#WTH Has Trump joined Team Putin?

Or is he playing a longer game?

Is Donald Trump betraying Ukraine?

Let’s back up a bit. I’m not going to review the history of Russia-Ukraine relations, or debate the merits of Ukraine’s government. Rather, let’s talk about Donald Trump, the dynamics at play, and how we got here. For some of this, I rely on the excellent work of two of my AEI colleagues, Marc Thiessen and Frederick Kagan, and two friends at the Institute for the Study of War, General Jack Keane and Kim Kagan.

Vladimir Putin first invaded Ukraine and occupied Crimea in 2014, when Barack Obama was president. Putin’s designs on Ukraine are well-known, and well-documented. He believes Ukraine is intrinsically part of Russia (there are ethnic Russians there, although he has killed them as indiscriminately as he has killed ethnic Ukrainians), and wishes to re-incorporate Ukraine into Russia, part of his vision of a restored Russian empire. Obama declined to provide lethal weapons to allow Kyiv to defend itself. And Europeans were even more feckless, protesting weakly, failing to enforce agreed upon solutions, and sinking deeper into energy dependence on Moscow.

Although Donald Trump was accused of having won the presidency in 2016 with Russian help, and was falsely accused of being a Russian stooge, the first Trump term was the only recent U.S. Administration during which Putin did not invade another country. For whatever reason — possibly Trump’s willingness to arm Ukraine, among other things — Putin feared Donald Trump.

That brief moment ended with the accession of Joe Biden to the presidency. Three years ago, Putin moved again, seeking to take all of Ukraine. But Biden (and the world’s intelligence agencies) were shocked to discover that Ukraine was not for the taking. Eventually, though slowly and reluctantly, both Europe and the United States agreed to arm Kyiv, and to impose strong, though far from crippling, sanctions on Moscow. If you’re interested in an early read on Biden’s day-late-dollar-short efforts to stop Ukraine from losing — but never to help them win — read this piece I wrote in Foreign Policy in 2022.

Three years later, Russia has likely lost hundreds of thousands of men, and Ukraine tens of thousands. Russia occupies just under 20 percent of Ukraine. Ukraine, for its part, has ensconced itself in Kursk, occupying a small sliver of important Russian territory.

During his campaign, Donald Trump said he would settle the Russia-Ukraine war within 24 hours. That was overly ambitious, but the President has proven eager to move things along quickly. How would Trump approach the issue? His rhetoric was, to those who support Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity, worrisome. Although Trump has labeled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “piece of steel,” he has also praised Vladimir Putin as a “genius,” said that “[a]ny deal — the worst deal — would’ve been better than what we have now,” and that “Biden and Kamala allowed this to happen by feeding Zelensky money and munitions like no country has ever seen before.” And that was before his recent war of words with Zelensky.

So how should we think about the most recent turn of events? Has Trump betrayed Ukraine? Is he about to? Is he “raping” Ukraine of its natural resources and prepping to sell Kyiv out to his pal Putin? Or is he playing four-dimensional chess, faking out Putin in order to win Ukraine (and the United States) the best and most sustainable peace possible?

I don’t know. But I have begun to try to think about this issue differently than I did months ago.

Trump and his acolytes’ biggest pre-election complaint about Ukraine wasn’t the war as much as it was the cost of the war to the United States: $300 billion per Trump, though in reality, closer to $160 billion. Still, that’s not chump change. Was the aid restoring the American defense industrial base? Sure. Was it mostly being spent here in the United States? Yes. Was it being stockpiled for a future conflict with China, per the shrewder of Trump’s gadflies? No.

At the same time, Trump and Co. also complained that the Europeans have been freeriding on America’s support for Kyiv, while the EU, not the US, is most at risk from a rising Russia. (This, too, is not entirely correct. Russia, allied with Iran, China, and North Korea is a serious threat to the US.) Trump has asserted, mostly incorrectly, that the EU has given less aid to Ukraine than the US or that most of the aid is loans. Both allegations are false. Nonetheless, it’s clear what’s on the president’s mind.

