AT THE BEGINNING OF DONALD TRUMP’S second term, MAGA was brimming with confidence about his ability to bring the war in Ukraine to an immediate conclusion. After repeatedly promising to end the war in “twenty-four hours” during the campaign, Trump revealed his plan for doing so: drastically scale back American support for Ukraine and force Kyiv to accept a terrible deal with Moscow. Trump believed he had all the leverage in negotiations—from the military aid Washington has provided Ukraine to his “great relationship” with Vladimir Putin. “You don’t have the cards right now,” he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during an Oval Office ambush in February. “With us, you start having cards.”
Vice President J.D. Vance gave Zelensky a condescending lecture during the same meeting. “What makes America a good country is America engaging in diplomacy,” he said. Zelensky pointed out that Putin had a long record of breaking diplomatic agreements and asked what sort of diplomacy would succeed. Vance responded: “I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country.” He said Zelensky’s question was “disrespectful” and fumed: “You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict.”
When Trump’s critics argued that standing up to Putin would end the war more quickly than preemptively capitulating to him, Vance dismissed this argument as “moralistic garbage.” He claimed that the United States “retains substantial leverage over both parties to the conflict.” He said, “We must pursue peace, and we must pursue it now. President Trump ran on this, he won on this, and he is right about this.”
Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie responded: “Amen. Thank goodness we have a President and Vice President who put America first and acknowledge what has always been the reality in Ukraine. We should pursue a peaceful and realistic outcome, not death, debt, and war.” The idea that only Trump was capable of recognizing “reality” and pursuing a “peaceful” outcome in Ukraine was an article of faith in MAGA.
Trump thought he could bypass Ukraine and the United States’ European allies to secure a deal with Russia right away. In February, Trump’s negotiating team met with Russian officials in Riyadh without preconditions—and without Ukraine. Meanwhile, Trump’s Ukraine envoy said Europe would play no role in negotiations. Two months and no progress later, Trump blamed Zelensky for starting the war. He demanded compensation for military aid the United States had already provided and said future aid would be dependent upon how much Kyiv was willing to pay. He told Ukraine to abandon any hope of joining NATO, agreed with Moscow that it should retain control over the territory (and millions of people) it occupies in eastern Ukraine, and toyed with easing sanctions. Trump even considered officially recognizing the Russian annexation of Crimea.
This conciliatory approach has failed. MAGA’s illusions about securing an easy peace in Ukraine have been shattered, and even Trump has been forced to admit that Putin is running out the clock by negotiating in bad faith. “I am disappointed in President Putin,” he said last month. “My conversations with him are always very pleasant, and then the missiles go off that night.” He now claims that his campaign promise to end the war in a single day was “sarcastic” and “figurative,” and says securing a ceasefire is “more difficult than people would have any idea.” Trump even admits that “we’re going to have to send more weapons.” He says Putin has “gone absolutely CRAZY” and concedes that “we get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin.”
AFTER ALL THE SCOLDING LECTURES on how the Trump administration was going to elevate hard-nosed “realism” over “moralistic garbage” about defending Ukraine from Russian aggression and tyranny, it turns out that those who urged Trump to maintain robust support for Kyiv were right all along. As Trump underwent the excruciatingly slow process of realizing that Putin had no intention of pursuing peace, Moscow was dramatically intensifying its bombing campaign against Ukrainian civilians. In June, civilian casualties in Ukraine hit a three-year high. Moscow launched ten times more missile and drone strikes than it had in the same month a year earlier, and the recent bombing of an apartment block in Kyiv was the deadliest single attack on the city in a year. During a wave of airstrikes in April, Trump was reduced to pleading with Putin to end the assault on Ukrainian civilians, posting “Vladimir, STOP!” on Truth Social.
Does this sound like a president who has “leverage” over Putin, as Vance insisted earlier this year? Had Trump and Vance listened to Zelensky instead of screaming at him in the Oval Office and kicking him out of the White House, they would have understood that Putin’s ostensible desire to negotiate was just a stalling tactic. At every stage of the negotiations, Putin has refused to budge from maximalist demands which are obviously unacceptable to Kyiv, not to mention Ukraine’s European allies. Putin wants a pretext to continue fighting a war he believes he can win.
This strategy was on full display after June negotiations in Istanbul. Moscow demanded that Ukraine fully withdraw from four provinces in eastern Ukraine—including territory currently controlled by Ukraine—which would permanently consign millions of civilians to life under brutal Russian occupation. This occupation has led to imprisonment, torture, rape, and death for thousands of Ukrainians; widespread child abductions; and a campaign of cultural eradication. The withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from eastern Ukraine would also leave the rest of the country far more exposed to Russian attack—an attack that would almost certainly follow any ceasefire. Under the Russian “peace” plan, there would be severe limits on the size of Ukraine’s military, the weapons it can possess, and the alliances it can form. Moscow also wants control over the Ukrainian political system, including a ban on what it deems to be “nationalist” parties. Putin wants a disarmed, isolated, and politically compliant Ukraine because his goal has always been the eradication of Ukrainian statehood.
