There’s only one word to describe Trump’s negotiations with Russia: appeasement
In what by now looks like a pattern, in his most recent phone call with President Trump, Vladimir Putin again rejected the White House ceasefire — and again piled up still more preconditions before even considering one.
Perhaps still more important in the long run was Trump’s reaction. So far, the record of the White House’s negotiations with the Kremlin amounts to appeasement — and appeasements tend to lead to more wars. This time, the outcome could be a European conflagration.
Trump and his top national security officials have persistently encouraged Putin by preemptively conceding some of Moscow’s key condition. There shall be no NATO membership for Ukraine, ever. Nor the recovery of the Ukrainian territory seized by Russia since 2014. No peacekeepers either.
When, in the Kremlin’s typical outburst of propaganda lies, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov rejected a European peacekeeping force as “undisguised involvement of NATO countries in a war against the Russian Federation,” he needn’t have bothered. By refusing to commit the U.S. to “backstop” security guarantees for the European peacekeepers, Trump had already effectively vetoed the deployment.
Even “de-Nazification,” one of the Kremlin’s more bizarre official reasons for the invasion, has been, in effect, embraced by Washington. Standing for the ouster of Ukraine’s pro-Western government led by the Jewish Zelensky, Trump’s de-legitimation of Ukraine’s president has been relentless. Zelensky was a “dictator” who would not hold presidential elections (which Ukraine’s constitution suspends in wartime). He was guilty of personally profiting from what Trump called the “gravy train” of U.S. assistance. The vilification reached a crescendo when, after prolonged castigation, Zelensky was accused of “disrespecting the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office.”
Having pocketed the freebies, the Kremlin dictator demanded that Ukraine be left defenseless and effectively blind: no weapons transfers from the West, no "rearmament" of the Ukrainian army, the end of the military draft and no battlefield intelligence sharing.
Putin is certain to expand his menu at the summit in Riyadh. He will insist on the U.S. recognition of Russia’s annexation of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, the latter three of which Russian does not even fully control militarily. Already bruited about is U.S. acquiescence to Moscow’s insistence on resurrecting the framework of the 2022 Istanbul talks as the basis for the “peace deal.”
Rejected by Kyiv even in the desperate first months of the Russian invasion, the draft effectively turned Ukraine into Russia’s defenseless protectorate: subject to Russia’s veto in the conduct of its foreign policy and security policies, nearly disarmed, and banned from to seeking the West’s assistance either in weapons or troops.
These are among the key “root causes” of the “conflict,” which Putin, in last week’s press conference, hinted at as pre-conditions for a cease-fire in response to Trump’s proposal — and it looks like they, too, will be met. “I think we will be using that framework as a guidepost to get a peace deal done,” said Steve Witkoff, one of Trump’s top negotiators.
On a roll, the Russian dictator could further push to revive his 2021 demand that NATO withdraw soldiers and weapons from the eastern and central European member states. Trump cannot force other alliance members to comply but, given his record, he may well grant Putin’s wish unilaterally by withdrawing the U.S. security guarantee. Believing as Trump does the Kremlin’s canard that the invasion was caused by the promise of NATO membership to Ukraine, one can almost hear the U.S. president declaring, “I’m not going to go to war with Russia over Romania!”
Conveniently, he can effect the change without formally violating Article 5 of the NATO Treaty: while an attack against one member state is considered an attack on them all, each member is to take such action as “it deems necessary,” including — but not necessarily requiring — the use of armed force.
Shorn of the U.S. protection and facing a newly resurgent and aggressive Russia, at least some of the post-1997 member states could try to mollify Moscow by declaring “neutrality,” or even quitting NATO, and returning to Moscow’s “sphere of influence” 34 years after the end of the Soviet Union.
Would Putin stop here? He might. Yet we also must consider the possibility that, in a rush to exploit the Trump presidency’s gift that keeps on giving, Putin might attempt to fatally weaken NATO by challenging the alliance to its first war.
The most vulnerable targets are Estonia and Latvia. Only lightly defended, they are the only NATO member states on Russia’s borders — and, along with Lithuania, the only former Soviet republics that have joined NATO. Invariably among the top “unfriendly nations” in Russian public opinion, they are “traitors.” And traitors, Putin opined, are worse than enemies and must be “crushed.”
A pretext can always be found. Moscow “saving” the ethnic Russians — over one-fifth of the Estonian and Latvian population — from non-existent “repression” and a bloody riot may do the job.
Of course, Putin would not want a protracted conventional war with NATO, which he is bound to lose. If the alliance does not buckle under, even if the U.S. washes its hands of Europe, Putin would be ready to follow the “escalate to de-escalate” doctrine by resorting to nuclear blackmail: an all-out war or an “overall peace settlement” that would spell “permanent neutrality” for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — and render NATO a humiliated paper tiger.
Trump still has the option of reversing course by helping Ukraine to force an increasingly strained Russia to negotiate a real, fair and lasting truce. Yet if the U.S. president persists in furthering Ukraine’s capitulation disguised as “peace,” Washington may see the fulfillment of Churchill’s prophecy in the wake of Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich deal with Hitler: "You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.”
Leon Aron is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is “Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War.”
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