The Art of a Really Bad Deal

In the first week of peace negotiations, Trump and his negotiation team gave Putin everything he wanted and got nothing for Ukraine in return. I hope the second week will be better.

After Donald Trump’s reelection, there was some genuine optimism among my Ukrainian friends and colleagues that he might be the one who will finally bring peace to Ukraine. On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to do so. He said he could do it in a day, even before his inauguration. After all, President Trump has a unique and close relationship with Vladimir Putin, which some hoped he might leverage to negotiate a peace deal. Some Ukrainians were also tired of President Biden and his team, who they believed moved too slowly and timidly with weapons and sanctions. Quietly, some of my Ukrainian friends also suggested that Trump’s return to power would give President Zelenskyy the alibi he needed to make unpopular concessions, such as giving up land for credible security guarantees like NATO membership. The Ukrainian president could then say he had no choice but to accept these suboptimal deals.

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump Meet in Helsinki, Finland, on 16 July 2018. Photo via Wiki Commons.

After last week’s first-round negotiations, all that optimism is gone. Ukrainians and our European allies are shocked at how badly President Trump and his negotiation team started this process. Trump’s team floated giant concessions to Putin and asked for nothing in return. For a president who prides himself as a dealmaker, these first moves in this negotiation were hard to understand. Conversely, last week, the Trump administration made significant demands from Zelenskyy without offering anything in return to Ukraine. For anyone interested in advancing American national security interests, defending Ukrainian sovereignty, and preserving international norms against barbaric, imperialist invasion and annexation, it is hard to imagine a worse start.

Let’s briefly review who got what so far:

U.S. Concessions Offered to Putin:

1. Ukraine has to give up territory to Russia.

2. Ukraine cannot join NATO.

3. If there is an international peacekeeping force in Ukraine, American soldiers will not participate.

4. The U.S. plans to reduce the number of U.S. soldiers deployed in Europe.

5. Zelenskyy must hold new presidential elections before negotiations to end the war start.

6. U.S.-Russia relations were formally restarted without any preconditions at a meeting between Secretary of State Rubio and Foreign Minister Lavrov in Saudi Arabia.

7. Trump officials hinted at sanctions relief for Russia.

8. Trump officials suggested that the 2022 “Istanbul protocols” should serve as a negotiation guidepost. That document capped the size of Ukraine's Armed Forces at 85,000, placed very low limits on the number of tanks, artillery pieces, and missiles, and banned Ukraine from purchasing foreign weapons.

9. Trump called Zelenskyy a dictator.

10. Trump invited Russia to rejoin the G7.

11. At the Munich Security Conference (which I attended), Vice President Vance lectured American allies in Europe on their poor democratic practices without criticizing Russia’s dictatorship.

12. The format of the negotiations is very favorable to Russia. Instead of practicing shuttle diplomacy between Kyiv and Moscow, Rubio seems to oversee talks with Russian officials, while General Kellogg is in charge of meeting with Ukrainian officials. In the first meeting between Russian and American officials in Riyadh, Saudi representatives were present, but Ukrainian and European officials were not.

13. The United States voted “No” on a UN resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In doing so, Trump broke ranks with American democratic allies and sided with Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and other dictatorships.

U.S. demands of Ukraine:

1. An agreement to allow the United States to obtain 50 percent of all future mining profits from Ukrainian minerals to repay the United States for aid already delivered.

2. No new military or economic assistance.

3. No new sanctions.

4. Cutting off all USAID assistance to Ukraine already appropriated, including humanitarian aid and financial support for anti-corruption programs.

5. Zelenskyy must step down as president before negotiations begin.

6. Ukraine has agreed to Trump’s minerals deal in hopes of paving the way for a long-term U.S. security commitment. While the Trump administration has dropped the toughest demands, Ukraine is to establish a fund and contribute 50 percent of proceeds from the “future monetisation” of state-owned mineral resources, including oil and gas, and associated logistics. The fund would invest in projects in Ukraine.

