Hegseth, Trump Bring Dose of Realism to Russia-Ukraine War

For the first time since the Russia-Ukraine war began nearly three years ago, there appears to be real progress toward a resolution thanks to a much-needed dose of realism from the Trump administration.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s remarks during a NATO meeting in Belgium earlier this week outlining the Trump administration’s attitude toward a settlement to end the war demonstrated a commitment to dealing with the reality on the ground in Eastern Europe, ugly as it is. President Trump’s phone calls the following day with Presidents Putin and Zelensky further demonstrated that the United States intended to move forward on the basis of what was possible. Trump made clear that America would not be held back by rituals of interagency process and international consultation with dozens of other nations that have taken on the trappings of idol worship.

Perhaps the reason that these developments are so shocking to many in the American foreign policy establishment is that they cut their teeth in an environment where corporations, nations, and institutions of all types have continued to pursue policies long after it has become clear that they are ineffective or counterproductive. In their world, admission of failure is considered worse than failure itself.

While the foreign policy establishment is full of individuals who view themselves as independent-thinking intellectual titans, their advancement in the field has, in reality, been tied to a willingness to publicly insist that certain failed policies were actually great successes in the hopes of moving up the ladder. Thus, the failure of Afghan reconstruction, the Iraq War, Obama’s “reset” with Russia, the Iran Nuclear Deal, and so on continued unabated long after it was obvious where things were headed.

Those who challenged this consensus, regardless of party, have found themselves treated like lepers, stigmatized lest their heresy infect the careers of anyone who interacted with them. Dick Cheney and George W. Bush drove critics of the Iraq War out of the party, including Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Adviser to Bush’s father. Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Taibbi, and Glenn Greenwald found themselves expelled from the Democratic Party due to their discomfort when the party adopted George Bush’s neoconservatism with a touch of “woke,” USAID-driven grift attached.

It is possible to have different opinions on what the goals of U.S. foreign policy should be and what methods should be used to achieve them. A willingness to discuss whether policies are achieving their stated goals is a precondition to healthy deliberation that has been missing for much of the past two decades.

To this end, Hegseth’s remarks were noteworthy. The points he outlined – that Ukrainian membership in NATO is not happening; that the Russian seizure of Crimea cannot be reversed through any conceivable allocation of resources by NATO; and that the United States is not going to war over ceasefire violations along a thousand-mile-long demilitarized zone – are recognitions of reality, not revolutionary statements of policy. It was impossible to contest them factually, and no one even tried.

Negative reactions, such as those of Obama’s Ambassador to Russia turned online troll Michael McFaul and former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton, attacked Hegseth’s statements in moral terms, not policy terms. Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger argued that “abandoning Ukraine,” as he put it would make the withdrawal from Kabul look like a brilliant strategy, but declined to describe what a better approach would be.

That is because policy requires choices. By presenting them, Secretary Hegseth and President Trump were breaking with U.S. foreign policy towards Russia since the end of the Cold War.

For decades, American and European leaders have steadfastly refused to recognize both that it is not 2004 anymore and that their 1990s policies towards Russia failed. They have also failed to either integrate Russia into a stable European order or to create an alternative order strong enough to exclude Russia.

Either path, successfully pursued, would have secured Ukraine’s independence and rendered the issues that led to the war irrelevant. If Russia’s transition to a free-market democracy in the 1990s had succeeded or if Putin had been brought into a U.S. partnership as an ally on the level of India’s Narendra Modi, then anti-Russian forces in Ukraine would find little interest in Washington or European capitals busy profiting off energy deals with Moscow. Pro-Russian complaints in Ukraine would also find little resonance in Moscow, which would be too focused on technical cooperation with the West and fears of Chinese ambitions in the East.

But the door to this alternate reality has closed. It closed because the Clinton administration, rather than containing the looting of the Russian state after 1991, joined in, taking advantage of Moscow’s weakness to install proxies in the Balkans and Caucasus, which could not sustain themselves against any sort of resurgent Russia. The door was slammed shut again when the Obama administration made clear that, regardless of what Russia did abroad, including abstaining on U.S. intervention in Libya, the very existence of Vladimir Putin within Russia was seen as incompatible with the mission of extending “liberal values” around the world.