At heart, however, it was the money question that gave birth to the idea of having Ukraine guarantee its arms acquisitions from the United States with its abundant natural resource assets. Here’s the idea laid out by Marc: Does Trump want Putin to get Ukraine's $26 trillion in gas? Other possibilities include lending the money to Ukraine, collateralized by those same assets, or a lend-lease program, similarly structured. All of that would take the burden of arming Ukraine off the backs of the American taxpayer, theoretically defanging all but the most Russophilic of Trump’s team.

But that was not the deal offered to Ukraine by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Far from it. And in response to the Bessent deal, apparently drafted by a lawyer Bessent found from a billboard on the NJ Turnpike — it included a wholesale transfer of Ukrainian mineral wealth to the United States with no security guarantees in return — Zelensky blew a gasket. No way, he said, in rather sharper tones. Was this smart? Absolutely not.

Zelensky may have had right, morality, and his nation on his side, but a failure to understand how your bread is buttered is a fatal flaw in a leader. Ukraine needs the United States. It needs American arms. It needs American support. And for that, it needs Donald Trump. And Donald Trump, it turns out — who knew? — doesn’t like to be criticized.

Trump’s response to Zelensky, who had already burned bridges by complaining that the United States had cut him out of talks in Saudi Arabia over the future of the war, was to go to DEFCON 1. Zelensky, said Trump, is a dictator. Who has no support. Who caused Russia to invade. Trump then instructed his United Nations ambassador to oppose a UN resolution blaming Moscow for the invasion, aligning the United States with the likes of North Korea.

Hand-wringing, chest-beating, and cries of betrayal were heard from the usual suspects in response. Are they right? Here’s how I am trying to think about this:

Trump leapt on board the minerals concept immediately. He seemed fine with the underlying notion that it would marry Washington to Ukraine’s success in retaining sovereignty over most of its nation. He seemed — though this may have been wishful thinking — fine with the idea Ukraine would buy weapons from America.

And on Europe, he is right that the Euros have been more talk than action, that they are free riders, and that they expect the United States to do more than they expect to do themselves. Only Trump’s genre of shock treatment can wake up a continent sleepwalking into irrelevance—and if that was the goal, it seems to be working. Which is good, because nothing else has.

Trump is also right that the time has come to discuss a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. Whether Americans are tired of war or not is not the point; Americans are not fighting. But polls suggest Ukrainians are also tired, and that the war is becoming unsustainable for Russia. The key question is, on what terms?

In addition, Trump is not crazy to offer Russia empty victories if they give him additional leverage in negotiations. Should Russia be readmitted to the G7 (G8)? The odds are low, and in the event, Putin will gain little. Should Russia be protected from condemnation by the United Nations? No, but then again, as Israel knows all too well, being condemned at the UN is close to meaningless. Should Russia be allowed to cut Ukraine out of negotiations? No, but if nothing happens at the meetings with Russia, what has Ukraine lost?

Of course, there is another read to these events, the read you have seen all over the legacy press and from breathless tweeters and substackers. Trump might be betraying Ukraine, looking for nothing more than a great “deal” to skive off with their precious mineral wealth. He might actually think Putin is a genius. He might believe Ukraine caused the war, and that Z is a dictator. He might be preparing to sell out democracy for a great economic “deal” with Moscow, and he might be abandoning Europe to its own devices.

I hope that’s not true. There will be a steep price to pay for America in aligning itself with tyranny and expansionism. In the meantime, as we wait for the outcome of this Friday’s meeting between Trump and Zelensky, I am at least grateful to have learned something important about foreign policy at this late stage: Joe Biden’s carefully choreographed gestures and symbolism and belabored efforts to “do the right thing” amounted to nothing but camouflage for his abysmal leadership, which resulted in a loss of deterrence, war, and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

If Donald Trump wants to dispense with the niceties of global discourse and cut to the chase, but restores American deterrence, jolts Europe from its somnolence, and ends the Ukraine war successfully (which depends on the terms), at the same time ensuring it can defend itself from future Russian aggression, kudos to him.

Fingers crossed.