Trump's plan for peace negotiations

Hello,

Over the last week we have heard some both dramatic and strange statements from Washington about Trump's plans for a peace process for Ukraine. It's fundamentally an unrealistic plan, so in that sense the outcome is predictable. But it highlights the need for the countries in Europe who actually do care about achieving a good result for Ukraine to define a vision of victory.

Watch the video here or read a transcript below.

Best,
Anders

Transcript:

Over the last few days we've heard more details about how the Trump administration views a peace plan for Ukraine and what types of concessions they believe that Ukraine should make. And Trump also had a phone call with Putin where they talked about the situation in Ukraine for more than an hour and it's been planned that they are going to meet in person in the near future. Trump says that they will meet in Saudi Arabia. The Russians say that they might meet in Saudi Arabia but it might also be somewhere else but they have agreed to meet somewhere and we should expect that the negotiations will continue on a bilateral basis between the presidents of the United States and Russia.

All this has been covered and discussed in the mainstream media so what I want to do in this video is to just add a few reflections about what I think is useful to keep in mind when thinking about all this and what it says about the possibilities of a peace deal and where it leaves Ukraine and Europe. So let's talk about it.

There are so many things that one could say about the things that have come out in recent days. It's the statements from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and from Donald Trump about the concessions that Ukraine must be willing to make, how they will not be able to get their territory back and how the United States will not contribute to providing security guarantees for Ukraine after a peace deal.

I'm not going to go into all that in this video because I think I've covered much of it in other videos and it's also been just the topic of discussion in mainstream media. So I will just say that I think it shows that the Trump administration basically doesn't really understand what's going on. Even though they think they have a plan for how to bring an end to the war in Ukraine, they don't actually have a plan because they don't really know what they're talking about.

But I still think it says something interesting about the kind of process that Donald Trump is envisioning for the coming months, and this process is going to set the tone for the discussions about the war. So that is worth reflecting on. And the first point is that Donald Trump's motivation for wanting peace is basically, well the argument that he keeps making is that he just wants the war to stop. So he wants the shooting to end, so it's basically an argument about the need to end human suffering. He wants Russia and Ukraine to make a deal to stop shooting at each other.

But aside from that it's pretty clear that he doesn't really have any preferences about what that deal would actually say. So Donald Trump does not have any political goals that he wants to achieve with the war. He does not have any particular desired outcomes that he wants to see or any specific conditions that must be met for the war to be called a success.

And that is remarkable because usually in military theory we would refer to Clausewitz, and we would say that war is the continuation of politics by other means. So when there is a war there is always politics. But Donald Trump does not have any political goals with the things that are happening in Ukraine now. So all he wants is for it to end. It just has to stop. So that is interesting.

The second thing to note is that Donald Trump sees the most important players in a peace process as being the United States and Russia. So it's a great power thing where they will have meetings amongst themselves, and then other actors like Ukraine and the European NATO allies they might be consulted at some level, but the real decisions will be made between himself and Putin.

I think there are several reasons for Donald Trump wanting to do it that way. One of them is that since his only priority is that the war stops, then what he sees as the real challenge is how to make the Russians stop. Because he believes that he has the power to dictate the conditions to the Ukrainians, and then they will do as he says as he says. So Trump doesn't really believe that Ukraine has agency in this, and therefore they don't need to be a direct participant in the negotiations.

It's also fascinating that on one hand the Americans say that the Europeans need to take greater responsibility for European security, because the United States do not have the ability or the willingness to continue doing that. But then on the other hand they don't seem to think that the Europeans need to be a part of negotiations about European security, because that's just something that will be dictated by Washington. So there is an interesting disconnect there.

The third thing I will say is that while Donald Trump may not have any real political goals with the war and therefore the war seems pointless to him, then for the Ukrainians and the European countries in NATO, then absolutely they do have political goals with a war. They do have things that they want to achieve and conditions they want met before a peace deal that is made can't be called a success. Because this peace deal will shape the future of European security and the security of their own countries. So for Donald Trump this war is just a matter of inconvenience. It just has to go away. But for the European countries – and in particular for Ukraine of course – it's a matter of national security.

This might sound banal, but the Ukrainians have been fighting this war for three years, because they believe that this is a cause that it's worth dying for. And that's not going to stop just because America has changed its mind. So there is something paradoxical about wanting to exclude the people from the peace negotiations who actually have some skin in the game, and I think it's fair to say that it's not going to work. But it's interesting to try to identify some of the assumptions behind Donald Trump's idea that this is something that he can do.

