President Trump rightly points out that America did not engage in new wars during his first term in office. The world was indeed a more stable place before the Biden administration engineered a disastrous exit from Afghanistan. That catastrophe signaled weakness and incentivized the Russian invasion of Ukraine as well as the Hamas attack on Israel. When America is weak, our adversaries grow bold.
The incoming Trump administration will certainly not be interventionist; gone are the days of neoconservative visions of world transformation. Yet neither is it likely to succumb to the capitulationist voices of isolationism that have cropped up on the right and the left. No one knows better than President Trump that making America great again means making America strong again. We need strength to dissuade our adversaries from destabilizing aggressions.
Ukraine will be the first theater in which the Trump administration will be tested. In the wake of the poor performance of the Russian military and the depletion of its manpower Moscow has resorted to bringing in North Korean mercenaries. This internationalization of the conflict represents a significant escalation. The Biden administration has countered this escalation by giving Ukraine authorization to use American missiles that can target sites far inside Russia. For years the Biden team was fearful of provoking Russia and therefore capped supplies to Ukraine, providing enough for Zelensky to keep fighting but never enough to win. That has changed. The prospect for ever greater conflict is therefore growing. This is the stage that President Trump, committed to pursuing peace, will enter on January 20. (READ MORE: North Korea Is in the Fight)
But what kind of peace will it be?
A narrative is circulating among Democrats, never Trumpers, and Europeans that Trump will pull the plug on Kyiv and hand Putin an easy victory. While this vision conforms with the “Russiagate” narrative that the Democratic National Committee has been hawking for eight years, it is deeply counterintuitive. Trump saw the disastrous consequences of Biden’s version of the Afghanistan wind-down. He surely does not want Ukraine to become his Afghanistan or for a gloating press to report from Kyiv as if it were the fall of Kabul. Surrender is not going to be the Trump path to peace.
What then are his options? There are two variables at stake in Ukraine: geography and legality, or the question of territory and the question of guarantees. Concerning geography, the maxim of the inviolability of international borders points to Ukraine regaining control over its full territory. This is the principled position (and one endorsed by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Ukraine’s Black Sea neighbor). On the other hand, the Russian position, variously expressed by President Vladimir Putin, other political leaders, or the ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, involves the complete occupation of Ukraine, and the eradication of any Ukrainian independent sovereignty (and probably executing Zelensky). Surely Russia wants at the very least to control the Black Sea coast to maximize its own maritime access but also to render any left-over rump Ukraine a landlocked and subordinate vassal state, even less independent than Belarus. In any case, before analysts in the West start to negotiate with ourselves over how much Ukraine to surrender, it should not be forgotten that Russia still pretty much wants it all.
Whether in some settlement Ukraine regains all its territory or is forced to make some concessions, international guarantees will be needed to safeguard against future Russian aggression, a second attempt to gobble up the rest. The strongest version of such a guarantee could be seen as NATO membership for Ukraine. Putin will resist this — this may be his redline. Alternatively, Ukraine might remain out of NATO, but international forces could be stationed at its border with Russia as tripwires to ward off another invasion. Such a solution would be analogous to the NATO troop contingents in the Baltics. A weaker version might just be an international memorandum endorsing Ukrainian independence, but this is what Ukraine already had, the so-called Budapest Accord, which ultimately did it no good at all. President Barack Obama did not feel obligated to offer genuine assistance to Ukraine when Russia invaded Crimea.
The worst solution would be a complete Russian occupation of Ukraine or, short of that, major territorial concessions with only weak international security agreements. It would be out of character for Trump to embrace a defeat. While he is not an interventionist, neither is he an appeasement politician or a fool at deal-making.
One can surely try to reach a compromise in terms of territory and guarantees, but it is also useful to look beyond the narrow Ukraine issue and keep an eye on the bigger game. Russia is the most direct threat to Europe and hence the Atlantic Alliance, but Russia is not America’s main global adversary; its economy is weak and its population is small. Its geostrategic significance is largely a function of its collaboration with China, while China is now recognized as the primary challenge to American power in the world. It is therefore in long-term U.S. interest to peel Russia off from China, a kind of reversal of President Richard Nixon’s driving a wedge between China and the Soviet Union half a century ago.
The challenge of the moment then is for America to be firm with Russia over Ukraine, while at the same time winning Russia over to the American side in the current great power rivalry. This will require tact and agility, but also some outside-the-box thinking. Some analysts believe security for a post-war Ukraine is greatest if it enters NATO, but Moscow would regard that NATO expansion as a threat. What is needed then is a solution that protects Ukraine’s legitimate interests without alienating Russia — in the competition with China, it is important that the U.S. find ways to build bridges to Moscow, not to burn them.
Whatever the precise formula that the Trump administration agrees to, it is vital to uphold the principle of Ukrainian national sovereignty while simultaneously working to pull Russia into the Western security architecture. We gain nothing if we push Russia further into the arms of Beijing. We win a lot if we pull Russia toward us and leave China out in the cold where it belongs, as long as it continues its expansionist ambitions in the western Pacific.
This project will hardly be easy to carry out, but for the incoming peace president, this could be a legacy goal for the century.
Russell A. Berman is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and formerly a senior advisor at the State Department.
Kiron K. Skinner is the Taube Family Chair professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, the W. Glenn Campbell research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and the former director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Department of State.