As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump said that he would end the war between Ukraine and Russia in 24 hours. While he cannot achieve that goal so rapidly, it is conceivable that the second Trump administration could stop the fighting in Ukraine, in which case the president-elect would be worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.
A settlement of the conflict would have four components, all of them necessary for terminating it:
- A ceasefire in place.
- The lifting of at least some, and perhaps all, of the economic sanctions on Russia.
- A credible American threat, which would have to come from President Trump, that if Russia does not accept the terms being offered, the United States would substantially increase its military assistance to Ukraine and relax its restrictions on how the Ukrainians can use their American-supplied weaponry, going beyond President Biden’s recent authorization of the Ukrainian use of American-supplied missiles against targets in Russia.
- A Western security guarantee to Ukraine – if not formal NATO membership, then the functional equivalent – that is credible to both Ukraine and Russia.
Each of the three parties involved – the Ukrainian government, Putin, and the Trump administration – would have good reasons to reject such a settlement. All, however, might be moved nonetheless to accept the four-part arrangement if each of them calculates that the price of refusal would exceed the cost of acceptance; and there is a basis for such a calculation for each of the three.
By the terms of the plan, Ukraine would lose some of its territory, which Russia has occupied in two wars of aggression and that the Ukrainians have been fighting, valiantly and at great cost, to regain. This would constitute a blow not only to Ukraine but also to the international legal order, since Russia would profit by its aggression.
On the other hand, if the United States and its NATO allies agreed to such a settlement, Ukraine, which depends on them for much of its weaponry, would be in no position to spurn it. Moreover, such an agreement would give the people of Ukraine the peace they require to reconstruct their country. (They would probably need assurances of some kind of help from the West for that reconstruction.) While they would assume, no doubt rightly, that Vladimir Putin would never give up his ambition to subjugate their country, the fourth element of the peace plan would provide assurance that he would not be able to do so.
As for the man who started the war and thus could end it singlehandedly, Mr. Putin may not be open to these or indeed to any terms for stopping the fighting. An ongoing war helps him remain in power, which is presumably his highest priority. By agreeing to end it, he would risk triggering whatever public reckoning he would encounter in dictatorially-governed Russia for having sacrificed, since February 2022, 600,000 Russians and members of other ethnic groups dead and wounded for what amounts to a personal vanity project that will have brought his country only a relatively small piece of depopulated and economically unpromising Ukrainian territory. Moreover, a Western security guarantee for Ukraine would establish one of the conditions that Putin has consistently claimed he went to war to prevent.
Still, it is at least conceivable that, if he regarded as credible a Trump threat to give Ukraine a more powerful military force in the absence of a settlement, Putin would decide that rejecting such a settlement would put him in serious jeopardy of ultimately losing everything – the war, the Ukrainian territory he has conquered, and his own control of Russia.
While he has suppressed overt criticism of the war in his own country, opposition to and resentment of both the conflict and the person responsible for it surely exist beneath the surface in Russia. At some point, he must worry, it will erupt in public, at his expense. Similarly, while he has managed to find the resources to wage the war even while incurring heavy economic and human losses, even Russia’s resources have limits, which he must be wary of exceeding. If he believes that a more powerful Ukraine could push the patience of the Russian people and the men and materiel at his disposal to the breaking point, he might grudgingly agree to terms to avoid what would be a personal disaster for him.
The American president-elect, like the Ukrainians and Putin, has disincentives to taking the steps that would make possible the four-part settlement to the war. He has made clear his dislike for wars in general and for American participation in them, even the indirect participation that the Ukraine-Russia conflict involves. He has evinced no particular commitment to Ukraine or to the principles it is defending in resisting Russian aggression. A number of people associated with him regard support for Ukraine as a diversion from the main business of American foreign policy: confronting China.
Extending a security guarantee to Ukraine might go beyond what Mr. Trump is willing to do. Given his skepticism about America’s existing alliances, he might well balk at establishing yet another one, although it should be noted that his principal stated reservation about the country’s allies has been that they do too little to defend themselves, a criticism that does not apply to Ukraine. The American public and its elected representatives are also likely respond skeptically to a proposal for a formal security guarantee to Ukraine; but because of his own previously expressed skepticism, Mr. Trump is singularly well-placed to secure public and congressional support for it, in the same way that President Richard Nixon was politically able to effect a rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China in 1972 without serious damage to his domestic political standing because of his own history of anti-communism.
What would induce Mr. Trump to play such a part in constructing this settlement? Like all political leaders he would undoubtedly welcome the praise that comes to successful peacemakers; but the strongest incentive for Mr. Trump to threaten Russia with greater military assistance to the Ukrainians and to offer Ukraine the kind of security guarantee that Europe and Japan enjoy is not what he might gain from such initiatives but rather what he stands to lose in their absence.
Ukraine is now slowly losing its war with Russia. In the absence of more robust Western military assistance, it will continue to lose it slowly; and if American assistance ends, it is all too likely to lose the war rapidly. A Russian victory would have catastrophic consequences for Ukraine, with carnage perhaps even of the kind that Israel experienced on October 7, 2023.
Such an outcome would also have extraordinarily damaging political consequences for Mr. Trump. Once he becomes president, he will inherit responsibility for the war. While he has had nothing to do with American policy toward the conflict since it began, he will not be able to disavow or walk away from it after January 20, 2025 with no consequences at all, much as he might wish to do so. A Russian victory in Ukraine would dramatically weaken the American position around the world, and the US president at the time would incur the blame for this.
The worst outcome – a decisive Russian victory – would have the same kind of negative effect on President Trump as the collapse of Afghanistan did on his predecessor, but in all likelihood the impact would be even worse. Such an outcome would blight, and perhaps cripple, the Trump presidency. He himself would be seen as among the worst – perhaps the worst – commanders-in-chief in American history. That is a fate that anyone in his position would do a great deal to avoid.
If the Ukrainians, Putin, and Trump conclude that accepting the terms of this four-part settlement serves their interests better than rejecting them, an end to the Ukraine-Russia war is possible. If that should happen, Mr. Trump, who would be responsible for the third and fourth parts – strengthening Ukraine militarily and guaranteeing its security – would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. In the admittedly unlikely but not impossible event that all this should come to pass, Mr. Trump would join the two other sitting American presidents to have won this honor: Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 for mediating a peace agreement for the Russia-Japanese War of 1904-1905, and Barack Obama in 2009, for being Barack Obama. He would have the added satisfaction of knowing that, like the first presidential recipient but unlike the second, he would have earned the prize.
