by Victor Davis Hanson
Trump’s Alaska summit with Putin yielded no ceasefire, but it revealed the contours of a possible peace—where diplomacy, exhaustion, and hard limits define the battlefield’s end.
At the August 15 Alaska summit, Vladimir Putin performed as expected.
He desperately wants an end to Western sanctions, détente with the
U.S., and assurances that the U.S. will not impose a disastrous
anti-Russian secondary boycott—and, apparently, some additional
Ukrainian territory.
Consequently, Putin, in his media synopsis, talked more about
restored friendship with a “neighborly” United States under Trump. He
scarcely mentioned Ukraine directly—other than to imply to Westerners
that he seeks not merely to annex a foreign country, but to reclaim what
he views as a former Soviet province with ancient ties to the Russian
people.
Trump did not get his ceasefire with Putin. But he quickly pivoted to
remind us that the table is set for a supposedly comprehensive peace
without first requiring a temporary cessation of arms.
Trump addressed the media more succinctly and with greater discretion
than Putin, appearing more optimistic that the Russian-American
hostility was thawing. And he views normalization as a necessary step
toward comprehensive peace in the weeks to come.
The left lambasted Trump for speaking politely of Putin and vice
versa. There was additional criticism of a Fox interview in which Trump
mentioned “land swaps” and for his supposed prior naïveté in believing
he could obtain a ceasefire with Putin.
Yet for all the posturing, we have known for some time the general
outlines of a peace, how it could come about, and why it has not yet
happened.
Ukraine will not join NATO, but will likely be fully armed by the
West. Ukraine lacks the power to retake Crimea or the Donbass, but with
Western aid, it can preserve most of its territory.
Russia is worn out, but it is not yet ready to give up and may not be
even after the envisioned destructive secondary sanctions. Putin will
only make peace when his dictatorship feels it has advanced far enough
westward (perhaps 100 miles west of the border) to justify to the
oligarchy and military his foolhardy invasion and the needless toll of
one million Russians dead, wounded, missing, or captured.
No one knows where a hypothetical DMZ line might eventually be drawn.
But for now, it depends on which army has the greater wherewithal and
momentum to push its enemy backward before there is a general consensus
to stop the madness.
These contours of peace can be shaped by promises of trade deals and
normalization between Russia and the West. Or, contrarily, they can be
realized by threats of tougher sanctions and boycotts, as well as by
security guarantees to Ukraine, by near-permanent aid to Ukraine to
maintain its quite formidable army and deterrence, or by internal
erosion from the war either in Ukraine or Russia.
Yet few critics of the administration address the unmentionables that
likely account for the above general outlines of a settlement. There
are some realities that serve as subtexts to any possible agreement that
cannot be simply thought away.
1. Ukraine could only regain Crimea and
the Donbass and return to its pre-2022 borders by a historic
transference of U.S. and European arms, intelligence, logistical
support, and financial aid that would be little short of actively
fighting nuclear Russia.
Europe talks grandly of unlimited
support. But some Europeans still buy Russian energy, slow-walk aid,
seem exhausted by the war, and are likely in time to peel away as they
once did from the endless “no-fly zones” over Saddam’s Iraq after the
first Gulf War. Europe sounds as if it fields vast armies, but in truth,
Putin believes European support will erode more quickly than Ukrainian
resistance or American help.
So, for all the talk of an “exhausted”
Russia, there is a silent consensus that a depopulated and broken
Ukraine cannot sustain its current levels of resistance without a much
greater Western profile. And that is unlikely to happen.
2. Notably, the left never really dwells
on the likely 1.5 million dead, wounded, missing, and captured from
three and a half years of war. It is a humanitarian nightmare, a modern
Stalingrad that makes Gaza look like child’s play.
