Is Trump Getting Serious about Ukraine?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 23, 2024

 

Donald Trump seems to have settled on a coherent and consistent message in relation to America’s commitments to Ukraine’s defense amid Russia’s war of territorial conquest — in private, at least.

 

On Friday, the Financial Times reported that Trump “plans to continue supplying military aid to Ukraine,” a commitment that is not conditioned on changes in the posture assumed by our European allies. He will, however, also call for NATO member states to increase their defense budgets to 5 percent of GDP.

 

That makes sense. If Russia’s war in Europe represents an existential threat to the post-Cold War geopolitical order, Western Europe’s great powers should mirror the defense commitments to which NATO’s frontline states are already committing themselves. Trump cannot advocate for larger defense budgets to meet growing challenges abroad while also dismissing the threat posed by Russia’s aggressive expansionism — which he has on numerous occasions, including just two weeks ago during a sit-down interview with NBC News’s Kristen Welker.

 

Trump’s inconsistency raises questions about how much the president-elect has bought into the policy his allies are retailing to America’s European partners. One might even presume that setting defense spending targets at 5 percent — well beyond even America’s budgetary commitments — represents a trigger that Trump can cite whenever he wants to flirt with abandoning Ukraine or even pulling out of NATO (a prospect he also entertained in his interview with Welker). But the FT’s reporting suggests Trump is not being deliberately unrealistic.

 

“One person said they understood that Trump would settle for 3.5 percent,” the report added, “and that he was planning to explicitly link higher defense spending and the offer of more favorable trading terms with the U.S.” One unnamed European official observed that Trump’s ask is essentially what’s already on the table ahead of NATO’s June summit.

 

It’s reasonable to wonder about Trump’s level of commitment to this trial balloon. He has surrounded himself with skeptics of Ukraine’s cause, and his own rhetoric toward the leadership in Kyiv grew more hostile over the course of the campaign. But the view is always different from behind the Resolute Desk, and Trump’s first term saw the United States adopt a confrontational approach toward Moscow that never squared with the president’s rhetoric. A similar dynamic may now be emerging with respect to Russia’s war in Ukraine, in which the president sounds accommodationist but presides over policies that turn the screws on Russia.

 

That’s confusing in undesirable ways. A president should mean what he says, and “peace through strength” only succeeds when America’s adversaries believe the U.S. deterrent is credible. But the FT report is a welcome step toward a consistent American foreign policy that takes its cues not from the excitable discourse on social media but a rational assessment of America’s core strategic interests on the European continent. It’s a Christmas miracle!