By Michael Kimmage
Tuesday, August 19, 2025
The most famous story about an emperor may be about an
emperor obsessed with new clothes. In Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, a vain
leader hires a pair of seamsters to make him a suit. Promising that the outfit
will be elegant but invisible to the incompetent, the seamsters are frauds.
Clad in nothing, the emperor marches before his people. Commanded to admire
him, they go along, cheering until a little boy bellows out the obvious
truth—that the emperor has no clothes. Even so, the procession continues.
In trying to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine,
which Donald
Trump once promised he could do “within 24 hours,” the U.S. president is
presenting himself as a kind of emperor. He has tried to make his
administration the conflict’s diplomatic fulcrum. In the course of a single
week, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky,
and a host of European leaders all journeyed to the United States. Peace,
according to Trump, will not be hammered out in Kyiv or Moscow, or in Geneva or
Vienna or Doha. It will be forged by him in the White House.
But the Trump administration has no plan for ending the
war. The president vacillates from one position to another, discarding policies
like gloves—a cease-fire one day and a comprehensive settlement the next, with
threats of disengagement along the way. The United States struggles
to find leverage over Russia, not least because it has preemptively rejected
any form of escalation, such as additional sanctions or more military aid to
Kyiv. It also struggles to find leverage over Ukraine because Ukraine is
fighting for its life and has many governments beyond Washington that support
it. Yet the U.S. president insists on being the peacemaker, and an
international public is asked to admire his nonexistent plan. On and on the
procession goes.
Andersen’s story may have prefigured this moment,
although no major actor in the war wants to be the boy. So far, no one is
willing to call out Emperor Trump. Moscow does not want to upset a president
more sympathetic to Russia than any before and likely any in the future. Kyiv
does not want to incur Trump’s wrath, given that Trump could set back Ukraine’s
war effort by abandoning it. (In a February meeting with Trump, Zelensky came
perilously close to telling Trump he was delusional, but this week, he
celebrated Trump’s generosity and probity.) And Europe does not want to
alienate the leader of a country that underpins its security when the outcome
of a major war is unclear and when Russia is its bona fide adversary.
Were the stakes lower, this spectacle of sycophancy might
be comic. But the real-world implications are dead serious. Trump’s ongoing
diplomatic circus will not only fail to stop Russia’s war. It will complicate
the job of sustaining and strengthening Ukraine’s capacity to fight, which is
the only way to give Kyiv the upper hand in this conflict and, accordingly, to
stymie Putin.
Ultimately, the pantomiming of diplomacy will diminish American power, which
rests on coherent, disciplined, and believable leadership. Pity the empire
whose emperor wears no clothes yet whose visitors are required to rhapsodize
about the brilliance and beauty of his hats and gowns.
HELPLESSLY HELPING
There are profound limits to what Trump can do for Russia. Putin is a
dictator. He does not need photo-ops with an American president to secure his
domestic political position. U.S. aid to Ukraine via intelligence sharing,
battlefield targeting, and the provision of hardware (now paid for by
Europeans) is militarily quite consequential. But the United States cannot
force Ukraine to surrender. Even if Putin could somehow convince Trump to
withdraw all support for Kyiv, Ukraine would fight on, backed by its European
partners. Lacking a path to victory that runs through Washington, Russia has no
incentive to make real concessions. A rushed end to the war, much as it would
suit Trump, would make it hard for Moscow to achieve its primary objective:
gaining direct or indirect control over Kyiv.
A rudderless American diplomacy is nonetheless helpful to
the Kremlin. Conditions are placed on Russia and then suddenly dropped, while
Trump’s muddled and inconsistent messaging lets Russia portray its designs on Ukraine as more
modest than they truly are, to obscure its intentions, and to play for time.
The Trump administration is also, by its own volition, suggesting a reduced
American military footprint in Europe—another one of Moscow’s key ambitions.
Russia’s task is not to interfere with Trump’s fantasies or his fraught
relationship with Europe. It can best do this by flattering the president’s
image of himself. Putin does not at all mind pretending, at times, that Trump
is the consummate peacemaker.
In Europe, Russia is mostly regarded with fear and
suspicion. But elsewhere, Moscow can use its diplomatic theater with the United
States to position itself as a country invested in peace. In this sense, the
meeting in Alaska last week was a gift to Putin. It implied a last-minute
realization on the part of the United States, that Russia understands more than
the language of force. Indeed, Trump, who typically blames Ukraine for having
been invaded, configures Putin’s Russia as eager for peace, even though Moscow
has spent the summer relentlessly attacking civilian targets in Ukraine and
pushing to conquer more territory. With Trump’s tacit approval, Russia can call
a brutal offensive war cautious and defensive. Trump’s genius for dominating
news cycles has thus started to work to Russia’s global advantage.
