I don’t say this often, but let’s give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt.
During Trump’s instantly infamous Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky last week, the Ukrainian president was determined to make one point above all: that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not to be trusted. Again and again, Zelensky noted that Putin has a long record of breaking promises. “Twenty-five times he broken his own signature,” Zelensky explained in clunky English. “Twenty-five times he broken cease-fire.”
Zelensky kept returning to this point because he knows Putin’s paper promises are worthless. Putin has made it very clear that he wants to reclaim as much of the old Soviet empire as he can get away with, which is why he invaded Georgia in 2008, turned Belarus into a vassal state, refused to remove troops from Moldova, annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched a full-blown invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
As Putin once put it, “Russia’s borders do not end anywhere.”
Trump’s response to Zelensky? Putin didn’t break any promises while Trump was president.
This is the key to Trump’s entire understanding of the war. If he were president, he always says, the war never would have happened.
So let’s give Trump the benefit of the doubt and assume Putin would never violate an agreement brokered by Trump while Trump is in office.
So what? National security operates on a longer timeline than a single presidency.
One reason Germany was incorporated into NATO and the European Union was to ensure that it would never again threaten the continent or the world. Another was to ensure that the Soviet empire would not expand further into Europe, beyond the Eastern European states it occupied at the end of World War II. And the time frame of this alliance wasn’t just as long as Harry Truman or German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer remained in office. The time frame was as long as necessary.
Similarly, our European allies are scrambling to adapt to an international order in which America can no longer be relied upon, but not because they fear an imminent invasion of Poland or the Baltic states. What they’re concerned about is the long run.
Indeed, Putin might love a deal allowing him to keep much of what he’s stolen—and the Trump administration has already said it’s fine with that—and prepare for another stab at taking all of Ukraine and maybe more a few years down the road.
Trump doesn’t care about down the road. He wants to be able to claim he achieved peace in the short term. If Putin invades Ukraine again on January 20, 2029, that’s not his problem. In fact, he might even like it: He could point to it as more evidence that Putin would never invade the country while Trump was president.
This is how Trump thinks about politics, international and domestic alike. He cares less about serious, lasting policy than what he can take credit for immediately.
One popular theory for Trump’s dislike of Zelensky is that the Ukrainian leader failed to help him tarnish Joe Biden’s political prospects in 2019, which became the subject of Trump’s first impeachment. Trump just wanted the Ukrainians to say Biden was under investigation for corruption and let him handle the rest. As an inducement, he threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine even though it had been appropriated by Congress.
Trump’s second impeachment revolved partly around a similar plea to Justice Department officials to, “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” In both cases, the talking point was more important to Trump than the truth.
This is the context of his maneuvering to “end” the war in Ukraine. He wants to be able to say he delivered peace; he couldn’t care less whether it’s a durable peace. He just wants the talking point.
His foreign policy team understands this, which is why administration officials scoff at the idea of providing Ukraine with actual security guarantees. “Everybody is saying security guarantees to secure the peace,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday on ABC News’ This Week.” “You first have to have a peace.”
Rubio once understood how deterrence works. As he put it in 2015, “Vulnerable nations still depend on us to deter aggression from their larger neighbors. Oppressed peoples still turn their eyes toward our shores, wondering if we hear their cries, wondering if we notice their afflictions.”
He endorses a backward notion of deterrence now because he wants to help Trump secure a talking point, not a lasting peace.
Zelensky isn’t an obstacle to peace; he’s an obstacle to a talking point. And Trump and company hate him for it.
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