Donald Trump and the Failure of Policy in Ukraine

As Donald Trump’s presidency continues, I get more and more worried, perhaps especially about foreign policy.  He is bad domestically, but I am hopeful we can overcome the problems he is causing here.  The damage he is causing in foreign affairs seems greater.  I don’t know why he is doing what he is doing, but here are some possibilities:

1. He a zero-sum kind of guy. 
2. He thinks almost everybody has played us for suckers and has taken advantage of us. 
3. He is very thin-skinned, and he thinks people are out to get him.¹  Also, he seems to take it personally when people disagree with him (especially on a deal he wants to get done).
4. I am not sure how much history he knows, but I fear it is not enough.  History does not repeat, but knowledge of history does inform.
5. Government is different than business; making agreements between countries is different than making agreements between companies.  I don’t think President Trump understands this.  He thinks deals are deals.  They aren’t.²

So, what has happened while Donald Trump says he is trying to end the war in Ukraine (aka the War of Russian Aggression)?  Because President Trump has seemed to decide that the way to achieve peace is to beat up on Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelenskyy³ and suck up to Vladimir Putin,⁴ countries from Canada to Europe to South Korea have begun to doubt the reliability of the United States as an ally.  President Trump would probably say that these countries have just been taking advantage of us, so who cares.  In any case, this has resulted in, inter alia:

• Canada has wondered whether it should reconsider its decision to buy F-35 fighter jets from the United States and instead buy Gripen fighter jets from Sweden.  After all, if Trump would cut off deliveries of military supplies to Ukraine and stop haring intelligence with Ukraine in the middle of a war, should other countries trust us enough to buy weapons from us?  Would we cut them off from further deliveries or spare parts when they needed them?

• There is growing sentiment in South Korea that they need to develop their own nuclear weapons.  North Korea has nuclear weapons.  Up until now, the United States has protected South Korea with its nuclear weapons, but South Korea is wondering if we are still trustworthy.  Some South Koreans think they need nukes of their own.^4.5  (It’s hard to see how that will make the world a safer place.)

• Europe has not been carrying its share of the load in buying insurance, i.e., spending for defense, against Russia since the Cold War ended.  But instead of working to get Europe to pay more for the joint defense, Trump has made the U.S. seem so unreliable, that leaders all over Europe say Europe needs to build its own defense capabilities.  So, Europe will have a complete set of defense industries, and we will, too.  Which means we will be duplicating each other, which will be more expensive than if we did it together.  That is wasting money.  It was dumb on the part of Europe for not doing more before.  It is dumb on our part for not working with them now.

In general, President Trump is a smart guy, but in at least one way, he is naïve.  He thinks he knows how to make deals, and he may know to do that in business – but he doesn’t in government.  President Trump knows about negotiating real estate deals and financing agreements and construction contracts, but negotiating agreements between countries is different than negotiating deals between companies.  Because government is different than business.  And I don’t think he understands that.  He has very good political instincts, but I don’t think he has good government instincts.  And he definitely doesn’t have good international relations instincts,

In addition, I worry that President Trump’s apparent ignorance of history and his focus on the here and now, means that he will make serious mistakes in making with other countries.⁵  President Trump does not have the background and historical knowledge you need to be able to negotiate a good deal.  He may think, based on what he sees in front of him, that he can trust Vladimir Putin.  But that is not the way governments work.  That is not the way countries work. 

Neville Chamberlain apparently thought he could trust Adolf Hitler.  Joseph Stalin may have thought he, too, could  trust Adolf Hitler (or he knew he couldn’t but he didn’t pay attention to the signs as to how quickly Hitler would double-cross him).  In spite of his speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Angela Merkel apparently thought she could trust and work with Vladimir Putin, and she seems to have still thought that even after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Governments and countries are more than just individual leaders.  Then-candidate Trump said Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if he had been president.  Now-President Trump may say that Putin won’t attack Ukraine again while he is president.  Even if that is right, what happens when President Trump leaves office and Putin (or somebody just as bad as him) is still there?  Because it’s not just Trump’s term that counts.  It’s beyond that, too.  Any peace agreement (or ceasefire or whatever) is not just between two people; it needs to be between countries and needs to last longer than just one person’s time in office.

In real estate deals or financing agreements, it could be that the people on both sides pretty much think alike.  That is not true in agreements between countries.  In his book Battlegrounds, former National Security Adviser General H.R. McMaster talked about strategic narcissism.  Things are not all about us.  The other side has agency, too.  And the other side is not a just mirror image of us, thinking like us and wanting the same things we do.

The other side is different from us.  You have to assume it will think differently than us.  It will want different things and will have different values than us.  In order to reach an agreement, we need to understand the other side; we need to understand these differences.  And we not only have to understand how they look at things; we also have to look at ourselves from their point of view.

Robert McNamara and his “whiz kids” didn’t understand this about Vietnam.  They were smart, but they didn’t understand North Vietnam.  They didn’t understand how the North Vietnamese were different than us.  Perhaps most importantly, they didn’t understand how and why the North Vietnamese thought differently than us.  They assumed the North Vietnamese were like us and would respond to the things like we would.  That was totally wrong.  The North Vietnamese were different than us.  They wanted different things; they had different values; they had different time frames.  The failure to understand this is why the Johnson administration did so poorly in Vietnam.