Those were choices. They amounted to a decision to pursue a road of confrontation with Russia. But if successive presidential administrations were determined to create a confrontational Russia, they had a responsibility to build the structures in Europe to contain Russia without indefinite U.S. support. There was a total failure to do this as well.

Despite repeated urging from President Trump, the very allies who complain about the United States not consulting them today on defense matters have refused to meet their (already insufficient) NATO spending commitments. Obama, despite ruling out any cooperation with Russia under Vladimir Putin after 2014 and possessing no realistic plan to displace him, declined to arm Ukraine with deadly weapons. Unlike Biden (and to his credit), Obama urged Ukraine’s leaders to make their own peace with the Kremlin through the Minsk agreements, but those agreements were always going to become quite precarious the moment tensions escalated between Russia and the United States. Donald Trump armed Ukraine, an effort for which he received not praise but impeachment.

Joe Biden and his team abandoned even the pretense of a realistic policy, urging Ukraine to tear up the Minsk agreements and ban pro-Russian parties while also demanding Europe leave itself at the mercy of Russian energy. To this day, it remains a mystery what the goals of this policy were. What did the United States or Ukraine gain from a breakdown of negotiations when American intelligence believed a Ukrainian defeat was likely in the event of a war?

In the end, the heroism of the Ukrainian people and hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. aid, have so far avoided that defeat and have instead produced a grinding stalemate. Heroism and unsustainable levels of aid may have been sufficient to prevent the disaster Biden’s policies were leading to, but there is no path forward to victory.

Even if Ukraine could retake some territory, a dubious prospect after the failures of the 2023 counter-offensives, it would do nothing to secure peace or prevent Russia from resuming its assault at a later date. A reconquest of Crimea by Ukraine would merely give Putin or his successors a motive for a rematch.

There is an argument to be made that there has been too great a focus on the issue of territory. What the Trump administration seems to be suggesting is that conditioning a ceasefire between half a million combatants on moving armies to new battle lines is a choice to infinitely complicate a process to the point of futility.

The Russian armies are where they are, the Ukrainian armies are where they are, and the causes of a future war lie not in which abandoned towns they occupy along that thousand-mile front but in the wider relationship between Russia, the United States, and Europe.

Equally, Ukrainian membership in NATO has always been about domestic Ukrainian politics, not international security. If the United States or Europe were willing to go to war over Crimea, they would have done so regardless of treaty obligations.

In turn, it seems unlikely that NATO members would sign a treaty that would commit them to going to war with Russia. Signing might furthermore even provoke rather than deter a Russian attack, as Moscow could take a gamble and seek to prove the emptiness of NATO’s mutual defense compact.

The prospect of NATO membership has always been about allowing anti-Russian parties in Ukraine to make the argument to voters that they can afford to offend Moscow because European and American troops are behind them. This empowers anti-Russian parties, in turn presenting Russia with only the option of invading and proving that the West cannot or will not defend Ukraine in order to ensure the election of conciliatory leaders. Removing the prospect of NATO membership removes a motivation for escalation on both sides.

Critics are correct that no piece of paper, guarantees, or territorial concessions can secure Ukraine’s long-term security against Russia. The problem is that an endless war effort propped up by American taxpayers can’t ensure Ukraine’s long-term security either. There is furthermore no sure way to know what victory in such a conflict would entail – the implosion of the Russian state in the 1990s having demonstrably caused more problems than it solved.

President Trump and Secretary Hegseth recognize that as long as NATO and Russia are in a state of conflict, Ukraine will be a battlefield, and the best that can be achieved is to set ground rules to keep the conflict a political one rather than a military one. That is the short-term goal of the current policy.

In the long run, the threat to Ukraine’s independence comes not from historical disputes dating back to the 1300s but from the breakdown in relations between Russia and the West. It is unlikely that Russia and the West will be friends in the near future, but a gradual improvement of relations from a proxy conflict in which both sides seek the overthrow of the other is the best guarantor of Ukraine’s future security.

That is the reality America, Europe, Ukraine, and the entire world face. That is the reality President Trump and his team are forcing the foreign policy community to accept.

Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.