God helps those who help themselves. Now more than ever, Ukrainians should heed that timeless wisdom.
A growing number of experts say the best way for Ukraine to safeguard its security after the war with Russia ends is to acquire the military capabilities needed “to deter future attacks and defend itself if deterrence fails,” as Jennifer Kavanagh of Defense Priorities put it in a study published Monday.
But news reports this week suggest the Trump administration is offering Kiev something that seems better in theory but may prove counterproductive in practice: a U.S. pledge to defend Ukraine if Russia ever invades again. One can imagine versions of such a “security guarantee” that would compel the U.S. to give Ukraine little more than moral support. But Kiev is pushing for a guarantee with a lot more bite than that.
The Trump administration should avoid promising to fight a direct war with Russia in defense of Ukraine, argue advocates of U.S. foreign policy restraint. Mark Episkopos of the Quincy Institute says that such a promise would lack credibility. “The past 3.5 years have been an ongoing test of whether the West will go to war against Russia over Ukraine, and the answer has been a resounding no,” Episkopos told The American Conservative.
The dangers of such a lack of credibility are complex. Most obviously, a non-credible security guarantee would fail to deter Russia. Yet if Russia, doubting the credibility of a U.S. guarantee, attacked Ukraine again, America would feel pressure to defend its client rather than lose face—possibly leading to a direct conflict between two nuclear superpowers that neither of them expected to fight. And if Washington didn’t come to Ukraine’s defense, all of America’s alliance commitments would come into doubt.
It’s surprising that President Donald Trump appears poised to extend America’s superpower shield over Ukraine. After all, Trump has slashed U.S. funding for Ukraine’s war effort and threatened to cut the flow of weapons and intelligence. He has dismissed Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky as a manipulative ingrate. And he has repeatedly blasted Joe Biden for spending billions to support Ukraine. What explains the change in approach?
Politics has a lot to do with it. Due to various factors, Trump’s notorious fixation on getting a deal—any deal—has heightened in the case of Russia–Ukraine.
On the campaign trail, Trump said he’d resolve the war within one day of returning to the White House. Eleven months into his second term, Trump’s political incentives to get a quick deal are only growing. Russian victory would be a political fiasco for Trump on par with the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, from which Biden’s approval ratings never recovered.
The White House also has a strategic rationale for trying to achieve peace diplomatically, as it laid out in the recently published National Security Strategy. The document says the war has exacerbated animosities between Russia and Europe and that a negotiated settlement is needed to restore “conditions of strategic stability across the Eurasian landmass, and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states.”
Trump’s desperation for an agreement gives Kiev and European capitals leverage, since they can obstruct the peace process if he doesn’t accommodate their more hardline demands. Of course, by drawing closer to their position, the White House moves further away from Moscow’s—and likely also from any potential deal. But in recent days, the Ukrainian and European teams have played their hand well.
Over the weekend, Trump dispatched negotiators to meet with them in Berlin. Speaking to reporters in the White House on Monday, Trump said an agreement was “closer than ever.”
One reason for the optimism may be that Zelensky, ahead of talks with the U.S. delegation on Sunday, acknowledged that Ukraine won’t be joining NATO anytime soon. The Guardian said the statement “marks a big shift for Ukraine.” Since Russia launched its war in part to prevent Ukraine’s accession to the alliance, Zelensky’s comment struck many as a promising sign.
But there was a catch. If Ukraine won’t be joining the alliance, Zelensky said, Kiev will need “Article 5-like guarantees for us from the U.S.,” referring to the NATO treaty’s collective defense clause, which treats aggression against one as an attack on all. Extending that protection to Ukraine would give it a major benefit of the alliance without making it a formal member.
Influential MAGA luminaries like Steve Bannon, a former Trump advisor, vehemently oppose giving Ukraine such guarantees. They argue it’s not in America’s interest to acquire yet another faraway security dependent—in this case, one that could drag the U.S. into a catastrophic war. Indeed, Bannon himself has been warning the White House since at least February that Zelensky will demand security guarantees which threaten U.S. interests.
Evidently, those warnings were ignored by the delegation Trump sent to Berlin. One leading Russia hawk who attended the talks, Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, told reporters,
For the first time I heard from the mouths of American negotiators… that America would engage in security guarantees for Ukraine in such a way that the Russians would have no doubt that the American response would be military if the Russians attacked Ukraine again.
Moreover, European leaders released a joint statement after the talks praising “the strong convergence between the United States, Ukraine and Europe,” including a decision by Washington to “provide robust security guarantees.” If Washington and Kiev truly achieved a “strong convergence” on the issue, America First conservatives should be worried. Zelensky clearly aims to entangle the U.S. in a military alliance that doesn’t serve its own interests.
Not only would such an alliance be a nightmare scenario for MAGA and the United States, but Zelensky’s effort to bring it about is bad news for Ukrainians.
Moscow opposes any military partnership between the West and Ukraine, so it likely would reject the security guarantees and other measures described by the European leaders. “This seems like a message from Mars,” Samuel Charap of the RAND Corporation wrote on X, reacting to the joint statement. “It is unrealistic to expect that Russia will agree to most (any?) of this.”
That may be the point. Many analysts, including the Russian-born journalist Leonid Ragozin—a committed liberal and no fan of Vladimir Putin—say Europe is trying to sabotage Trump’s diplomatic efforts. “The European strategy so far has been to alter the US-proposed peace plan in such a way that it becomes completely unacceptable to Russia,” Ragozin wrote this week in Al Jazeera.
Offering security guarantees to Kiev may win applause in European capitals, but it doesn’t bring Moscow any closer to ending its war in Ukraine. Trump will have better luck if he pushes instead for “armed non-alignment,” the model of Ukrainian security that Kavanagh elaborated in the aforementioned study. U.S. negotiators should familiarize themselves with the report, which details the military capabilities Ukraine needs to deter—but not threaten—Russia.
That’s not as flashy as American security guarantees, nor as attractive to Zelensky. But it’s both more credible and more likely to gain acceptance from Moscow. It also happens to be in the best interests of the nation President Trump leads.
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