DANGEROUS DISTRACTIONS
Zelensky and his European counterparts are not naive
about Trump. They know that his furious diplomatic efforts are hollow, as is
his commitment to European security overall. As a result, European leaders are
laying the foundation for a post-American Europe. The key to this transition is
Germany, which has twice transformed its political economy because of the war.
First, Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor when the war broke out, cut Germany
off from Russian energy. Then, Friedrich Merz, who became chancellor a few
months ago, was able to transcend his country’s love affair with austerity and
begin reconstituting Germany as a military power. As much as Putin, Trump has
been the prime mover behind these changes, which might prompt Europe to fully
break with Washington.
For now, however, European leaders are in the humiliating
position of relying on the United States. Awkwardly, they must defer to Trump,
who relishes their deference. The more European leaders adopt Trump’s framework
and echo his claim that peace is at hand, the less they are able to explain the
war to their own populations. In this conflict, Europeans will need to be
patient. Building up European defense industrial capacity will take years and
aligning Ukraine with European institutions will take decades. Europeans must
learn to live with the pressures and difficulties of having a major ground war
on their doorsteps. Trump’s rapid-fire, improvisational, and utopian diplomacy
complicate this process. It invites the continent’s people to believe the
conflict might go away with the wave of an emperor’s scepter—especially when,
to avoid antagonizing the president, their leaders adopt bits and pieces of
Trump’s wishful thinking.
The ultimate beneficiary here is, again, the Kremlin. Any
time spent speculating about land swaps to which Ukraine cannot agree, or
parsing security guarantees that the Trump administration will only vaguely and
fitfully underwrite, is time not spent on the logistics of helping Kyiv.
Today’s war may at some stage be wound down by diplomats elaborating
confidence-building measures, outlining ten-point plans, and drafting treaties.
At the moment, however, the essential conversation is about helping Ukraine with
its drones, manpower needs, and air defenses. If Washington is going to
continue to pull back, as seems likely, Europe will have to focus intently and
productively on these details. Just five days before Trump and Putin met in
Alaska, U.S. Vice President JD Vance declared that his country is “done with
the funding of the Ukraine war business.” That is the chilling reality.
WASTING AWAY
The final cost to Trump’s diplomatic charade will be
measured in the currency of American power. Washington has a rich history of
peacemaking in Europe. President Woodrow Wilson’s journey to Versailles in 1918
to help broker the end of World War I may not have made the world safe for
democracy, but his proposal for a world based on deliberation rather than war
came to inform the European Union, the United Nations, and the best of
intentions of twentieth-century American foreign policy. In the final months of
World War II,
Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman did not get everything they
wanted at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, but they did erect the NATO
alliance, ensuring a Western Europe at peace with itself. Presidents Ronald
Reagan and George H. W. Bush pursued artful diplomacy with the Soviet Union
and, along with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, they found a peaceful end to
the Cold War. Postwar Europe is the crown of American foreign policy, and Trump
is tarnishing it.
Even if the president can maneuver Russia and Ukraine
toward a temporary cease-fire, which he would surely label as the achievement
of perpetual peace, Trump’s efforts will cost Washington influence. Methods and
manners matter in international relations. Trump’s processes are too chaotic,
his speech too riddled with falsehoods, and his policy shifts too abrupt for
foreign leaders to trust him. Without trust, there is no persuasion and no
genuine cooperation; without trust, alliances lose their validity. If its
trustworthiness is a fully spent commodity, all Washington will have left is
the limited tool of hard power.
None of this means that Trump’s madcap style of diplomacy
is categorically unworkable. It can embody the virtue of flexibility and a
salutary indifference to dogma. The president’s disregard for the status quo,
for example, helped him facilitate a creative peace deal between Armenia and
Azerbaijan. But in Ukraine, where many powers intersect and some collide,
Trump’s limitations as a statesman are all too apparent. His convening power
may be formidable—at a moment’s notice, he can bring the world to him—but his
problem-solving power isn’t. His hunger for praise is a vulnerability,
highlighting rather than hiding the space between rhetoric and reality. This
was precisely the space occupied by Andersen’s emperor, whose solipsism and
stubborn self-regard were visible, even if his clothes were not.
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