There Are No Participation Trophies in High-Stakes Diplomacy

Trump and his interlocutors negotiated to begin to negotiate, hardly a significant achievement.

I have applauded President Trump’s efforts to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. I have supported his decision to engage directly with Russian officials. His efforts over the past week were the most ambitious so far.

Diplomacy, however, is judged by results, not effort. To date, Trump and his team have held numerous meetings with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, including the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska last week, and a handful of meetings with President Zelenskyy, including the Trump-Zelenskyy meeting yesterday, followed by a subsequent meeting with several European leaders. While both the Alaska and Washington meetings created opportunities for some iconic photos, neither has achieved any substantive progress towards ending Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Alaska may have even set back the process.

It was a big and risky decision for Trump to meet with Putin. While flying to Alaska, Trump himself wrote on social media, “HIGH STAKES!” The very act of meeting with Putin was a gift to the Russian autocrat. That gift was sweetened by having the meeting in the United States. A decision to hold the meeting in a territory that was once part of the Russian Empire was a third present for Putin, as commentators of Russian state-owned media used that fact to remind Russia of its great power status, and some even called for the taking back of Alaska because the terms of purchase had been so unfair.

Trump then decided to lavish the indicted war criminal from Moscow with even more respect and admiration than is rarely done for even America’s closet democratic allies. In the same week that Putin was killing Ukrainian civilians with drones, U.S. soldiers were on their knees rolling out a red carpet for him. Trump then met Putin on the tarmac, clapping in excitement as his “friend” approached. When I worked at the White House at the National Security Council for President Obama from 2009-2012, I helped to prepare presidential summits with Russian leaders, including one in Moscow in 2009, one in Prague in 2010, and one in Washington in 2010. Regarding pomp and circumstance, we never did anything nearly as elaborate for these meetings.

To advance American national interests, diplomacy often requires engaging with dictators. But when doing so, you do not have to treat them as friends or check your values at the door. That’s precisely what Trump did.

And Putin is no ordinary autocrat. At home, he has crushed independent media, civil society, and the political opposition, including killing two of Russia’s most prominent political leaders, Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny. Abroad, he has launched several wars of aggression, including in Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and then his full-scale invasion of Ukraine starting in 2022. His current invasion and occupation of Ukraine is the first major war of industrial slaughter and annexation in Europe since Hitler and Stalin started World War II in 1939. During this war, Putin has kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children, his soldiers have raped Ukrainians and stolen their property in the occupied lands, and Moscow now launches rockets and drones on a nightly basis that terrorize and kill Ukrainian civilians indiscriminately. This is the leader for whom Trump provided a red carpet and a welcome embrace.

It might have been worth it if Trump had accomplished some tangible outcomes from Alaska of value to the American people, our allies, and our partners in Ukraine. But there were no positive outcomes at all from the Alaska summit. So thin were the results that the meeting was abbreviated, the lunch canceled, and no questions were allowed at the “press conference.” Usually, after such high-level meetings, White House officials – they are cited when quoted in the press as “Senior administration officials,” (SAOs) -- often call reporters to spin their version of the substance of these meetings. I know. I was the SAO for multiple meetings between Obama and Russian leaders. In chatting with American journalists in Alaska last Friday, they got no such calls. There was nothing to spin.

But Alaska was worse than legitimizing an imperial dictator without achieving any results. Trump actually walked back some of the minimal goals he had announced for the summit before the meeting. Trump rightfully aimed to achieve a ceasefire in his meeting with Putin. As he said before the summit, “I want to see a ceasefire rapidly.” He added, “I don’t know if it’s going to be today. But I’m not going to be happy if it’s not today.” Yet after the meeting, when he did not secure a ceasefire commitment from Putin, Trump changed his talking points and now argues that ceasefires are not needed for peace negotiations to be successful. A second most minimal objective – in the State Department, we used to call these “deliverables” from summits – from Alaska was to be a commitment from Putin to meet directly with Zelenskyy and Trump in a trilateral summit. Trump also failed to secure that outcome; he’s still negotiating with Putin to make it happen.

And then on the flight home, Trump gave away some of his most valuable negotiated chits without receiving anything from Putin in return. He announced that Crimea is Russia’s and is never coming back, and he proclaimed that Ukraine is never going to join NATO. I personally would never play either of these cards, to use the analogy of negotiations that Trump likes. I think that the United States and Ukraine should never formally recognize the annexation of Crimea and should leave the door open for Ukraine’s membership in NATO. Trump apparently disagrees. But he should never have given these concessions away for free. That’s not how high-stakes diplomatic negotiations ever work, let alone with the Russians. That was a big blunder.

The only good news from Alaska is that it did not become a Yalta 2.0. Trump and Putin did not carve up chunks of Ukraine without Ukrainians in the room.

The Washington summit with Zelenskyy and other European leaders helped to stop the bleeding from Alaska. It was a brilliant idea to have other European leaders at this meeting as it made the event more of one with European allies more broadly and less of a personal meeting just between Trump and Zelenskyy; that personal relationship for Trump will always be clouded by the role that a phone call in 2019 between the two leaders played in eventually leading to Trump’s first impeachment. European leaders also helped to reframe the agenda of peace negotiations, in contrast to Putin’s narrative that dominated Alaska. Most importantly, the democratic leaders gathered in Washington yesterday discussed security guarantees for Ukraine, a central component of a lasting peace settlement. The vital subject of the return of Ukrainian children kidnapped by Putin also came up. Trump also did not berate and embarrass Zelenskyy like he did the last time the Ukrainian president visited the White House. The vibes with the other European leaders were also very positive. And it was clear that Trump was enjoying playing the role of the master of ceremonies. The meeting of the leaders in the Oval Office – Trump sitting in a big chair behind his desk and the other leaders sitting in smaller chairs all around the president’s desk- created an image of Trump’s leadership.

However, photo ops on the tarmac in Alaska or the Oval Office do not make peace. On the complex, substantive issues needing resolution for a peace deal, no real progress was made. As my friend and Ukrainian member of parliament, Sasha Ustinova, pithily summarizes, they “negotiated to negotiate.” And even that exercise is still incomplete. Putin has yet to agree to meet Zelenskyy.

To be successful in negotiating an end to this war, Trump is going to have not just to give concessions to Putin but also apply pressure. So far, Trump has hinted at that but never done the latter. Since becoming president, Trump has not enacted any new sanctions on Russia. Nor has he provided any new U.S. assistance to Ukraine.

Trump is also going to have to be more creative and bolder. For instance, he should separate the discussions about the borders from conversations about security guarantees. The former is a conversation between Zelenskyy and Putin alone. The latter is a negotiation between Zelenskyy and NATO alone, without any input from Putin. I personally still think the best security guarantee is NATO membership, not “NATO-like guarantees.” (I spelled out in detail how that could work in this article in Foreign Affairs, including my analysis for why Putin would ultimately acquiesce to it.). But because Trump objects to NATO membership for Ukraine – and NATO works by consensus – then second-best options must be explored, including the idea of European soldiers deployed to Ukraine, without Putin being asked if he agrees or not. We didn't ask for Stalin's permission to create NATO in 1949. We didn't ask Khrushchev's permission to bring West Germany into NATO in 1955. We didn't ask for Yeltsin's permission to expand NATO in the 1990s or Putin's permission in the 2000s. And after these events, Moscow did not invade NATO members. So why are we asking for Putin's blessing of our security guarantees with Ukraine now?

I still want Trump to succeed in ending the Putin war in Ukraine. I hope the next rounds of negotiations will achieve more than these first rounds did.