What Trump Actually Wants From a Ukraine Deal

By Eliot A. Cohen

Thursday, August 21, 2025

 

Whenever Donald Trump announces an international meeting about the Russia-Ukraine war, his critics immediately begin talking about Munich 1938 or Yalta 1945. The analogies are not only misplaced, but misleading. What happened in Anchorage last week and in the follow-on visit by European leaders to Washington on Monday was something far less tragic, and far less serious, than the comparisons would imply.

 

Too often, the commentary focused on trivialities. For the Trump-Putin summit: Was the B-2-bomber overflight when Vladimir Putin arrived in Alaska an undeserved honor or a sobering reminder of American power? How damaging was it when Trump whinged, once again, about “Russia, Russia, Russia” and repeated his delusions about having won the 2020 election? For the Washington meeting with European leaders and Vlodymyr Zelensky: Was the Ukrainian president’s black suit a sign of submission, or a display of good sense? Did it make a difference that the European delegation was met by the chief of protocol and not the president in all his glory?

 

Fluff and flummery. The muddled outcomes (did the Russians accept the idea of Western security guarantees to Ukraine? Did the Ukrainians agree to cede territory to Russia?) began with the prelude to the meetings. The confused signals going in resulted in part from an incompetent special envoy, Steve Witkoff, being unable to get straight what the Russians had offered in preliminary talks—a rookie mistake if ever there was one, although par for the hapless real-estate lawyer turned diplomatic ingenue. But they resulted as well from the very different positions of the four parties, and those in turn emerged from their motivations, which explain a lot about what happened and what may lie ahead.

 

Putin’s motivation is simple, even if Witkoff and Trump do not really understand it: He seeks to dominate Ukraine, seize what pieces of it he can, and eradicate its democratic government and national independence. For Zelensky, it is only slightly more complicated: He wishes to preserve Ukrainian sovereignty and freedom of action, and to guarantee its membership in the larger European community of free countries—all while refusing to recognize de jure the loss of its territory to Moscow. For the European leaders, it is also a bit more complex: They want to help Ukraine achieve those things while ensuring continued American engagement in European security against a menacing Russia.

 

Trump’s motivation is actually the simplest of all: He wants a Nobel Peace Prize. We know that because he cannot stop talking about it. This is what makes a true sellout of Ukraine unlikely. For Trump to have that glorious moment when five otherwise insignificant Norwegians bless his contributions to humanity, he needs the willing cooperation of Zelensky and the Europeans. If he merely handed Ukraine over to Russia, as some observers say he has always wished to do, no Nobel: The Norwegians, having some claim to democratic scruples, would not deliver, however dubious some of their past awards.

 

No, at some level, Zelensky and his European supporters will have to find the deal, whatever form it may take, to be better than continuing the war, and for now, nothing on offer seems to meet that test.

 

There is another reason that the United States has less leverage than Trump may think: He has weakened his hand by silly concessions. The meeting with Putin was a gift to the Russian dictator, for which Washington received nothing. The easing of some sanctions on Russia is a similar unilateral gift. Trump’s long-threatened secondary sanctions have yet to materialize. Most important, by ruling out putting American forces on the ground in Ukraine, the American president has, so to speak, discarded a trump card.

 

The American foreign-policy establishment has become so accustomed to denigrating Europe’s leadership that it has not fully taken on board the remarkable coherence and adroitness of its leaders’ performance in Washington. They spoke with one voice, and they skillfully combined flattery (which is indispensable in dealing with Trump) and a quiet firmness (also essential). Zelensky, too, hit all the right notes, and the result was an atmosphere of geniality which may not have been substantive, but was useful.

 

America’s weakened hand is the result also of the quiet, limited, but nonetheless significant mobilization of the Ukrainian and European defense industrial base. Ukraine is the largest producer of its own excellent military hardware, followed by the Europeans, and then the United States, which provides only 20 percent of the hardware (although, admittedly, the most advanced and in some cases unique 20 percent). Even that contribution, however, will no longer be paid for by the U.S. but by European states—as a result of the Trump administration throwing away yet another source of leverage over Ukraine, the provision of military aid without strings attached.

 

In theory, the administration could try to coerce a Ukrainian deal by cutting off all intelligence sharing and refusing to sell weapons to Europe for Ukraine. But even there, as a senior intelligence official from the continent recently informed me, the Europeans have been quietly figuring out ways to minimize the loss from certain unique capabilities (particularly space-based reconnaissance). Cutting off all aid would also stir protest even from some Trump loyalists in the Republican Party, and besides, Trump always wants to sell American products. Most important, such blatant arm-twisting means no Nobel, and Trump can’t have that.

 

The trouble with the historical parallels that are now being drawn is that they inflate the capacity of the adversary that Ukraine faces and minimize Western leverage. The Munich 1938 analogy is dumb because the British and French leaders were then dealing with a powerful and vigorous Nazi Germany and operating under the shadow of the mass slaughter of World War I, which had taken place only 20 years earlier. Czechoslovakia was bound to succumb to German demands unless the Soviet Union joined in its defense, and that was made impossible by Stalin’s demands to London, Paris, and Warsaw. The Yalta 1945 analogy is also dumb: Yes, Poland was consigned to Soviet occupation, but the Red Army held the territory, and to pry it loose there and elsewhere in Eastern Europe would have required a new war, which neither the United States nor Great Britain was prepared to fight. Yalta was awful, but also unavoidable.

 

Instead, in the current circumstance, we have a Ukraine whose heroism and persistence is extraordinary, a far larger country with a more capable military than either the Czechs in 1938 or the Polish Home Army in 1945 had at their disposal. Ukraine also shares borders with its Western supporters. We have a third party—the European states—that retains agency as well. In Russia, Ukraine and its supporters face neither a dynamic Germany nor a titanic Soviet superpower, but rather a creaky, corrupt dictatorship that has taken a million casualties; is suffering diplomatic setbacks everywhere from the Middle East to the Caucasus, to its northern flank; whose sovereign wealth fund has almost run dry; and whose economy is beset by inflation, wretched productivity, and falling oil prices. If Trump were as good a dealmaker as he claims to be, he would be focusing far more on exploiting Russia’s weaknesses, which he can exacerbate if he wishes, than on basking in the chumminess of his KGB-trained counterpart, which is nothing more than deception.

 

No one knows how this war will end. Either side could collapse, or there could be some kind of freezing of the front line, unsatisfactory to both sides but guaranteeing Ukraine’s independence and, to some measure, its security. When the war reaches its conclusion, it will probably surprise all of us, and none more than those who think Trump is as shrewd as he is often malign. He is not, and that is probably the only thing on which his counterparties can agree wholeheartedly.