John Jefferson
President Donald Trump’s announcement of upcoming talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine unleashed a torrent of alarmist reactions, some borderline hysterical, from the usual hawkish quarters in Europe and America. Trump should ignore these reactions and press ahead with his peace initiative.
Several European politicians feigned surprise at Trump’s phone conversation with Putin last week and expressed dismay that they hadn’t been consulted. Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock stated that the call came “out of the blue”—as if she hadn’t caught wind of Trump’s long-stated position in favor of negotiating with Putin to resolve the Ukraine war. Her counterparts from the UK, the Netherlands, Poland and other countries joined her in insisting that no deal on Ukraine can be made over the heads of Ukrainians and Europeans.
The former prime minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, set the tone by implying, not too subtly, that President Trump is a modern-day Chamberlain, and that his peace initiative will lead to another “Munich,” a tired trope with which the hawks always try to discredit any talks with adversaries as acts of dishonorable appeasement.
Though clichéd, the over-wrought parallels with Chamberlain’s appeasement toward Hitler are serious and in some quarters effective. They are designed to paint Trump as a weakling and a dupe who will inevitably be played by Putin. The only way to prevent that, in this logic, is to push Trump to desist from the pursuit of serious negotiations with Moscow even before they have started and revert to a default maximalist stance.
The comments last week from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suggesting that Ukraine will not join NATO and will have to accept a loss of captured territories as a price for peace further incensed politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. A number of senior Democratic lawmakers and the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Kaja Kallas, among others, accused Trump and Hegseth of giving up leverage before talks even started. Kallas, by vowing that Europe would obstruct the implementation of U.S. concessions, encouraged Ukraine to reject Hegseth’s proposal.
Kiev may be persuaded by such arguments, but Washington should be confident in the legitimacy of its new approach. To begin with, the EU had a chance to launch its own peace initiative way ahead of the Trump administration. The rationale for such an initiative, from a European point of view, was and is strong. While Ukrainians are fighting admirably, the long-term battlefield trajectory is favorable to Russia. Moreover, there is increased war fatigue among not just Ukrainians but across the continent, with a majority of Europeans supporting a negotiated end to the war. Resolving the war, especially if accompanied by sanctions relief on Russian energy, would yield considerable economic dividends, boosting European competitiveness and freeing up resources for Europe’s cherished welfare model.
Yet since the Russo–Ukrainian War began, the only European leader who consistently spoke in favor of peace negotiations with Russia—Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban—has been ridiculed and ostracized for allegedly overstepping his boundaries. Orban has long been at loggerheads with Brussels over domestic governance issues, but the Ukraine issue intensified the rivalry. While Orban has tried to open a space for diplomacy between Moscow and the West, none of the stream, “respectable” EU leaders dared to envisage any path forward other than a relentless and quixotic pursuit of a total military victory over Russia. These leaders are in no position to lecture Trump, since their own policies have been such an abject failure.
Nor do accusations that the U.S. has given up leverage over Russia before the talks hold water. Hegseth’s admission that Ukraine won’t be recovering all its territories “is not a concession to Russia but a concession to reality,” as foreign policy analyst Stephen Wertheim recently put it. The same applies to the White House’s opposition to Ukraine joining NATO as part of a peace deal. Critics of Trump should explain why Putin would even contemplate negotiations over something—Ukraine’s potential NATO membership—that he waged war to prevent in the first place. With the battlefield winds blowing in Putin’s favor, what is there to stop him from pressing for further territorial advantage, as indeed his own War Party is pushing him to do?
The actual alternative to the settlement roughly outlined by Hegseth is not a better deal for Ukraine in terms of NATO and full restoration of its territorial integrity—but no talks at all and further Russian advances on the ground. In that scenario, if and when talks eventually happened, Ukraine would find itself in an even worse situation, with more people killed, more land occupied (from the current roughly 20 percent to somewhere between 30 percent and 40 percent), and more infrastructure destroyed.
Accusations of Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine are factually wrong: as part of the president’s vision, the U.S. would continue supporting Ukraine militarily even after a peaceful settlement, in exchange for access to mineral riches. If, however, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, swayed by the Europeans’ promises, rejects Trump’s plans, as he strongly hinted he would do at in his speech at the Munich Security Conference last Friday, the risk is that Ukraine will lose American support, with extremely dire consequences for the country on the ground.
After three years of brutal fighting and hundreds of thousand deaths, Trump’s initiative is a chance for peace, or at least a frozen conflict. If European politicians like Kallas insist on inciting Zelensky to reject the terms outlined by Washington (without offering any realistic alternatives) and to keep fighting on whatever reserves Ukraine still has at its disposal, Trump should make it clear, in blunt terms, that the Europeans are on their own and that the U.S. might even consider abandoning NATO altogether—an option not yet contemplated. Such a warning may move minds in Brussels and push Europe’s War Party toward peace.
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