Trump approach to end Ukraine war echoes his deal with Taliban
Trump’s cut-off of military & intel aid to Ukraine as he seeks warm relations with Russia has disturbing similarities to his approach in 2020 to Afghanistan, when he cut a deal with the Taliban.
The comparison is not perfect. But there are similarities to how Donald Trump approached negotiating a deal to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan in his first term as president, and how he is approaching trying to end the Russian war on Ukraine now in his second term.
In 2019-2020, Trump’s envoy opened negotiations with the Taliban, cut the western-backed Afghanistan government out of the talks, and in February 2020 signed a deal with the Taliban agreeing to the full withdrawal of U.S. and foreign forces from Afghanistan the following year in exchange for the Taliban’s pledge to prevent Afghanistan being used as a base for international terrorism. Joe Biden inherited the U.S.-Taliban deal when he became president in 2021, withdrew the last remaining U.S. military forces on a slightly adjusted timetable--and then took the political blame when the Afghan government rapidly collapsed and the Taliban took over Kabul just weeks later, in August 2021.
Since returning to office in January, Trump has opened talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, offered Russia numerous up-front concessions – from saying that Ukraine should not be allowed to join NATO, would probably not get back all the territory Russia has seized; to conspicuously voting at the United Nations last week with North Korea, Russia and Belarus against a UN resolution condemning Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And now, disturbingly, Trump has ramped up coercive pressure not on Russia, but on Ukraine—most notably the decision this week to cut off U.S. military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine.
“We have taken a step back, and are pausing and reviewing all aspects of this relationship,” Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Waltz told journalists at the White House this morning.
“I just got off the phone…with my counterpart, the Ukrainian National Security Advisor,” Waltz said. “We are having good talks on a location for the next round of negotiations, on delegations, on substance….I think we’re going to see movement in very short order.”
CIA Director John Ratcliffe similarly confirmed the suspension of US intelligence-sharing and military assistance to Ukraine, and credited it with pushing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to issue a conciliatory statement yesterday expressing Ukraine’s desire for negotiations that would lead to a just peace.
“President Zelenskyy put out a statement that said, ‘I am ready for peace, and I want President Donald Trump’s leadership to bring about that peace,’” Ratcliffe said in an interview with Fox Business today. “And so I think on the military front and intelligence front, the pause that allowed that to happen, I think will go away. And I think we’ll work shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine, as we have, to push back on the aggression there.”
Waltz earlier today suggested that Trump was still looking for more from Ukraine before he would consider lifting the pause in military support.
“I think if we can nail down these negotiations and move towards these negotiations, and in fact, put some confidence-building measures on the table, then the president will take a hard look at lifting this pause,” Waltz said in an interview with Fox & Friends.
Neither official suggested any additional pressure that the United States was considering imposing on Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and has been continuing to fire Iranian-made drones and missiles at Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure most every night.
Trump bullies Ukraine, not Russia, for concessions
It remains to be seen if the Trump administration is willing to exert pressure on the Russian side after it has dramatically imposed it on the Ukrainian side to get them to the table, said former US Ambassador to Poland Daniel Fried.
“The way I suspect [Trump administration officials] think of it, ‘we’ve got to push Zelenskyy down and get him into a box so that then we can turn and deal with the Russians,’” Fried, now a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council, said. “And if they slow walk it, then we’ll turn the heat up on them.”
“Now, the trouble is, we are suggesting to the Russians--and I think the Kremlin will play it this way--that we really don’t have much use for pressuring them, it’s all on Ukraine, which means our clever tactic may not be so clever at all,” Fried said. “And I am hoping that they rethink this and don’t put themselves in a weak tactical position, allowing the Russians to play us. But that’s what they seem to be doing.”
“I hope they rethink this fast, because their position is defensible if, having received this letter from Zelenskyy, they now turn and push the Russians,” he said. “But to continue the pressure on Zelenskyy… risks encouraging the Russians to jerk them around.”
Former US Ambassador to NATO Robert Hunter also said there was merit in Trump resuming talks with the Russians. But then he needs to bring in the Ukrainians and Europeans, he said.
“Trump understands, unless you deal with Russia, you can’t stop it,” Hunter said in an interview. “But having done the initial talks [between the US and Russians in Saudi Arabia last month]…then you have got to bring in the Zelenskyy people right away. And he’s got to bring in the Europeans right away.”
“So now you have a situation in which you need to go through with talks, but you need to have everybody at the table who has to be there,” Hunter said.
If a peace agreement is reached, “you can put in peacekeepers from all sides. But then you need to have security guarantees, … de facto , as well as de jure…backed up by the United States,” Hunter said. “If the United States doesn’t back it up, it’s a zero.”
“The only thing that can work in dealing with Russia is American power, full stop,” Hunter said.
European powers, however, are increasingly expressing uncertainty they can count on America to provide that back-stop.
‘The future of Europe cannot be decided in Washington or Moscow’
“I want to believe that the US will stand by our side, but we have to be ready for that not to be the case,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in an address today. “We need to be able to recognize the Russian threat and better defend ourselves in order to deter such attacks.”
“The future of Europe cannot be decided in Washington or Moscow,” Macron said.
“Why is Trump only helping Putin?” former conservative British member of parliament and veteran Tobias Ellwood wrote in evident astonishment on Twitter today in response to Trump administration officials confirming the U.S. cut-off of military and intelligence aid to Ukraine. “This strategy won’t bring long term peace in Europe. It simply emboldens the bully.”
Trump’s puzzling ‘strategic surrender’ to Russia
Trump’s approach to the Russia-Ukraine war to date has been “a policy of rapid, unilateral concession of long-held positions on fundamental interests to persuade the aggressor to stop fighting,” Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), wrote in an analysis on Feb. 24. “The established name for such a policy…is ‘strategic surrender.’”
The Trump administration is “accepting a series of escalating Russian demands without extracting any quid pro quo except the promise of an end to the war on terms that Russia dictates,” he wrote.
“In his book The Art of the Deal, Trump wrote, ‘the worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead.’ This is precisely what Trump is doing, and the consequences are just as he describes, enabling Russia to steadily raise the price it extracts for agreeing to stop fighting,” Gould-Davies wrote.
“Strategic surrender has always been a policy adopted by states facing total defeat and occupation,” he wrote. “America has initiated a diplomatic version from a position of great strength. If it continues on this course, it will become less secure. The reason America has chosen it is profoundly mysterious.”
We are still in the midst of seeing what results from Trump’s efforts to try to end the Russian-Ukraine war. But a common element of his approach to date in both the Afghanistan and Russia/Ukraine cases seems to be his inclination to cut a deal with the more powerful adversary fighting the weaker US ally, who Trump seems to view with disturbing hostility, and whose continued existence he seems willing to sacrifice.
(Photo: U.S. Pres. Donald Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House in Washington, Feb. 28, 2025. Mstyslav Cherno/AP.)
**