Yet Westerners are far more likely to
posture on the human costs of the “genocide” in the distant Mideast wars
than on Europe’s doorstep. Perhaps Germany or France feels it can
influence Netanyahu by performance-art declarations of statehood for the
Palestinians (on the quiet assumption that Israel is Western, friendly,
and more likely to listen to Euro-moralizing than is a proximate,
hostile, and dangerous Putin’s Russia).
Strangely, Trump alone seems to be
lamenting the needless loss of thousands of lives each month, with no
end in sight. It is fine to demand zero concessions to Putin or to
accuse any who seek negotiations through land swaps as appeasers. But it
is quite another to lay out a strategic plan for victory and complete
recovery of pre-2014 Ukrainian territory, the likely costs necessary for
such an ambitious strategy, and who, and for how long, will pay the
tab.
3. There is a long history, both peaceful
and hostile, between Russia and Ukraine that Westerners often ignore
due to the current naked aggression of Putin and the murderous nature of
his regime. Nonetheless, most recently, since 1939, the borders of
present-day Ukraine have been fluid and changeable between Poland,
Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. There still remains strong Russian
influence and even support in Eastern Ukraine. And there has been a
Western naivete since the end of the Cold War about pre-Putin Russia’s
trip-wire sensitivity to the eastward trajectory of Western military
alliances toward Russia and the more insidious Westernization of former
and still mostly Russian-speaking areas of the old Soviet Union.
The current tensions with Canada and the
U.S. would certainly boil over if China were to begin overtly
championing the Canadian cause. Americans remember the 1962 U.S.
response to Castro’s Cuba when Nikita Khrushchev broke Cold War
conventions by strategically arming a third-nation proxy on America’s
doorstep.
4. Talking to a monstrous Putin is not
treasonous, foolhardy, or unnecessary. FDR openly courted, joked with,
and even praised (“Uncle Joe”) an even greater monster in Joseph Stalin,
who by 1941 had the blood of nearly 20 million Russians on his hands.
Stalin had already invaded pro-Western Finland and Poland. And between
September 1, 1939, and June 22, 1941, he had enabled Adolf Hitler to
overrun much of Western Europe, hoping Germany would destroy both the
West and itself in the process.
Nixon did not just “go to China” but
sought to change the geostrategic nuclear landscape by courting Mao
Zedong, the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century.
Not calling Putin a “killer” and
“murderer” at the summit is hardly appeasement but more like
art-of-the-deal, speaking softly while carrying a big stick, rather than
Biden-style loud rhetoric while carrying a twig. Who is the greater
humanitarian—the inert and anemic blowhard who resorts to name-calling a
“murderous thug,” or the president willing to meet face-to-face with a
monster to explore costly ways of halting the mass slaughter?
5. Finally, few seem to remember that Trump is a latecomer to the Ukrainian-Russian mess.
In the end, we should remember it was not
Trump who once talked grandly of a soon-to-be NATO Ukraine or who for
years welched on the promise to spend a meager 2 percent of GDP on
defense.
It was not Trump who pushed a plastic red
button to embark on a “Russian reset” with a voracious Putin. It was
not Trump who invited Russia back into the Middle East after a nearly
40-year hiatus.
It was not Trump who, after the reset’s
failure, moved on to concoct “Russian collusion” and “Russian
disinformation” to use Russia to destroy a political rival. It was not
Trump who went to Ukraine, threatened to hold up aid, and fired a
prosecutor looking into his son’s selling to Ukrainians the influence of
his father’s vice presidency.
It was not Trump on whose watch Putin invaded Georgia, the Donbass, and Crimea, and sought to absorb Kyiv.
It was not Trump who dreamed up the Nord
Stream 2 pipeline to subsidize green energy fantasies—while still buying
Russian energy.
And it was not Trump who conditioned his possible reaction to Putin’s invasion based on whether it might be “minor.”
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the
Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former
classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a
visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023
Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public
Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National
Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley
Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm
in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming
and agrarianism.
He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/18/putin-trump-and-the-elusive-peace/
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
