WASHINGTON—For months, the Trump administration has courted Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenka. Led by US Special Envoy for Belarus John Coale, the US side has offered sanctions relief and an easing of Minsk’s international isolation in return for Lukashenka releasing political prisoners and lowering Belarus’s aggression toward its neighbors—Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine. While it’s easy to be skeptical about such moves with dictators, the United States has something to show for it. In five trips to Minsk in the past year—which reportedly included many vodka toasts with Lukashenka—Coale and his team have secured the release of around five hundred political prisoners held in Belarus, including most recently Polish-Belarusian journalist Andrzej Poczobut and two other Poles.
That’s a lot of people freed, and the results are being noticed. The Belarusian democratic opposition, with which Coale and his team have worked, has lauded the US initiative, as has the Polish government.
Dealing with a dictator
Still, there are downside risks in dealing with dictators, and outreach to Lukashenka has been tried several times before. Between 2005 and 2008, I and my team at the State Department’s Bureau of European Affairs engaged in similar efforts. Our attempts sometimes led to the release of prisoners but never to a general change of Lukashenka’s course of repression at home or pro-Kremlin orientation. That policy direction accelerated after Belarus’s 2020 elections, which Lukashenka claimed victory in but were widely seen as rigged. After that point, Lukashenka increased repression and turned to Moscow for even more support.
So far, Belarus has continued its repression. Earlier this month, the regime tried to extend its reach by declaring the European Humanities University, founded in Belarus in 1990 and relocated to Vilnius as repression deepened in Belarus, an extremist organization, a move that would make its students subject to prosecution.
Moreover, it is not clear how far Belarus will go in easing pressure against its neighbors. Lukashenka has previously weaponized migrants on the Polish frontier, sending them across the border after providing them with wire cutters and axes to use against border barriers and even lasers to use against Polish border guards. While this seems to have subsided, Polish analysts have privately confirmed reports of tunnels under the Polish-Belarus frontier. For months, too, Belarus has launched balloons into Lithuania, disrupting commercial travel. Senior Lithuanian officials have conveyed to me that this “hybrid aggression” from Belarus ebbs and flows but has not stopped. Even more dangerous, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has cautioned that Russia may try to increase Belarus’s participation in its war against Ukraine.
Lukashenka may judge that he can play the Trump administration: that in exchange for releasing political prisoners, a step easily reversed, he can gain sanctions relief (already delivered) and perhaps even an invitation to the White House, effectively ending his isolation.
Still, the administration has a case for its initiative: five hundred prisoners freed is nothing to sneer at. The administration maintains that it will craft its sanctions relief in ways that do not provide a major benefit to Russia; that it is keeping Lithuania and Poland informed of its actions and keeps their equities in mind; that it works closely with the Belarusian opposition and civil society in crafting its lists of political prisoners; that it is watching any Russian military buildup inside Belarus, whether directed against Ukraine or the NATO countries to its west; and that it will push Lukashenka to cut back on aggression against Poland and Lithuania. These are solid steps. If it keeps acting according to these precepts, the administration’s outreach to Belarus’s dictator could be a modest success. But it will be subject to Lukashenka’s timetable and within the parameters he sets out. His regime and pro-Moscow orientation will undoubtedly continue.
Learning from the past
The United States might achieve more by supplementing its engagement with the regime—the give and take and vodka toasts with Lukashenka—with a policy directed toward the Belarusian people. It could take a lesson from US President Ronald Reagan’s policy toward Communist Poland in the 1980s.
Challenged by Poland’s Solidarity movement, which was both a trade union and a pro-democracy movement, Poland’s communist leaders declared martial law in 1981. They outlawed Solidarity and arrested tens of thousands of Poles. The Reagan administration responded with all the economic pressure it could think of. The Polish economy, already weak, melted down. Relations froze.
In the mid-1980s, the Reagan team tried limited reengagement, including some easing of economic pressure as political prisoners were released. The United States raised the level of relations with the communist regime by sending a full-fledged ambassador. It even began mid- and then higher-level visits to Poland, culminating with a visit by then Vice President George H.W. Bush to Poland in September 1987, when he met with the dictator Wojciech Jaruzelski.
But the United States maintained a policy track beyond dealing with Poland’s communist regime: Reagan invested in support for the Polish people, for the vast networks of Polish democratic groups, Solidarity’s clandestine structures, and underground media. This was no secret: In 1982, during a visit to the United Kingdom, Reagan delivered his famous Westminster speech, in which he announced that the United States would promote democracy around the world, not as abstract idealism but as a strategic investment in US interests which, Reagan argued, would advance with freedom. Out of that speech came the National Endowment for Democracy (full disclosure: I am a member of the NED board), and greater emphasis on US government instruments of “soft power,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty among them.
Reagan’s tools of democratic advance put their back into support for Poland, including smuggling mimeograph machines, books, and other forms of support to that country’s vast opposition.
Poland’s opposition leaders knew that while the United States was beginning to engage with the communist government, it was backing them. In his 1987 trip to Poland, Bush also met with Lech Wałęsa, then under semi-house arrest in Gdansk.
The communists didn’t like US support for democracy. Jaruzelski complained that Solidarity was nothing but a bunch of malcontents that gathered at the US ambassador’s house for dinner. But the United States played its hand well. The communists needed US engagement and an end to economic pressure. And they accepted reengagement with the Reagan administration on its terms. By 1989, Poland’s prime minister was from Solidarity and wasted no time dismantling communist rule.
Of course, Belarus in the 2020s is not Poland in the 1980s. Russian President Vladimir Putin is a bloody-minded tyrant closer to Joseph Stalin than to the reform-minded Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Policy approaches seldom repeat. But they can sometimes rhyme. The Trump administration now has some traction in engaging with Lukashenka’s regime. It should keep that engagement up and look for tactical opportunities. But it should also supplement regime talks with a second track that invests in the Belarusian people. Instead of cutting funding for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and trying to do the same to NED, the administration could boost it and find other ways to increase its outreach to Belarus’s civil society.