Reality Bites
Why President Trump’s attempt to sell Ukraine out failed—and what it says about geopolitical reality
If President Trump and his administration haven’t yet managed to sell Ukraine out, it certainly hasn’t been for lack of trying.
Indeed, Trump and his administration have offered concession after concession to Putin while pressuring Kyiv to accept terms favorable to the Kremlin. Only Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s obsessive pursuit of maximalist war aims and obstinate unwillingness to accept anything less than complete Ukrainian capitulation have kept Trump from consummating his sellout. Trump longs to hand Putin a substantive victory, attempting to hand the Kremlin a dismembered and geopolitically neutered Ukraine that Moscow would be able to easily dominate. Putin doesn’t just reject these terms—he launches intense air strikes against Ukrainian cities after his conversations with Trump, seemingly in a bid to humiliate the American president.
With his extremely grudging admission that this war may be harder to end than he imagined—and that Putin may not be as interested in peace as he assumed—Trump has begun to learn the hard way that the world does not work the way he or his America First acolytes believe. Putin has made a mockery of Trump’s attempts to sell out Ukraine, just as Hitler did to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s efforts to appease the Nazi dictator before World War II. In apparent response to Putin’s recalcitrance, Trump announced a scheme where NATO allies would purchase arms outright from the United States to then give to Ukraine and threatened to slap comprehensive tariffs on Moscow if Putin does not cease and desist by September.
It's important to recognize that Trump hasn’t had some sort of epiphany on the war in Ukraine, much less a Damascene conversion to internationalism and the value of American involvement overseas. His specific policy shifts on Ukraine have been grudging and convoluted at best, and he remains unalterably sympathetic to Putin for reasons known only to him. Even Trump’s recent tariff threat gives Putin fifty more days to mount offensives against Ukrainian positions while delaying harsher sanctions working their way through Congress.
More to the point, though, these moves occur in the context of an overall foreign policy that can best be classified as solipsistic and belligerent. The Trump administration simultaneously asks America’s European allies to spend more on defense and buy American weapons to give to Ukraine while fighting an irrational, unjustifiable trade war with the European Union and, worst of all, throwing America’s credibility as an ally into severe, existential doubt. To say that this zero-responsibility approach to foreign policy doesn’t add up would be something of an understatement; the whole somehow manages to be less than the sum of its parts.
Trump may have been mugged by geopolitical reality in this particular instance, but don’t expect him to learn any real lessons about international affairs—not that he’s capable of learning. It's far more likely that Trump will persist on his isolationist foreign policy path moving forward. Indeed, when he announced the Ukraine arms purchase deal with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump once again noted that an ocean separated the United States from Europe—with the heavy implication that the United States didn’t need to be directly involved in the continent’s security.
As welcome as the Ukraine arms deal may be, then, it transpires amidst Trump’s wider effort to renounce American responsibilities in Europe and elsewhere around the world. It’s reminiscent of the first great renunciation of the 1920s, when the United States under the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations refused to take up any real security responsibilities in Europe after World War I—much less any broader international responsibilities that came with America’s immense national power. The United States instead acted mainly as a debt collector, indefatigably insisting that its wartime allies pay back their loans in full—a tall order for France, which understandably insisted on a punitive peace with Germany in the absence of security guarantees from the United States. The end result was a jerry-rigged political and economic order in Europe, one that worked well enough until it faced the pressures of the Great Depression and collapsed like a house of cards.
As Americans learned at great cost in the first half of the twentieth century, when the United States spurns the considerable responsibilities that come with great national power, no one else can or will take them up. Trump seems to believe that the United States can wield its power without any real responsibility and still achieve the same results—if not better ones—as the foreign policy pursued in some way, shape, or form by his predecessors over the decades.
The logic, insofar as can be discerned, is that other countries will step up as the United States steps back. But it’s far from clear that other nations can replace the United States and the resources it brings to bear on international problems ranging from security to foreign assistance and disaster relief. Without the catalyst of American involvement or, at minimum, funding, other countries may well prove less eager to make substantial contributions of their own to a particular cause—even when it directly impinges upon their own national interests and security. Alternatively, erstwhile American allies may try to plug the resulting gaps but fail to succeed given generally fewer available resources and significant challenges involved in mobilizing them effectively.
It's not that other nations will or won’t step up in the absence of a responsible United States—it’s that they most likely can’t do so, at least not in a way that functionally recreates American power and influence in the aggregate.
Suffice it to say that this state of affairs does not advance American interests or safeguard liberal values around the world. It can lead to a stable equilibrium of sorts, albeit a fragile and disadvantageous one where the United States and its long-standing allies are all worse off than we were before. A second American renunciation of international responsibility will ultimately result in a less stable and more dangerous world, one increasingly dominated by dictators and hostile to American interests—a specter that ought to remind us why the United States embraced a panoply of international responsibilities in the first place.
Our current foreign policy course will lead to slow decay and quite possibly disaster, like it did in the 1920s and 1930s. The worse things get—and the more visibly worse they get—the deeper Trump and his acolytes will retreat into isolationist fantasies. We’re already seeing this animating impulse in Trump’s Golden Dome missile shield, an attempt to escape from the terrifying realities of the modern world. Technology promises to achieve what mere policy cannot and allow the United States to hermetically seal itself off from the rest of humanity with few repercussions: the ultimate gated community, if only in theory.
Approaches like Trump’s America First impulses, along with progressive notions of “restraint,” attempt to deny the reality of a world fundamentally changed in profound and permanent ways by constant and unabating advances in technology, science, and industry over the course of the past century and a half. They remain blind America’s enduring national interest in the peace, security, and freedom of Europe and the Pacific—and no foreign policy can possibly secure an essential interest it cannot recognize.
But reality tends to bite back, and bite back hard—as we’re only beginning to discover. Trump may not learn much from experience, but the rest of us can’t let these lessons about the way the world actually works pass us by. And one lesson stands out above all others: active, ongoing American involvement overseas remains the best way for the United States to protect itself and its interests in the world that actually exists.
Trump’s ongoing attempt to abdicate any and all American responsibilities in the world crashed into its first major shoal in Ukraine. He will receive further muggings by geopolitical reality moving forward, and he’ll undoubtedly learn very little from them. But that’s no excuse for the rest of us, who will witness first-hand the folly of foreign policy solipsism and the value of vigorous American involvement overseas—albeit mainly through its glaring absence.
Or as President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it in an August 1938 address at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada:
We in the Americas are no longer a far away continent, to which the eddies of controversies beyond the seas could bring no interest or no harm… The vast amount of our resources, the vigor of our commerce and the strength of our men have made us vital factors in world peace whether we choose it or not.
That will be the hardest lesson for all of us to learn, if only because it will have been so utterly unnecessary.