Will a Second Trump Administration Bring Peace to Ukraine?

The Deep States still holds major influence.

In certain non-interventionist and foreign policy circles, the re-election of Donald Trump on Nov. 5, 2024, provided a glimmer of hope for the prospects of bringing the Russo-Ukrainian War to a close.

On the campaign trail, then-candidate Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours. After over two years of conflict that has resulted in the combined deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian troops, it’s high time that this war be wrapped up.

Though fulfilling lofty campaign promises is not so simple. After all, ending DC’s perpetual wars is a different ballgame. Trump’s Cabinet appointments illustrate this frustrating feature of American politics.

The nomination of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to be Secretary of State is concerning. Since being elected to the Senate in 2010, Rubio has been an energetic booster of conflicts abroad. With respect to Russia, he was keen on the idea of sending long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) to Ukraine after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. He said to CNN at the time:

I think we should send them anything they need to reclaim their territory, to the extent that we have it available, and it is reasonable. I think the concern some would say is that the longer-range missiles could target deep inside of Russia and trigger a broader conflict. I’m not sure I’m as troubled by that.

The very ATACMS Rubio pushed for sending to Ukraine would later be used in the middle of November after President Joe Biden gave Ukraine the green light to launch long-range missile strikes against targets deep inside of Russia.

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Trump’s nomination of Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) to be his National Security Adviser should also worry foreign policy restrainers. While Waltz’s views about the U.S.'s funding of Ukraine has changed over the course of conflict, Waltz revealed during a Fox News appearance that he held a productive meeting with outgoing National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. He boasted that the Trump transition team is working “hand in glove” with the Biden administration.

“For our adversaries out there that think this is a time of opportunity that they can play one administration off the other, they’re wrong, and we are — we are hand in glove. We are — we are one team with the United States in this transition,” Waltz stressed.

Trump’s decision to name Sebastian Gorka as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counter terrorism is another sign that the administration is not particularly serious about rolling back the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. In a recent appearance on The Times Radio, Gorka called on Trump to use the threat of increasing military aid to Ukraine as a tactic to bring Russia to the negotiating table. He called Putin a “murderous former KGB colonel” and said that Putin must “negotiate now or the aid that we have given to Ukraine thus far will look like peanuts.” In Gorka’s view, “that's how he will force those gentlemen to come to an arrangement that stops the bloodshed.”

Making matters worse, Trump named Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg to serve as the Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia. Kellogg is an unabashed Russia hawk who in a 2023 appearance on Fox News said that the US should focus on “evicting the Russians from Ukraine”, which includes expelling Russian forces from Donbas and Crimea. Moreover, former CIA analyst and current Vice President of the America First Policy Institute Frederick H. Fleitz teamed up with Kellogg to previously craft a plan to end the Russo-Ukrainian conflict back in April. The plan consists of a ceasefire on the current front lines, compelling the authorities in Russia and Ukraine into peace talks, and continued delivery of weapons to Ukraine if it agrees to implement a ceasefire and enter peace talks. If the Russians do not agree to a ceasefire and peace negotiations, the U.S. would dial up its delivery of weapons to Ukraine.

From the looks of it, a second Trump administration will not be dovish towards Russia. Like most of his generational cohort, Trump has a mindset that centers around American primacy. In a multipolar world, where the U.S. will have to make more concessions abroad to emerging regional powers, such a prospect may seem embarrassing to American leaders. So there will naturally be resistance to the idea of rolling back America’s commitments abroad.

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We already saw this play out during the first Trump administration. Despite his promises to change the foreign policy status quo of yesteryear, Trump nominated all manner of establishment politicians, who ended up derailing his promises to mend ties with Russia. Under Trump’s watch, the U.S. pulled out of the Open Skies Treaty and INF Treaty, while also supplying lethal military aid to Ukraine and attacking Russian military contractors in Syria. Further, Trump signed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), the toughest sanctions imposed on Russia. In sum, Trump was more than willing to go toe-to-toe with Russia in a way that was no different from the rest of the DC blob.

Let’s be brutally honest here, the Fleitz/Kellogg proposal is something that the Russians would never agree to. For one, why would the Russians freeze their current military campaign while Ukraine continues receiving military aid? As the previous Minsk protocols demonstrated, agreements that pause conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but don’t fully address Russia’s security concerns, will only allow Ukraine to buy time to reconstitute itself and launch offensives against Russia further down the line. For Russia, such a scenario would be unacceptable. Instead of going through another set of pointless, drawn-out negotiations, Russia will likely opt to resolve this conflict on the battlefield.

Vastly increasing military aid to Ukraine will do nothing to change the outcome on the battlefield, as Ukraine’s manpower is depleting at breakneck speeds while Russia continues making gradual territorial gains. After well over two decades worth of attempts to integrate with the West and have its security concerns respected, Russia may just give up and pursue more maximalist aims in Ukraine. A hypothetical Trump plan to have Ukraine escalate against Russia will further convince the most hawkish elements of the Russian political class to go deeper into the country and annex key regions such as Odessa, thereby rendering Ukraine as a dysfunctional rump state that is largely dependent on Western largesse just to keep the lights on.

At this point, Trump and co. should have the humility to acknowledge that Project Ukraine has been an abject failure. From there, they should halt all military aid to Ukraine, give up on any aspirations for Ukraine joining NATO, and have Europe start to assume more control of its security affairs.

Given how wedded DC’s ruling class is to the moribund corpse of unipolarity, this is perhaps too much to ask for.

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