This is what I am worried about with respect to President Trump and Ukraine.⁶  I am not sure President Trump understands that Vladmir Putin thinks differently than we do and wants different things than we do.^7,8  I wonder if President Trump is trying to look at the war in Ukraine the way Putin does and from Russia’s point of view.⁶  I worry that President Trump doesn’t understand that the Russians are different than us.  He doesn’t have the historical knowledge and ability to understand the Russians or Putin (or the Ukrainians, for that matter).  Without that knowledge and understanding, President Trump isn’t going to get to a deal that works and lasts.

UPDATE (3/28/25 2:20 pm):  I wrote this last Tuesday but was unable to post it then, which is fine because since then we have seen more examples of the incompetence of the Trump administration foreign policy team.  I’m not talking about the so-called scandal of the discussion on the Signal app about the attack on the Houthis in Yemen.  That was a stupid mistake, but people shouldn’t be fired for one mistake.  The only thing that could be a scandal is the unwillingness of the Trump people to admit it was a mistake.  But not many Presidents or administrations are willing to do that.

In fact, the most unfortunate thing about “Signalgate” was that it took attention away from the so-called negotiations regarding the war in Ukraine.   These negotiations have showed the real problem with President Trump’s approach to foreign policy.  By beating on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President Trump got him to agree to a 30-day ceasefire proposal.  It was unclear how much help that would give Ukraine.  After President Zelenskyy agreed, President Trump talked to President Putin.  President Putin effectively said no to President Trump’s 30-day ceasefire proposal.  But President Putin knows how to play President Trump, so he said he was willing to agree to a 30-day ceasefire for the Black Sea.  That sounds good, but it would be more for Russia than Ukraine.  Ukraine, even without a navy, has used drones to force the Russian fleet out of Crimea and into the eastern Black Sea and has been able to resume its export of grain from its Black Sea ports.  The Black Sea ceasefire that President Putin wants will help Russia export more, not Ukraine.  And to agree to even this, President Putin wants significant relief from western sanctions.  Did or has President Trump or his team pushed back at President Putin on any of this?  I don’t think so.  President Trump made a comment about President Putin dragging his feet on the negotiations, but President Trump said he has done in real estate deals.  And that seems to be about it.  (See here and here, among others.)  This is nothing like what President Trump did to President Zelenskyy after that meeting in the White House.  And this is not a real estate deal.  It's different.  In any case, it is unclear to me whether anything has come into effect (the Financial Times reported yesterday that the European Union had rejected Russia’s demands for sanctions relief⁹) – or what its effect will be.

All of which demonstrates the kind of lack of historical knowledge, experience in negotiating with foreign governments (especially Russia) that I was talking about in the post.  It is assuming Russia and Vladimir Putin are like us and want what we want.  They aren’t like us.  They don’t think like us.  And they don’t want what we want.  Until and unless the Trump administration starts to realize this, our policy will fail.
--------
¹ On the other hand, after the 2020 election, his opponents did try to bankrupt him and put him in jail.  I realize they thought this was appropriate and was a result of applying the law equally to everyone, but I think I can safely say, he did not agree.
² While it is not a main point here, he also does not understand economics.  Among other things, trade in goods is not the only kind of foreign trade.  There is trade in services and in investment.  They all matter.  Also, trade cannot be equalized between the United States and each individual country around the world – without making everybody poorer.
³ In part because President Zelenskyy disagreed with some of the proposals President Trump was suggesting.  See point 3 in the list above.
⁴ By, inter alia, repeating Vladimir Putin’s charges and claims as facts when they are just wrong.
^4.5 "Nuclear arms race feared as doubts deepen over US atomic umbrella," Financial Times, March 26, 2025. 
⁵ He already did that with the agreement he entered into in the agreement he entered into in March of 2020 with the Taliban.  It was, in effect, a surrender agreement.  While the Biden administration did a poor job in following through on the agreement, the end result was never going to be good because the agreement was bad.
⁶ And much of the rest of President Trump’s foreign policy.
⁷ The basic difference is that President Trump wants fighting to stop, which he inaccurately defines as peace.  (Peace is a lot more than just the absence of fighting.)  Vladimir Putin wants victory. 
⁸ I do not think the Biden administration understood this either.  They were always talking about gradually increasing the pressure on Russia and making sure Putin had off-ramps.  Gradualism is what failed in Vietnam.  And Putin didn’t want an off-ramp.  He wanted to win.
⁹ Henry Foy, Christopher Miller, and Max Seddon, “EU rebuffs Russian bid to link ceasefire with sanctions relief,” Financial Times, March 27, 2025.
UPDATE (3/28/25 11:10 pm): Added footnote 4.5 and cleaned up some wording in the first Update above.
UPDATE (4/15/25 10:20 pm): Deleted repeated words in point #2.