The U.S. is Surrendering a War It Isn't Fighting
By throwing in the towel on Ukraine, Trump is setting a dangerous precedent
U.S. President Donald Trump has set Thanksgiving (November 27) as the deadline for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to give an answer on the 28-point deal negotiated between American and Russian officials to end the war. The proposal, made without Ukrainian or European input and heavily slanted in the Kremlin’s favor, requires Ukraine to cede territory to Russia, accept limitations on the size of its armed forces, and ends war crimes prosecutions. It would amount to Ukraine’s capitulation. Zelenskyy has framed the choice ahead of him as deciding between Ukraine’s “dignity” or losing a “major partner,” i.e., the U.S. While it’s not clear yet which direction Zelenskyy will go, the U.S. has already stated its position: it has capitulated to Russia, without doing any fighting.
According to Reuters and the Washington Post, the Trump Administration has threatened that it will cut off intelligence and stop facilitating arms sales to Kyiv if Zelenskyy doesn’t accept. (Under Trump, the U.S. stopped funding Kyiv’s weapons buys.) The message to the Kremlin is unambiguous: we’re tired of this war, we don’t want to get more deeply involved, and it’s time to move on. Countries usually negotiate their surrender if they have lost huge numbers of people and materiel. Here, Trump is simply threatening to abandon an ally because he thinks that the U.S. has fatigue.
Accepting Ukraine’s surrender would be a huge strategic defeat for the U.S. Had Ukraine lost quickly in 2022, the U.S. probably wouldn’t have suffered much reputational damage. However, nearly four years later, the U.S. has spent over $30 billion dollars to defend Ukraine against Russia, an adversary of the U.S. As a superpower, the U.S. would be signaling weakness by dropping an ally out of boredom and showing that Russia, an adversary with a fraction of the economy of the U.S., can push it around. (It’s unlikely that Trump understands any of this. He seems more motivated by Ukraine’s territorial losses, which only have happened after Russia sustains heavy casualties.)
Should the U.S. force Ukraine to surrender, U.S. allies would no longer trust Washington and U.S. adversaries would be emboldened. The loss of Ukraine would make it much more likely that China would invade Taiwan. U.S. allies like Poland and Japan might seek nuclear weapons to deter Russia and China since Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 for security guarantees from Moscow that it broke in 2014. (The new 28-point plan also says that Russia and Ukraine will conclude a “non-aggression” agreement.)
Trump has criticized President Joe Biden’s 2021 chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, a process which he himself set in motion by agreeing to a peace deal with the Taliban in 2020. However, that poorly-executed withdrawal happened after the U.S. had been sustaining casualties and spending far more resources in a war lasting nearly 20 years. In Ukraine, Trump would be washing his hands of a conflict that the U.S. has lost no troops in and spent 0.08% of its GDP on each year for less than four years. Who will ever trust the U.S. again?
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