U.S. demands of Europe:

1. Europeans will not be represented at the peace negotiations.

2. Once a peace settlement is reached, Europe—not the United States—will be responsible for enforcing it, including providing peacekeepers.

3. The U.S. will reduce its military footprint in Europe. Some speculated that this might be the beginning of the end of U.S. participation in NATO.

4. Europeans must improve their democracies, especially regarding censorship issues and migration.

U.S. concessions from Russia:

1. The release of wrongfully detained American teacher Marc Fogel. (I know Marc personally; he was my son’s high school teacher, so I am excited about this achievement!)

2. The promise of new business deals in and with Russia.

Ukraine’s concessions from Russia or the United States:

1. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

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This is a bad start for both American national interests and Ukrainian and European interests. Trump and his team are rewarding imperialism and legitimizing annexation— dangerous precedents to set that could encourage more military conquest in the world, including in Asia. By appeasing a belligerent dictator, the United States looks weak. When I was in Munich last week, many Europeans said they were watching a replay of Munich in 1938 when British Prime Minister Chamberlain tried to appease Hitler. Others suggested that the Yalta conference in 1945 was a better analogy, except with Hitler as a participant in those negotiations that carved up Europe.

The way these negotiations unfolded also lacked professionalism. First, it is regrettable that we know all these facts about what was offered in just the first week of talks. Successful diplomacy happens behind closed doors, not through press conferences or tweets.

Second, the U.S. strategy seems to be to give Putin everything he wants and then hope that he will reciprocate with concessions in later rounds of negotiations. That never works in diplomacy in general, but especially with Putin. Instead, you have trade concessions and compromises. You must also signal clearly that nothing is locked in until everything is done. When I served in the Obama administration, that’s how we successfully negotiated the New START Treaty, the sanctions package against Iran, and the expansion of the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) through Russia to supply our soldiers in Afghanistan. Every paragraph of these agreements involved compromises from both sides, not just one country giving the other everything they wanted. Sometimes, effective diplomacy means linking together unrelated issues. For instance, we lifted some sanctions on Russian companies to get the Russians to agree to new sanctions against Iran in 2010. And sometimes, with Moscow, you have to play hardball, as President Reagan did when deploying Pershing missiles in Europe in the 1980s. That daring move, criticized by many at the time as destabilizing, eventually produced the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty, which required both countries to withdraw these very destabilizing weapons from Europe.

Third, you never should naively believe that saying nice things about Putin—or echoing his lies about who started the war or Zelenskyy’s legitimacy—will soften him up regarding substantive issues in negotiations. Putin sees fawning, sycophant praise of himself as a sign of weakness. For instance, Putin knows well that he started the war—he invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. For Trump officials to equivocate about this obvious fact is a signal to Putin of fealty, not strength. It suggests to Putin that he can ask for more.

There are only two explanations for why the Trump negotiations team got off to such a bad start last week. One is that they are new to all of this. They’ve been at it for four weeks. They have not figured out their game plan. Lavrov has been doing this for two decades. Negotiating with Putin or Lavrov is not the same as doing real estate deals in New York. Plus, the U.S. side always has to worry about Trump inserting himself as the action officer in the negotiations through social media or interviews. I’m sure that’s hard.

The second explanation is that Trump is actually not serious about negotiating a lasting peace deal, let alone a just one. Instead, he is more focused on developing his relationship with Putin and restarting U.S.-Russia relations. If that’s the case, then it doesn’t really matter what the contours of the deal are because Trump is indifferent as to whether the Ukrainians will accept them or not. If they do, Trump can declare victory. If they do not, Trump can say he tried, but the “stubborn” Ukrainians walked away. And he, too, can then walk away.

I hope the explanation for this bad start is the former. I fear it’s the latter. But I will keep hoping it’s the first: that the Trump negotiators will regroup and develop a smarter strategy as they engage in future negotiations. The stakes could not be higher for Ukraine, Europe, and the United States.