Those who have been making this argument for years were dismissed by Trump, Vance, and the rest of MAGA as “warmongers” and “neocons” dragging the country toward World War III. They were smeared as hollow “moralists” who were merely “pretending to fight for freedom and democracy abroad.” They were “globalists” guilty of squandering “all of America’s strength, blood, and treasure chasing monsters and phantoms overseas.” They did “more damage to America than Russia and China could ever have dreamed,” which is why Trump claims that the “enemy within” is a more serious threat than either country. As he put it: “Our foreign policy establishment keeps trying to pull the world into conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia based on the lie that Russia represents our greatest threat. But the greatest threat to Western civilization today is not Russia. It’s probably, more than anything else, ourselves.”
Trump has been forced to concede that Russia is a much greater threat than he once believed. He is painstakingly discovering that his fantasies of ending the conflict in twenty-four hours were based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Putin’s war aims.
Trump thought Putin was desperately searching for a way to end the war as quickly as possible, but this was never the case. Putin has reoriented the entire Russian economy toward war production. He has used the war as an excuse to step up his attacks on political opposition and consolidate power. The Russian educational system has become increasingly focused on propagandizing and training the next generation of soldiers. These are all clear indicators that Putin will not be satisfied with the territory he has already stolen in eastern Ukraine—his obsession with abolishing Ukrainian sovereignty remains the primary driver of the war, and it’s a war he has no desire to stop.
HOSTILITY TO MILITARY SUPPORT for Ukraine has long been a pillar of MAGA, and it has always been based on the same confusion that led Trump to waste months attempting to placate Putin. After Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Trump’s future Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declared that the “war and suffering could have easily been avoided if [the] Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns.” Tucker Carlson frequently blames the United States and NATO for the war, and he hosted a credulous and fawning interview with Putin last year. Key members of the Silicon Valley wing of MAGA, such as David Sacks and Elon Musk, spent years decrying American involvement in the war and arguing that Trump alone could fix it. “President Trump has always understood the conflict in Ukraine better than anyone in Washington,” Sacks declared in February. “Every bleeding-heart liberal I talk to about the Russia-Ukraine war wants to keep feeding bodies into the meat grinder forever,” Musk said a couple of days later. He continued: “They have no plan for success. Superficial empathy, not real empathy.”
The past seven months have demonstrated that Trump’s understanding of the war in Ukraine was cartoonishly superficial and his “plan for success” was to surrender as much as possible as quickly as possible. Yet the MAGA foreign policy luminaries who insisted that Trump would be a great peacemaker in Ukraine aren’t lining up to admit their mistakes. After all those lectures about the importance of diplomacy and saving lives, you’d think they would be capable of some self-criticism now that the war has entered an even more brutal and dangerous phase. If Vance, Massie, Gabbard, Sacks, or Musk have admitted that they were disastrously wrong about Ukraine, I must have missed it. If they have expressed any contrition as missiles and drones rained down on Ukrainian cities and led to unprecedented civilian casualties, they must have done so privately.
While Trump’s sudden impatience with Putin is slightly encouraging, it only serves to highlight the tragic failure of his Ukraine policy. Zelensky and many others were warning Trump to take a hard line on Putin right from the start, but he instead chose to waste seven months on a fruitless campaign of appeasement. The result is that Putin has been emboldened, relations with the United States’ closest allies have hit a multi-decade low, and Ukraine is in a weaker position to defend itself. Trump entered office with significant leverage that he could have used to compel Putin to rethink the war. He could have urged Congress to authorize a new military aid package for Ukraine and shown Putin that the American commitment to Kyiv wouldn’t waver. Instead of begging Putin to “STOP!” on social media, he could have increased Ukraine’s stockpile of Patriot missiles. Instead of threatening sanctions against an economy that Putin has spent many years sanction-proofing, Trump could have given Ukraine the resources necessary to hit Russia where it really hurts: on the battlefield.
But instead of using this immense leverage, Trump squandered it. He listened to advisors like Vance, who once declared, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.” He deluded himself into believing that he could end the war overnight—a belief that was reinforced by the sycophants surrounding him and his make-believe friendship with Putin. He showed the world what an “America First” foreign policy looks like in practice—attacks on allies, capitulation to dictators, and the abandonment of any remaining pretense that the United States will support and defend democracy around the world.
Vance and other members of the MAGA foreign policy brain trust may still regard such arguments as “moralistic garbage,” but this doesn’t change the fact that their own Ukraine policy has proven to be a disastrous failure.