One of them must be that Donald Trump believes that the role of the United States is bigger in supporting Ukraine than it really is, and that if there is if this American support falls out, then the whole thing in Ukraine is just going to collapse immediately. Because if that were the case, then that would really give him some leverage over Zelensky. But the reality is that European support is already bigger than American support and the Europeans could increase that support even more. And many of the most important weapons that Ukraine uses on the front line are today produced by domestic defense production in Ukraine. So yes it would absolutely be a huge disadvantage for Ukraine to lose American support but it's not like the whole thing is going to fall apart.

The second wrong assumption is that Trump believes that the Russians are stronger than they actually are. There were a couple of months during the fall when the Russian advances sped up on the front line, but they've slowed down again and it's just really minimal gains that the Russians are making right now. And we're also seeing signs that the Russians are really beginning to feel the deficit of armored vehicles, and instead they have to rely on more and more primitive tools for fighting the war. They even just introduced donkeys for logistics on the front line. So the Russian army is really not in a great shape right now, and that means that even if Ukraine loses American support, then it's uncertain if the Russian army can really capitalize on that situation under the current conditions.

So Donald Trump believes that he has so much leverage on the Ukrainians that he can just make a deal with Putin and then tell the Ukrainians what the deal is, and then they will have to take it. But in reality Ukraine has much more agency than that, and if the European countries continue supporting Ukraine, then they might still be able to win the war even without American support. It would take a longer time and it would demand more casualties, but it's not impossible.

The last reflection I will make is that I think what we're seeing right now is probably the culmination of a long period with a lack of a strategic vision for the Western countries regarding the war in Ukraine. On a political level the West just never recovered from the disappointment of Ukraine's failed summer offensive in 2023. The Western countries never managed to agree on a new goal for what they wanted to achieve in Ukraine, and therefore they never defined a coherent strategy.

To simplify things we can say that there are three sides in the war. There's Russia, there's Ukraine, and there's the West which is supporting Ukraine. Russia has a clear idea about what they want to achieve with the war and how they're going to do it. Ukraine has a clear idea about what they want to achieve and has made a plan that they've tried to present to their Western supporters. I've made videos on both the Russian and the Ukrainian plans for victory. But the West just hasn't had a plan, and it's been absolutely unclear what the goal is.

So we've been hearing platitudes like "nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine" and that the West will support Ukraine "for as long as it takes". But it's been very unclear what political goals the Western countries and NATO have had with supporting Ukraine, and what the vision has been for a future security order for Europe that would exist after the war has finished. And I think we've come to a point now where this doesn't work anymore.

It's possible that if NATO had been better at an earlier point at defining the end state for what they want to achieve with supporting Ukraine, then we wouldn't have had the situation now, where there is an American president who goes around and says that he doesn't see the point in supporting Ukraine at all, and that maybe the whole war is just pointless. But at least by now it should be clear to the European leaders that they need to define a comprehensive vision for a future security order for Europe, like what will be a good outcome for Western Europe? And then they have to find out what role Ukraine will have to play in that security order if Europe is supposed in the future to be able to deter Russia from further aggression. And from that it should be possible to derive some conclusions about what political and military end state it's necessary to achieve in the war.

Maybe the final thing I want to say is that I think it's important that we also don't overreact to these new statements from the Trump administration. It's not surprising that they would say some things that are really strange. As I said in my video just after Trump was elected, the interesting thing is not really what Trump says he will do to end the war in Ukraine; the interesting thing is what Trump will actually do when that thing that he says doesn't work. Because Trump doesn't actually have a coherent realistic plan for ending the war.

The point we've come to now is that Trump is going to try implementing those things that won't work. The process over the coming months is probably going to be messy, but what it will lead to is the realization that it doesn't work. And that's when the actually interesting developments will start happening, because that's when we will learn what Trump will actually do, and what the real Ukraine policy will be for the new administration in the White House. And as I said in that video I think it's unlikely that all American support for Ukraine is going to stop. I think it's likely to decline. I think the Europeans will probably have to pay more. But I don't think we're going to end up in a situation where for example Donald Trump will prevent the Europeans from buying equipment from American weapons manufacturers and sending that on to Ukraine. So I don't think Ukraine is going to end up in a situation where they don't have access to American weapons anymore.

Okay I will end it here. If you found the video helpful or informative, then please give it a like. And also remember to subscribe to the channel and click the bell icon to get notifications when I upload new videos. If you want to support the channel, you can subscribe to my newsletter at www.logicofwar.com. Thank you very much for watching, and I will see you again next time.