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11:00 01.02.2025 •
Photo: AP
Recently ‘The New Yorker’ published an interview with Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, about what Trump’s foreign policy might mean for Ukraine, and for the world. Wertheim is no fan of Trump, though he is a so-called ‘realist in matters of foreign policy’ – he is skeptical of American military action abroad and a critic of what he considers the open-ended commitment that the Biden Administration offered Ukraine. During the conversation, he discussed why Trump’s approach to foreign policy may be different than it was in his first term, whether the West is in part to blame for Putin’s attack on Ukraine, and whether the U.S. can ever really offer Ukraine sufficient security guarantees.
- For people like you who have had concerns about the shape of the American commitment to Ukraine, what is your hope about what a new Presidency could usher in?
- This is not a prediction, but it’s an opportunity to lift the taboo that unfortunately arose quickly after Russia’s full-scale invasion, on seeking a diplomatic settlement to the war, and hopefully to resolve the conflict within a short amount of time. This is especially appealing at this point, given that it’s hard to argue that Ukraine is in an advantageous position. For people like me, who have been supportive of aiding Ukraine but critical of the relatively unconditional way in which the Biden Administration went about it, the opportunity now is to find a way to end the conflict that ends up being in the United States’ best interest and hopefully Ukraine’s best interest, too, given the realities that Ukraine faces.
I never thought that this conflict was going to end in a complete Ukrainian territorial victory — in other words, in Ukraine being able to retake all the territory that Russia seized from it, whether that’s going back to the pre-February, 2022, lines or to 2014 [when Russia took Crimea and areas of eastern Ukraine]. And, in fact, neither did many officials in the Biden Administration. So I think already, with the victory of Trump in the election, this political taboo on a discussion about how, realistically, this devastating conflict could come to an end has been lifted. That said, I am quite concerned that it’s going to be very hard to find a durable settlement.
- You recently wrote, “Trump’s outlook has an inviting quality. It indicates that although he may have important ideas and instincts about international relations, he has few set plans and abides by few orthodoxies.” What did you mean?
- I was referring to what I called Donald Trump’s philosophy of history, which is “We’ll see what happens.” There’s going to be a particularly wide set of possible policies that this Administration could adopt. If you look at some of the personnel that have been appointed so far, some seem like fairly traditional advocates of American global military primacy. Secretary of State designee Marco Rubio, for example, seemed like a pretty straightforward neoconservative figure when he ran for President against Trump, in 2016. On the other hand, you have the Vice-President, J.D. Vance, and some of the appointees for the Defense Department, who seem more interested in completing the so-called pivot to Asia and drawing down U.S. military commitments in Europe, and possibly in the Middle East, but, in any case, in trying to focus the United States more rigorously on the challenge from China.
I wanted to tell allies in East Asia that perhaps their interests would be better realized if the United States intervenes less militarily around the world and adopts more of a focus on Asia. It’s clear that Trump has many different personas when it comes to foreign policy, and they contradict each other, right?
But Trump does have another persona in there, which is Trump the dealmaker and the peacemaker, and we saw an expression of that persona — we didn’t see much of it, frankly — in his first term.
- He may not have a clear vision, but I can’t imagine him ever saying that he really likes his Western European allies. I can’t imagine him ever speaking well of nato. I do wonder about the strength of any peace deal in which the U.S. President making it has no credibility. Ukraine is going to need a security guarantee, but we know there’s no way Trump wants to offer security guarantees, nor would he be fully trustworthy on any security guarantees that were on offer.
- Well, that is already a problem for the nato alliance as a whole. But you’re right. One way things could go is Trump basically selling out the Ukrainians and deciding he’s sick of this war, and he doesn’t want to aid them. Maybe he doesn’t even get a deal, but he goes to the Europeans and says, “It’s your problem. You figure it out.” And what we get is Russia fully completing a conquest of Ukraine.
I don’t think that that’s a likely outcome because even Trump would know that politically such an outcome would be damaging to him. He would not look strong. And he himself criticized Biden for the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which Trump put in motion. So he seems to understand that that kind of outcome is not a positive one. Nevertheless, I share that concern.
The idea that the United States, whether under Trump or a more conventional President, was going to make a commitment to come to the direct military defense of Ukraine in the future always suffered from a credibility problem.
Even if Ukraine doesn’t get nato membership, if it were to receive a nato-style security guarantee, the Russians would actually have an opportunity to shatter the Article 5 commitment across the entire alliance by testing it in Ukraine and showing that the alliance was not serious about defending Ukraine or that only some members of the alliance were willing to take that step. [Article 5 states that an attack on one member state of nato is essentially an attack on all member states, and must be defended collectively.]
- So, your argument is basically: Look, we shouldn’t invite Ukraine into nato because we’ve already shown that we’re not going to send Americans to die for this conflict.
- Yeah, that’s a central part of the argument, right? If you think about what the United States did to make its commitment during the Cold War to West Germany credible, we’re talking about stationing huge numbers of forces in West Germany, and nuclear weapons. And right now the people who favor Ukraine joining nato sooner rather than later aren’t talking about that at all. So I’m really concerned about the kind of magical thinking that has developed around the nato commitment.
- That’s totally fair, but I think that if you asked most Americans whether U.S. troops should defend Latvia in a war, they would say no. They probably don’t know that Latvia is part of nato and that we are, in some sense, committed to defend Latvia, and that that’s the whole point of a collective-defense alliance.
- You’re totally right. But this is a problem for nato, and for countries like Latvia. When we admitted Latvia, along with six other countries, in 2004 — go back and read the entire Senate debate over this seemingly solemn commitment. It’s a very short assignment. Senators virtually gave no consideration to whether the United States would or should come to the defense of those countries. This was the end of history, so they thought that once those countries were in nato, the problem would never arise. And now we’re actually confronting this new reality; on top of which, we have Donald Trump coming into office for the next four years.
My argument is that Europe has a greater interest in defending European countries against Russia than the United States does. That would be true even if not for current political dynamics in the United States. That would be true even if not for the fact that the United States is overstretched trying to manage a whole range of security problems across the globe. So really we should be transitioning to European leadership of European defense.
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