National Review Online
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
Clad in a jacket natty enough for Donald Trump to be
impressed by the gesture, if not the tailoring, Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky showed up at the White House on Monday. He was accompanied by a
retinue of European leaders, there to show both Trump and Vladimir Putin their
support for Ukraine. While Trump’s moods are unpredictable (not the worst thing
when dealing with Putin, as France’s President Emmanuel Macron observed later),
the meeting in Washington ought to have soothed concerns that, after his encounter
with the Russian leader in Alaska, the president would have been induced by
either Putin’s flattery or Putin’s obduracy into pressing Zelensky to
accommodate more of the Kremlin’s demands.
The meeting went well enough to yield some results that
suggested that while there is a clear limit to how far Trump will go to support
Ukraine, he will go further, at least in principle, than seemed possible a few
weeks ago. He seems prepared to offer some undefined sort of air support
(“nobody [has the] kind of stuff we have”) to buttress any peace deal, but
maintains that the boots on the ground will have to be European (something that
some of the Europeans are prepared to do). Whether that would ever be
acceptable to Putin has yet to be seen (he has said not), and, in any event,
there must be doubts as to how credible it would really be. Would the U.S.
really shoot down Russian planes (drones might be another matter) or the
Europeans fire at Russian troops? It is easy to envisage Russia, refreshed by a
few years of peace, being tempted to find out and see. Meanwhile, talk that
Ukraine might be offered some NATO-like guarantee is a pipedream. It would be
unacceptable to Russia and ultimately to Western powers, who would be obligated
to directly intervene on Ukraine’s behalf.
At this point, any sort of peace still seems far away.
“We’re going to find out about President Putin in the next couple of weeks,”
Trump commented later. “It’s possible he doesn’t want to make a deal.” He hopes
that Putin will be “good,” but if not, “it’s going to be a rough situation,” a
somewhat ambiguous turn of phrase from a man who has failed to impose the
additional sanctions he threatened in the event that Putin had not agreed to a
cease-fire by certain ignored deadlines, and now no longer seems set on
insisting on a cease-fire at all (“and again I say it, in the six wars that
I’ve settled, I haven’t had a cease-fire.”).
Perhaps this reluctance is out of an unwillingness to
wreck a peace process that barely exists, or perhaps it is out of a reluctance
to take on Beijing — the new sanctions would probably hit China, among others,
for buying Russian oil — but it is hard to see what else will persuade Putin to
agree to serious peace negotiations, if there can be such a thing in the
absence of a cease-fire. Without one, Putin is free to continue gnawing away at
Ukraine, with no obvious incentive to stop.
There is now talk of three-way talks between Trump,
Zelensky, and Putin, but would they, by themselves, be enough to persuade Putin
to push the pause button on a war of attrition he believes he can win? It seems
unlikely.
In the end, while the closer understanding between the
U.S. on the one side and Ukraine and Europe on the other is a relief, we have
yet to see how it will hold up when the extent of the chasm between Russia and
Ukraine again becomes apparent to an American president still chasing the
will-o’-the-wisp of a quick peace.
Trump’s efforts to come to a deal are welcome, and should
be pursued, but the best hope of bringing a halt to the fighting on an even
remotely acceptable basis is for Putin to be convinced that victory, or even
significant additional territorial gains, are beyond his grasp for now — at
least at a cost that he is prepared to pay. For that to happen, sanctions will
have to be tightened further, and Europe and the U.S. will have to keep
supplying Ukraine with the support it needs (Trump has said that the U.S. will
continue to sell arms to Ukraine). This is the right way to proceed, but it
will take time, money, and patience.
The question then becomes how willing the West, in
general, and President Trump, in particular, will be to stay the course.
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