The American surrender to Putin

Is Trump's policy America first or America alone?

By David Bernell and Thomas Graham

Photo by Yurii Khomitskyi on Unsplash

The president of the United States called Vladimir Putin on Feb. 12. The White House characterized the call as the beginning of a negotiation to end the war in Ukraine. The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, was informed of Trump’s call to Putin only after the fact. Trump also told reporters after the call to Putin that it seemed unlikely Ukraine would regain in any peace settlement all the territory it has lost to Russia.

On the same day Trump spoke with Putin, American Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in Brussels at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group that Ukraine should not expect a return to its pre-2014 borders, calling it an “illusionary goal.” He also said that the United States would not support NATO membership for Ukraine as part of a peace plan.

In a matter of hours, the Trump administration had ineptly telegraphed its intention to leave Ukraine out in the cold. By even placing a call to Putin—someone who is under indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes committed in Ukraine—Trump gave Putin a great reward. Hegseth’s comments further confirmed that even before any talks on Ukraine have begun, the United States was giving away two major concessions in exchange for absolutely nothing. “Why are we giving them everything they want even before the negotiations have started?” asked Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat.

Because Trump took these steps without first talking to the government of Ukraine or NATO members, these countries now know where they stand with him: They are secondary, perhaps even expendable. When asked if he considered Ukraine to be an “equal partner” in peace talks, Trump merely replied, “It’s an interesting question.” Trump’s special envoy for Russia and Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, offered a similar thought about America’s allies, stating at the Munich Security Conference last week that European countries should not expect to have any involvement in peace talks involving Ukraine.

At the same time the Trump administration appears ready to treat Ukraine and NATO like game pieces on a chessboard, it also wants to offload American involvement and responsibility in Europe and hand it to the Europeans themselves. The United States has asked NATO countries to indicate what level of military aid and post-war peacekeeping forces they can provide to Ukraine, saying that the United States would not take the lead in such efforts. To further drive home the point, Hegseth relinquished American leadership of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group a few days before he met with the group in Brussels.

So, American officials demean their European allies, saying it will leave them out of peace talks. Yet the United States also communicates that it wants European members of NATO to take primary responsibility for security of the region and peace in Ukraine. Moreover, the Trump administration is (not surprisingly) undermining good governance in Europe. When Vice President JD Vance was in Germany last week, he made a speech reprimanding Europeans for “censoring” far-right parties and spoke favorably of Germany’s AfD party, whose racist, xenophobic rhetoric echoes what the country experienced under Nazi rule. Vance suggested AfD should be considered a normal, legitimate actor in German politics and even met with its leader, prompting a rebuke by the both the German chancellor and defense minister, who said Vance’s comments equating democratic guardrails against extremism with autocratic governance were “unacceptable.” (Elon Musk has gone even further than Trump and Vance, speaking via livestream to an AfD campaign rally and endorsing its leader for chancellor.)

It is fitting that meetings in which the Americans have offered their approach to foreign policy have been taking place in Munich. The Trump team has been, in effect, articulating its own policy of appeasement to an expansionist, aggressive dictatorship in the same place that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain articulated his own country’s policy of appeasement in 1938, ushering in World War II, and giving appeasement the bad name it deserves.

From the moment he announced his call with Putin, Trump has looked as if he has begun the process of arranging the American surrender to him. Should that be the case, he and the American government will be disparaged—appropriately—for being content to leave Ukraine and the rest of Europe to deal on their own with Putin, who is eager to reassert Russian control in countries that had once been a part of the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact. (The Baltic states and Poland already see themselves as Putin’s next targets and have been arming themselves to prepare for war).

The Ukrainians will do everything they can to strengthen their security, and they rightly see NATO membership as the strongest (and maybe the only) guarantee of this. Their hatred and mistrust of Russia derives not only from the brutality, mass killings, targeting of civilians, and kidnapping of children in the war. It goes back far longer, as Russia has been responsible for the death of an estimated 5-10 million Ukrainians in the past century alone, not only during the Holodomor (the 1932-1933 genocidal famine carried out by Stalin that killed at least four million people), but also by the repression of Ukraine throughout the Soviet era, which included snuffing out Ukrainian independence after World War I.

As the Ukrainians seek to keep the Americans on their side, they might have something to offer, because Trump smells money and he hates looking like a sucker and a loser. The government of Ukraine dangled a temptation in front of him by pointing out that it has massive deposits of rare earth minerals that are untapped. Jumping at the opportunity, Trump indicated that American military aid could depend on reaching an agreement with Kyiv that grants U.S. access to its rare earth minerals. "We are going to have all this money in there,” Trump said, “and I say I want it back. And I told them that I want the equivalent, like $500 billion worth of rare earth."

Though the Ukrainian government rejected the initial American request for Ukraine to hand over 50 percent of its rare earth minerals to the United States, Ukraine says it will make a counteroffer, in part because the American proposal included no security guarantees, which Zelensky has made clear he wants in exchange for any mineral deal with the United States or any truce with Russia.

The world will soon find out if Zelensky can appeal to some combination of Trump’s vanity and greed. Even if this can be accomplished to help save Ukraine from Russia, the American foreign policy trajectory under Trump is taking shape: In Europe, it alienates NATO allies and strengthens Russia; worldwide, it threatens tariffs on U.S. trading partners while ending humanitarian assistance programs all around the world, rescinding funding for food and medicine, refugee relocation, and public health measures to prevent the spread of diseases such as HIV and Ebola.

This isn’t “America First.” Instead, the United States seems more likely to face “America Alone.”

Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr. was acting director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Bill Clinton and served as general counsel of ACDA during the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He is the author of several books on nuclear arms control, U.S. foreign policy, and American politics.

David Bernell is an associate professor in the School of Public Policy at Oregon State University. He is the author of “Constructing US Foreign Policy: The Curious Case of Cuba” and “The Energy Security Dilemma: US Policy and Practice.” He also served in the Clinton administration with the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. Department of the Interior.

You can find their work on Substack at Defending Democracy.

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