the 2008 attempt by George W. Bush—which ended in this bizarre compromise in which NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia would join NATO, but then took no steps to actually bring that about—I think it’s plausible that the war that we’re seeing today would not have happened.

That’s not a certainty, because I agree with the counter-argument that Russia and Putin have imperialistic designs on Ukraine that are to some degree separate from the question of whether Ukraine would join a U.S.-led security alliance. If President Biden had taken NATO membership off the table in the lead-up to the full-scale invasion of February, 2022, that may not have been sufficient. At that point, I think Putin had decided on the invasion. And I think this decision was probably made about a year or six months before the invasion.

What have you made of Trump’s recent rhetoric around Panama and Greenland? I’m wary of spending too much time on these kinds of pronouncements, but it does feel different listening to him talk about foreign policy now than it did in 2015 or 2016.

On one level, it doesn’t seem that different from what Trump has said before. He’s even expressed designs on Greenland before. I’ve always read Trump as sort of vacillating between an attempt to dominate other countries and a desire to withdraw from them. I think what may be different this time is more of a spatial conception of what matters to Trump. So what do Greenland, Canada, and Panama have in common? They’re arguably within the Western Hemisphere. His Secretary of State is also somebody who is keenly interested in the Western Hemisphere. We may be seeing this kind of assertion of the Monroe Doctrine that is accompanied by skepticism of military entanglements in Europe and to a lesser extent the Middle East.

Trump sounds to me confident, emboldened. He’s overcome a lot to win the Presidency again. And I think he’s also seen that, on a number of issues, he was initially received by the American political system as way outside the zone of legitimate discourse, and he’s led that system toward him. In his first term, he led the American national-security state, despite all the quarrels on other issues, toward cutthroat competition with China. He has also made the use of tariffs and industrial policy and protectionism a bipartisan endeavor. So he probably believes that when he asserts something and goes after it, he has the ability to bend the political system to his will. ♦