When U.S. President Donald Trump’s 28-point plan for peace in Ukraine first leaked in late November, its potential consequences were widely viewed as an unmitigated disaster for the besieged country.
The terms—several of which have been dropped, walked back, or otherwise modified by Trump’s national security team—would have obliged Ukraine to cede strategically vital territories in its east that Russia has been unable to conquer, even at the cost of huge losses of troops. Equally disastrous for Kyiv were clauses that would have required it to reduce the size of its armed forces, permanently barred it from entering NATO, and restituted billions of dollars of assets seized from Russia, enabling Ukraine’s aggressor to rapidly rearm.
When U.S. President Donald Trump’s 28-point plan for peace in Ukraine first leaked in late November, its potential consequences were widely viewed as an unmitigated disaster for the besieged country.
The terms—several of which have been dropped, walked back, or otherwise modified by Trump’s national security team—would have obliged Ukraine to cede strategically vital territories in its east that Russia has been unable to conquer, even at the cost of huge losses of troops. Equally disastrous for Kyiv were clauses that would have required it to reduce the size of its armed forces, permanently barred it from entering NATO, and restituted billions of dollars of assets seized from Russia, enabling Ukraine’s aggressor to rapidly rearm.
But as bad as the ill-fated plan might have been for Ukraine, its implications for the state of U.S. diplomacy and Washington’s position in the world during the second Trump presidency are arguably even worse.
By blindsiding Europe with a set of proposals to end the war in Ukraine that took almost no account of that continent’s concerns, the United States gravely deepened the yawning sense of disconnect between Washington and its European allies that has been building since Trump’s first term. By now, following decades of tightly woven interdependence, distrust has become a central feature of trans-Atlantic relations. No matter what happens next in Ukraine or how the remainder of Trump’s time in office plays out, it will be difficult to recover mutual confidence.
In the shorter term, though, not even the fundamental weakening of the United States’ most important relationship constitutes the worst of the damage. What the Trump administration’s recent diplomacy has laid fully bare is the utterly erratic, unplanned, and personalized character of the president’s method of dealing with the rest of the world.
Whereas a long string of previous U.S. presidents leaned on a gradually built-up and finely balanced system to conduct foreign relations, the Trump administration navigates according to the whims of the president’s gut.
This has resulted, in part, from the way that Trump has collapsed the country’s long-standing diplomatic architecture by appointing Marco Rubio as both secretary of state and national security advisor. The traditional separation between these two roles was intended to allow the former to lead in the hands-on practice of diplomacy while the latter concentrated on coordinating intelligence, defense, and diplomatic inputs from the country’s sprawling national security apparatus and thereby helped the president sort through foreign-policy options and decisions.
From all appearances, the Trump administration’s foreign-policy operations lack in interagency coordination, leading to galling oversights and an overall impression of sheer amateurism. How else to understand the failure to consult with Ukraine’s neighbors before announcing a peace plan delivered with a short-term ultimatum on compliance?
If Trump’s foreign policy is bereft of the systematic approach of past U.S. presidents, this cannot be altogether considered the result of a lack of design. Trump seems most comfortable in his role as the nation’s ultimate foreign-policy czar. He appears to relish coming to his own understanding of the issues and interests in play, even when it is wrongheaded or woefully oversimplified. And with nearly every major diplomatic decision, he seems to follow his own transactional view of human affairs and trusts his instincts as the surest source of wisdom and policy guidance.
This highly centralized and improvisational approach to managing world affairs has facilitated the rise of special envoys and policy freelancers in the Trump foreign-policy orbit. The most obvious example of this is Steve Witkoff, a real estate development billionaire with no prior foreign-policy experience, whom Trump entrusted as his lead negotiator in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Witkoff’s ill-suitedness for this role has been repeatedly borne out, from his amateurish participation in conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, where he has shown up without his own translator or official notetaker, to the ill-prepared August summit between Trump and Putin in Alaska.
