Time to End a Hopeless Policy
GLOBAL SECURITY REVIEW, 11.13.25
Coauthored with Daryl Charles
“Hopefully, he’ll become reasonable,” President Donald Trump recently said of Vladimir Putin.
There are only two problems with that four-word sentence: It’s not prudent to base U.S. foreign policy and national security on hope, and Putin is not going to become reasonable on his own. Trump’s penchant for deferring to Putin and hoping that Putin—after one more round of diplomacy, one more summit, one more phone call, one more tweet, one more attempt to rationalize unjust aggression—will become reasonable is a fruitless exercise. After 10 months of placing his hopes in Putin, it’s time for the president to stop giving the Russian dictator the benefit of the doubt and to start giving the Ukrainians what they need to ensure their independence and security.
Zigzagging
Trump’s zigzagging Ukraine policy has enfolded a public upbraiding of President Volodymyr Zelensky, a withholding of critical aid to Ukraine, a Munich-like summit with the Russian strongman, an inspiring counter-summit with Ukraine’s European backers, and a return by Trump to the NATO consensus on Ukraine. Indeed, by mid-summer, Trump was offering U.S. air power to a European-led peacekeeping force for postwar Ukraine and signaling his support for a security guarantee for Ukraine: “European nations are going to take a lot of the burden,” he said, before adding, “We’re going to help them...we’ll be involved” in any peacekeeping mission.
By the end of September, Trump was declaring that Ukraine could win back all of its territory. In October, he slapped sanctions on Russian oil producers and expressed a willingness to supply Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles, which could allow Ukraine to launch precision strikes deep inside Russian territory and hamstring Putin’s war machine.
But then, after another phone call with Putin, Trump during a meeting with Zelensky late last month took the Tomahawks off the table, urged Ukraine to consider territorial concessions, and spoke of security guarantees for Kyiv and Moscow under a flawed premise of moral equivalence between the aggressor and the victim.
Amidst all of this zigzagging on Ukraine, Trump addressed Israel’s Knesset and noted parenthetically, “We have to get Russia done.” Yet he seems unable to get done what really needs getting done. That begins with recognizing he cannot keep putting his hopes in Putin and expect a different outcome. Instead, he must understand that ending the war in Ukraine requires being consistent, focusing on realities and speaking the only language the Russian dictator understands: force.
Indeed, America’s security (and Ukraine’s future) would be better served if the president took the clear-eyed, hard-headed approach that has borne fruit in the Middle East: steady material support for a democracy under assault; rejection of moral equivalence; recognition that the aggressor and its cause are not reasonable; a commitment to tilting the battlefield and the postwar environment in favor of the democracy that was attacked rather than the aggressor that started the war.
There can be no end to the unjust war in Ukraine until the aggressor realizes that the costs are simply too high. Putin will not stop this war until he is stopped—until he understands he cannot achieve his aims. As long as the president continues to vacillate, seemingly without any sense of moral principle, and as long as he maintains his hope-based perspective on Putin, Russia’s war on Ukraine will continue.
Testing
“Continue” is arguably an inaccurate term, because Putin has escalated his war on Ukraine (and NATO) in the months since Trump’s return to the White House: more terror bombings against civilian targets and infrastructure, more waves of murderous drones, more civilian deaths, more hybrid attacks elsewhere in Europe, more testing of NATO’s unity. And yet Trump continues to hope Putin might—somehow, someday, some way—become reasonable.
The Atlantic Council’s Daniel Fried, former U.S. Ambassador to Poland, compares Trump’s approach to Putin with President Franklin Roosevelt’s approach to another Kremlin dictator, Joseph Stalin, during World War II. “I think if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing in return,” Roosevelt said, doubtless with sincere hopes for the best, “he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.”
Roosevelt was naïve. Trump needs to avoid walking down that same path.
With its recent history of multiple violations of international treaties and agreements—the Minsk Agreements, Budapest Memorandum, Chemical Weapons Convention, European Convention, Helsinki Final Act, UN Charter—Putin’s Russia has shown itself to be a serial aggressor. That pattern has not been deterred—let alone reversed—by the words of those treaties or by diplomatic communiques or by angry tweets or by presidential hopes. The only thing that has prevented Putin from taking all of Ukraine is a Ukraine armed with Western weapons, willing to fight for its independence. And the only thing that has prevented Putin from expanding his war beyond Ukraine is a rearmed and revived NATO alliance. (If Trump thinks Putin is difficult and unreasonable today, with the NATO alliance intact, wait until NATO fractures.)
What’s needed now is not more meandering diplomacy, not more White House zigzagging, not more hopeful words. Rather, what is needed is a just application of coercive force—embodied by a sustained flow of arms to Ukraine, a firm commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty, and a renewed recognition of the shared interests and values that bond America and Europe. This will lay the groundwork for peace.
In practical terms, European nations must get serious about implementing a plan to utilize for Ukraine’s support $300 billion in frozen Russian assets; they must stay the course in rebuilding their defenses; and they must commit to firmer restrictions on the purchase of Russian oil and natural gas, as Trump, to his credit, has urged. The sanctions he placed on Russian energy giants Rosneft and Lukoil underscore his willingness to apply economic force against Putin’s war machine; he should commit America’s arsenal of democracy to that same goal.
Does the president simply want to mediate a “deal” that kicks the can and the problem down the road, or does he want to secure a durable peace that save lives, bolsters Ukraine’s viability and ends the injustice of Putin’s war? If his aim is the latter, there is only one course of action, and that is to make the costs unbearable for the Russian dictator.
Only then will this war come to an end. Only then will Putin “become reasonable.”