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On the surface, yesterday’s White House summit on Ukraine showed an impressively unified front among President Donald Trump, major European leaders, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The participants all smiled and expressed optimism. Zelensky donned a suit, avoiding harangues like those he received over his military attire during his previous visit.
Yes, the leaders offered sometimes exaggerated praise for Trump, but the president also praised each of them in hyperbolic terms, and he had a few good lines, even if NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte laughed a little too hard at some of them.
The biggest division during the meeting was not about whether Trump is more sympathetic to Russia or Ukraine, the central question in the past. Instead, the disunity was over substance versus process. Trump appeared to treat the peace negotiation as basically a series of steps to be completed, while his counterparts were more focused on questions of cease-fires and security guarantees. This cleavage suggests that although European leaders appear to have succeeded—at least for now—in persuading Trump to move somewhat toward them and away from Russian President Vladimir Putin, turning that into a real peace will still be challenging.
For Trump, the answer to stopping the war appears to be getting the right sequence of meetings: First, he met with Putin; then he met with Zelensky; next, he will meet with both men and, he says, hammer out a deal. “We’re going to try and work out a [trilateral meeting] after that and see if we can get it finished, put this to sleep,” he said yesterday. (Zelensky was open to such a meeting yesterday. The White House said today that Putin has agreed as well, but the Kremlin has been publicly noncommittal.)
Zelensky and the other Europeans, meanwhile, were much more concerned about the details of what might come up at this eventual trilateral meeting, or along the way. For the pro-Ukraine bloc, the big victory from yesterday was a discussion of security guarantees for Ukraine—basically, assurances that once a peace deal is in place, allies will assist Ukraine if Russia restarts hostilities. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, discussed creating something similar to NATO’s Article 5 mutual-defense agreement. But Trump was notably vague about what sort of commitments he might make.
Trump also wavered on the importance of a cease-fire. Prior to his summit with Putin in Alaska last week, Trump had insisted on a cessation of hostilities, which Putin flatly rejected. Now Trump seems to have given up on that. “All of us would obviously prefer an immediate cease-fire while we work on a lasting peace,” he said. “And maybe something like that could happen. As of this moment, it’s not happening.” (As if to underscore the point, Russian drones struck Ukraine yesterday—though this sort of provocation also seems to be one reason for Trump’s new openness to Ukraine.)
Some observers were appalled by Trump’s meeting with Putin on American soil, noting that the Russian president is a butcher, an autocrat, and a war criminal wanted on international warrants. All of this is true, and nauseating, but as National Review’s Rich Lowry notes, achieving peace will require dealing with Putin. (When President Barack Obama tried diplomacy with Iran, Republicans were outraged; now the roles are reversed.) Peace deals are judged on results, not always the character of those making them. Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger were Nobel Peace laureates, after all.
Sitting down, however, is not enough on its own, and if treated that way, it can simply encourage bad actors such as Putin by giving them status and recognition without requiring any or many concessions. Trump sees himself as a dealmaker, and he’s often described—sometimes, though not always, positively—as transactional. But he is so personally motivated by deals per se that he doesn’t always appear to grasp that others are not, or why they’re not. Trump’s approach to this negotiation has ignored the fact that Putin doesn’t seem interested in a deal at all: He appears content to drag the war out as long as possible. Nor does Trump’s method account for the fact that some terms of a peace deal would be so onerous as to make it unacceptable to Zelensky on patriotic and political grounds. Dealing with the messy details is hard work, and Trump has never shown much interest in, or patience for, policy minutiae.
This fetishization of process over substance has previously led Trump into the same diplomatic cul-de-sacs. In 2018—despite the skepticism of some of his own aides—he met with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in Singapore. The summit produced all the pageantry and pomp that Trump adores, and it led to a pen-pal relationship between the men, but in part because that was his focus, the gambit has not produced any breakthroughs on North Korea opening up, reducing nefarious activities overseas, or relinquishing nuclear weapons. Trump has held multiple meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to try to move toward a peace deal in Gaza, but his inability to get much traction there has led him to lash out at his ally.
Other perils still dog the Ukraine peace process. Trump continues to speak about Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine as though Ukraine had some choice or culpability in the matter. (“Russia is a powerful military nation, you know, whether people like it or not,” he said on Fox & Friends this morning. “It’s a much bigger nation. It’s not a war that should have been started; you don’t do that. You don’t take—you don’t take on a nation that’s 10 times your size.”) Trump also has a tendency to latch on to whatever he heard from the last person he spoke with, which explains his vacillation between Friday’s friendliness to Putin and yesterday’s chumminess with Zelensky, and makes it hard to know where he might settle.
But the biggest challenge at this moment is the nitty-gritty. Process is important and shouldn’t be written off, but it’s important because it provides a framework for resolving the substance. No peace deal can be achieved without accepting that.
Related:
Today’s News
- Russian President Vladimir Putin promised to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the coming weeks, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
- In an interview on Fox News this morning, President Donald Trump said that no U.S. ground forces will go to Ukraine as part of any peace deal with Russia, but he is open to providing Ukraine with military air support.
- The Justice Department has launched an investigation into whether Washington, D.C., police manipulated data to make the city’s crime rates appear lower, according to The Washington Post.
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