Why I Don't Think Trump Will End the Russo-Ukrainian War Anytime Soon

Now that Trump, who campaigned on brokering some kind of peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, has won the presidential election, many people expect the war to end soon. Some of them fear that eventuality, because they think it means that Trump will abandon Ukraine, while others rejoice at the prospect, because they think it’s pointless to continue this carnage, but the view that Trump will somehow end the war seems pretty widespread. People may be right and maybe the war is going to end sometime next year, but I think it’s probably not going to happen, so I wanted to write something to explain why. The fundamental reason is that it’s very difficult to make a deal to end the war in the present circumstances, because the Russian and Ukrainian positions still seem very far apart and various political and organizational constraints will make it hard to bridge them. Depending on what Putin is thinking, which nobody knows (although many people think they do for some inexplicable reason), it may even be impossible.

In theory, there is a very easy way for Trump to end the war, namely by suspending economic and military assistance to Ukraine. Since Ukraine is almost entirely dependent on the US to finance its budget deficit and obtain the weapons it needs to keep fighting, so the argument goes, if the US stopped providing economic and military assistance to Kiev, the Ukrainians would either have to accept the terms that Washington dictates for a deal with Russia or, if they don’t, face a total collapse after a few months, at which point Putin would be able to dictate his terms. In principle, the Europeans could make up for the loss of US economic assistance by increasing theirs (although it’s dubious they would), but even if they did there is no way they could make up for the end of US military assistance, because they have neither the stockpiles nor the production capacities for that.

But that’s only easy in theory and, in practice, I think Trump would find it very difficult to cut off Ukraine overnight. Indeed, while I don’t think US officials had planned to get in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and I think some of them might even have made different decisions after the invasion had they known in advance that it would come to this, now that America has stumbled into a policy of preventing an outright Ukrainian defeat, they are committed to preventing that outcome and will try to stay the course even after Trump moves back into the White House, because national security policies of that importance tend to have a lot of inertia and are not easily reversed once they have begun to be implemented. There are many reasons for that, which tend to be pretty dumb, but that doesn’t make them any less powerful.

For instance, as Kissinger observed, the very process of decision-making creates status quo bias because people don’t want to go through it again: “The alternative to the status quo is the prospect of repeating the whole anguishing process of arriving at decisions. This explains to some extent the curious phenomenon that decisions taken with enormous doubt and perhaps with a close division become practically sacrosanct once adopted.” Thus, while people will continue to disagree with the details of how it should be implemented, once a policy has been adopted officials generally will develop a strong commitment to it. Moreover, the implementation of a policy changes the facts, giving even people who disagreed with it reasons to support it. In this case, now that Washington’s credibility is on the line (since Biden has publicly made a strong commitment to Ukraine), US officials will think that it’s important to stay the course lest that credibility be damaged. As I argued elsewhere, this argument is effectively an instance of the sunk cost fallacy, but US officials are no more immune to the sunk cost fallacy than the Russians or anyone else for that matter.

Of course, it’s still Trump who will decide in the end, but anti-Russia hawks in the Cabinet and deep state officials have many ways to influence his decisions. For instance, they present him with a range of options that is artificially restricted or exaggerate the dangers for the US of allowing Russia to defeat Ukraine, which are ways for them to guide the president’s decision while technically it’s still him who makes it. There is effectively a principal-agent problem at work here, because decision-makers are dependent on people with expertise they lack to make decisions and, precisely because they lack the relevant expertise, they’re also not in a position to assess the advice they’re given. In principle, this problem can be reduced to some extent by seeking the advice of experts with different perspectives, but bureaucracies tend to select people who share a similar outlook on fundamental issues. Moreover, even when the experts in government originally disagreed on a policy, they tend to fall behind a policy once it has been adopted for the kind of reasons mentioned above.

Thus, while Trump is likely to find experts in government who vary in the extent to which they think Washington should support Ukraine (for instance, it seems that so far the State Department has been relatively hawkish on military assistance, while the Pentagon has been more reluctant to allow the US involvement in the war to deepen even further and has consistently dragged its feet to provide more support to Ukraine), they will probably be united against a policy that would allow Russia to win a decisive victory over Ukraine within a few months. You may think that Trump could simply ignore them, but it’s not that easy to go ahead and ignore the advice of the experts in government when they tell you that it can’t be done or would result in disaster, even for Trump. We have seen that during his first term and, while he is arguably better prepared this time, I doubt it will be different this time.

Non-elected government officials can also slow walk any decisions Trump makes to give more time to their political allies in the administration to change his mind. Again, we have already seen that during his first term, like when he tried and failed to get the US out of Syria. Indeed, Trump’s political allies and Cabinet members, who judging from the appointments he’s announced so far will be anti-Russia hawks, would almost certainly try to deter him from cutting off Ukraine completely by arguing that it would have adverse political consequences for him and it shouldn’t be hard to make a good case because that’s probably true. Again, without US military assistance, Ukraine would likely collapse within a year. While it’s clear that, as long as the Ukrainian military remains a coherent force, Russia can’t take major Ukrainian cities. But if the Ukrainian armed forces disintegrate, as happened to Russia in 1917 or Germany at the end of the next year, because they suffer unsustainable shortages of weapons and ammunition, we’d eventually see Russian tanks rolling down the streets of Kiev and everyone would blame Trump.

