President Donald Trump has spent a lifetime negotiating. He prides himself on being a tough negotiator. He evidently learned along the way that there is a shortcut to getting a deal quickly — pre-emptive concessions.
That was his approach to ending the “endless war” in Afghanistan. And that is now his apparent approach to ending the war in Ukraine. He has already made significant opening concessions to President Vladimir Putin. The manner of the negotiations is the greatest concession of all, namely conceding the premise that Ukraine is not a sovereign country.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in Washington on Friday to finalize a minerals agreement with Trump, and to press for future American security guarantees. The meeting did not go well, as Trump and Vice-President JD Vance berated Zelenskyy in front of the media. It is revealing that no one thinks it’s strange that Trump will not make security commitments for peace, stability or democracy, but he will make them for commercial reasons. Trump himself implied as much this week, suggesting that Americans would be around to help if they had some mining plays at stake.
Trump opened his Ukraine strategy by talking with Putin by phone and engaging Russian diplomats in Saudi Arabia.
This is all very familiar. When Trump wanted to get American forces out of Afghanistan, he began by committing himself to a hard deadline for same. In a master stroke of negotiating, he then found an opposing party that was only too eager to grant his demand.
It turned out that the Taliban were all too happy to drive a hard bargain on getting American forces to leave the country. So Trump went over the head of the actual Afghan government — which would have preferred American forces to keep the Taliban at bay — and cut a deal. The Taliban got what it wanted — Americans out — in exchange for granting Trump what he wanted — Americans out. The Taliban are accustomed to rather severe deportment, so it was not easy for them to keep from chuckling.
While the Biden administration’s execution of the Trump plan was catastrophic, the eventual outcome had already been conceded by Trump. Thus the Taliban returned, just immediately instead of after a modest pause for good manners.
With Ukraine, Trump has committed himself to ending the war, to permanently ceding occupied Ukrainian territory to Russia, and to no NATO membership. Putin’s biggest challenge will be to conceal his glee, lest he puncture Trump’s inflated sense of diplomatic brilliance.
More than the concessions Trump has offered, the manner of the surrender is certainly maximally pleasing to Putin. In negotiating Ukraine’s fate without Ukrainian involvement, Trump has accepted the foundational premise of Putin’s invasion, that Ukraine is not real country, with no right to its own existence.
That was at the heart of the Oval Office shouting match on Friday, where Vice-President JD Vance — who campaigned for the Senate in 2022 saying, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine” — bitterly accused Zelenskyy of being insufficiently respectful and grateful. Zelenskyy has thanked the United States a thousand times, including last week, even after Trump called him a “dictator.”
What evidently rankled Vance was Zelenskyy’s unwillingness to sit quietly in the corner, meekly accepting his exclusion from determining the future of his own country. Vance considered it effrontery that the president of a country at war, which has sacrificed in blood, might choose to speak truths amidst the cataract of lies that Trump and Vance tell about Ukraine.
Even by Trumpian standards of prevarication, it was quite a week in the Oval Office, with President Emmanuel Macron of France, Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the United Kingdom and then Zelenskyy all publicly objecting to American untruths told about Ukraine.
At the heart of Putin’s aggression against Ukraine is an existential claim, namely that Ukrainians are not a people, that its national identity is subordinate to Russia, and therefore its territory ought to be so also.
Ukraine and Russia share a common spiritual patrimony, dating to the baptism of Prince Volodomyr in 988 — the ruler of Kievan Rus’. At the time, Moscow did not even exist, but Putin argues that in the millennium since, Russia alone has been the spiritual and cultural heir to that heritage, and therefore, as eastern Slavs, Ukrainians properly belong to the Russian world (Russkiy Mir). That view is why other Slavic peoples — Poland notably — were so eager to join NATO.
Thus in deciding to negotiate Ukraine’s future primarily with Moscow, and only bringing Zelenskyy in for a bit of coercive housekeeping on commercial matters, Trump has accepted Putin’s ethno-cultural and spiritual premise.
Putin has brought back the Soviet-era Brezhnev Doctrine, dressed up with icons, chants and fur hats. But while Leonid Brezhnev faced American presidents — LBJ, Nixon, Carter and Reagan — who rejected such imperial claims, Putin — to his astonished good fortune — has found a president who accepts them. There is nothing quite so congenial as negotiating with someone who is already on your side.
What then to make of the Ukrainian mineral deal? It’s a long way down from FDR’s lend-lease to Trump’s demand for postwar booty, but if that is what it takes to maintain American interest, so be it.
Also, agreements with Americans are no longer binding in the traditional sense. Given Trump’s approach of treating trade policy as war, and war policy as trade, he has undermined his own war policy by proving unreliable on trade policy.
Trump may not think threatening blatantly illegal tariffs against Canada and Mexico, in violation of the free trade agreement that he himself signed, affects his foreign policy. But a president who doesn’t hold himself to agreements he has already signed is no longer a master negotiator. Others can play that game, too. In the time it takes to bring Ukrainian minerals to market, it may well be that other parties will not feel themselves bound by agreements with a president who is never bound by his own word.
National Post