While incompetence, or at least a lack of background knowledge, was once thought to have been Witkoff’s chief liability, views of him turned darker last week, when it was revealed that he recently gave advice to Russians close to Putin on how to use flattery in dealing with Trump to get him to adopt Russian positions. The Kremlin’s demands included abandoning the idea of supplying Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine and incorporating Russian territorial demands in Washington’s negotiating strategy to end the war.
Personal comfort level and trust with key advisors were important to previous presidents, but these considerations have come to vastly override expertise or experience in the Trump world. Witkoff’s status with Trump appears to have been strongly boosted by his leading role in negotiating a proclaimed end to the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza. In fact, that war continues, albeit in a somewhat less intense form and largely outside of the headlines, allowing Trump to prematurely claim success.
Ending Putin’s war in Ukraine is unlikely to be as simple a matter as announcing a peace in Gaza, though. Stripped to its core, the Trump-Witkoff approach to Gaza seemed to be based on a simple principle captured in the ancient Thucydidean adage, “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” Israel, the vastly stronger party, was hardly obliged to make any concessions to Palestinian interests in the pursuit of a declared peace. A quick glance at that conflict’s rapidly superseded 28-point Trump peace proposal lends to an impression that this template was simply transferred to the Russia-Ukraine war.
The ill-suitedness of this approach—which a better organized and more qualified national security team could have warned a president who was willing to listen about—begins with the White House’s neglect of the fact that Europe has deep stakes in the outcome of this war and cannot be bypassed or written out of any lasting agreement. It also ignores that after years of deep human and material sacrifice in the defense of Ukrainian sovereignty, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would destroy his own credibility as a leader—rendered even more fragile by a recent high-level corruption scandal—if he agreed to sign over undefeated portions of the Donbas region in order to appease Moscow.
At a yet deeper level, the Trump team’s failure to bluntly challenge Russia’s maximalist demands over Ukraine seems to stem from its inability to imagine that Putin’s own political survival might hinge on a perpetuation of this war. That is because an end to hostilities would focus domestic public attention on the astonishing costs that Russia has paid—including the loss of as many as 1 million lives—in its 19th century-style pursuit of imperial aggrandizement. In other words, Putin may not only be trying to grind Ukraine into submission and deplete Europe’s political patience and material resources. In the absence of a near total victory, which seems unlikely, Putin’s grip on Russia may depend on postponing any reckoning over his utter folly.
The biggest mystery of Trump’s foreign policy—and the ultimate source of erosion in the United States’ position in the world—involves the U.S. president’s own motivations. Why has he been so extraordinarily deferential to Putin for so long? Yes, Russia has a huge surviving arsenal of nuclear weapons, but it leads the world in almost nothing; has a stagnant economy of only middling size and prosperity; and has become dwarfed by China, its rich and powerful senior partner in an increasingly imbalanced alliance.
None of the potential answers that come to mind remotely justify downgrading or jeopardizing Washington’s long-standing partnership with a rich and populous Europe. One holds that Trump simply admires authoritarians’ ability to make unilateral decisions and place their personal stamps on their times.
Another possibility holds that Trump looks up to Russia for its extraordinary size and enormous natural resources. These include some of the world’s richest oil reserves, which may tickle the fancy of a U.S. leader who seems obsessed with hydrocarbons as a tool of global power and likely harbors memories from the 1980s, when U.S. oil companies coveted a big role in exploiting Russia’s oil and gas resources. A covetousness toward Venezuela’s oil reserves, which are even larger than Russia’s, might also help explain Trump’s drive to put military pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro largely on the basis of an ill-supported charge that Maduro supplies deadly fentanyl to the United States.
Yet another view imagines that Putin has ensorcelled Trump with the lure of immense investment possibilities for U.S. companies in a postwar Russia (and Ukraine). At this point, no one would be surprised if that included hints that Trump and members of his family and inner circle, such as Witkoff, could personally profit in the future from large real estate and natural resource deals.
If this theory is borne out, the Trump administration will have laid U.S. diplomacy to ruin by abandoning the principle that international borders should not be changed through force and actively disregarding the country’s longest-standing allies. If naked transactionalism is indeed the motor driving U.S. foreign policy, it will drive Washington’s standing in the world into the ground.