Thus, any threat of permanently cutting off Ukraine is not credible and the Ukrainians presumably know it, which means they have more leverage than it seems. Trump may temporarily suspend military assistance to force the Ukrainians to the negotiations table and make them adopt a negotiating position closer to what Trump wants, but he would almost certainly have to resume aid eventually and there are limits to what concessions he can extract from them. Besides, Trump never said that he would force Ukraine to capitulate, he said that he’d broker a deal that is “good for both sides”. It’s unclear what this means exactly, though based on the little Trump has said on the topic so far it seems that he mostly has in mind a “land for peace” kind of agreement, but in any case it doesn’t sound like capitulation. The devil will be in the details and I think that, at the moment, the Russian and Ukrainian positions likely remain too far apart to be bridged, even with Trump’s mediation.

For instance, on the Ukrainian side, it’s not clear that people are prepared to formally give up all the territory that Russia already controls. It’s one thing for Ukraine to accept Russia’s de facto control over this territory, but it’s another to acknowledge it de jure. However, even if as Reuters suggests in a recent article Putin is willing to give up on the goal of capturing the rest of the four oblasts Russia has formally annexed in 2022 (which remains to be seen), this doesn’t mean he won’t demand that Ukraine formally acknowledge Russian sovereignty over the part Moscow controls. The same article also says that, for Russia to accept a deal, Ukraine would have to renounce NATO membership, but I’m really not sure that the Ukrainians are prepared to abandon that ambition yet. Similarly, the article says that if Ukraine does renounce NATO membership, Putin is prepared to “discuss” other forms of security guarantees, but that’s extremely vague and the details will be key.

During the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, Putin also seemed open to non-NATO Western security guarantees, yet Russian negotiators inserted a clause that would effectively have made those guarantees vacuous by giving Moscow a veto on their activation. Moreover, as I already pointed out before, one can also doubt whether the West is really prepared to provide meaningful security guarantees to Ukraine. The Reuters article also says that Putin would insist that Ukraine accept limitations on the size of its armed forces. If past negotiations are any indication, he will also insist on limits on the number and types of weapon systems Ukraine is allowed to have. Again, the details will matter a lot because there are limitations that Ukraine will under no circumstances agree to and that even Trump will probably not find reasonable, but at the moment we simply don’t know what Putin will ask for exactly.

Even something short of a peace treaty, which I think is very unlikely, that would nevertheless allow for a durable cessation of hostilities would require that many other points nobody is even talking about be settled, such as the issue of Crimea’s water supply. There are also things, such as lifting Western sanctions on Russia, that could facilitate a deal but that political constraints in the West are probably going to make very difficult, because everyone will say that it would be rewarding agression and that will be the end of it. All this will give Ukraine some maneuvering room to resist accepting a deal it finds unacceptable without getting on Trump’s wrong side. If the Ukrainians don’t want to accept Russia’s terms, but also don’t want to give Trump the impression they’re unwilling to go along with his plan, it won’t be difficult for them to insert spoilers in their proposals that, to Trump’s inexpert eyes, won’t seem unreasonable but that Putin will predictably reject, allowing them to blame the failure of the negotiations on him.

Once that happens, Trump will have no choice but to keep military assistance going because again a Ukrainian collapse would be politically very costly to him, especially if the Ukrainians have managed to blame Putin for the failure of the negotiations. I think the Ukrainians are already preparing the ground for that right now. Indeed, that’s how I interpret Zelensky’s recent statements, to the effect that he wants to end the war through diplomacy in 2025 and that he thinks Trump’s election will speed up the end of the war. I don’t think he says that because he expects that Trump’s plan will work, I think he says that because he wants to convince Trump that he’s willing to go along with his plan, so it’s easier for him to blame the failure of that plan on Putin later. The Ukrainians and their allies in Washington can also make it easier for Trump to agree to the continuation of military assistance by offering the US some kind of stake, real or imaginary, into Ukraine’s post-war economy, thereby appealing to Trump’s transactional view of foreign policy. It seems that some of them are already working on that kind of offer. I wouldn’t even rule out that, in the end, they will induce him to increase military assistance.

At this point, the reader may object that my argument rests on the assumption that the Ukrainian government doesn’t want the negotiations to succeed, but that’s not the case. It rests on the assumption that the Ukrainians are not prepared to make the kind of concessions they would have to make in order for negotiations to have a chance to succeed, which is not the same thing. As I have argued recently, I think Ukraine may have a window of opportunity to make a deal soon and that it should try to seize it, but even if that’s true the price would undoubtedly be very steep because Russia is winning. I may be wrong, but I think it’s very unlikely that Zelensky will be willing or able to pay it at this point because domestic political constraints will prevent that, despite the fact that he’d be able to claim that Trump forced his hand. Unfortunately, I think it will only be possible for Ukraine to contemplate that kind of concessions when its situation has deteriorated considerably, at which point the price it will have to pay will be even higher. In theory, Trump may have been able to force Ukraine to achieve a more satisfactory end of the conflict, but as I have argued in this post he faces his own political and organization constraints — not to mention his personal deficiencies — that will likely prevent him from doing so.