Biden’s Ukraine moves are a gift to Trump
Whether or not President-elect Donald Trump realizes it yet, President Joe Biden this week provided him badly needed negotiating leverage by deciding to allow Ukraine to use longer-range US missile systems to hit targets inside Russia, and by providing anti-personnel landmines to slow Moscow’s troop advance inside Ukraine. Biden followed that on Thursday with new US sanctions on Gazprombank, cutting off the primary hub for Russia’s oil and gas sales, in one of the most significant sanctions moves in more than a year. That will present still more leverage for Trump when he comes to office, and it matches the theme of Biden “emptying the barrel” for Ukraine as he leaves office.
The Biden administration, in coordination with partners and allies, has worked to free up military support for Ukraine in its final weeks. Emergency assistance aimed at helping to restore Ukraine’s energy system, which is being so heavily hit by Russian attacks, should be seen in the same light.
Bottom line: The United States and other partners of Ukraine need to increase their support to Kyiv now to improve Trump’s chances at negotiating a Ukraine deal worth having. It’s particularly encouraging that the Biden administration is stepping up instead of self-deterring in the face of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision this week to change his doctrine for nuclear weapons use.
What Putin did was lower the threshold for potential nuclear use from threats to the existence of the Russian state to what it considers attacks on its “sovereignty and/or territorial integrity.” Hence, the new doctrine says weapons used by one ally in Russian territory, ostensibly including the US weaponry wielded by Ukrainians, implicates the whole Alliance, suggesting that Russia could now hit any NATO ally with a nuclear weapon in response.
Putin followed that up by launching a new, nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile on Ukraine. Though it carried only conventional warheads, Putin’s message was clear.
Understanding Putin’s playbook
By playing the nuclear scare-the-hell-out-of-you card, Putin is hoping that the United States and its partners will once again self-deter. Sadly, this approach has worked before, prompting the Biden administration more than once to slow-roll decisions on providing crucial weaponry to Ukraine. It’s also the reason why this week’s decision to relax the rules under which Ukraine could use longer-range US missiles only came months after the weapons would have been most effective. For example, Russia has used the delay to move many of its assets out of the missiles’ range.
“Well, better late than never,” said Congressman Michael McCaul, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, speaking at the Atlantic Council on Thursday. Ukraine, McCaul said, “has to be in the strongest possible position with the most leverage to get the best negotiation at the table. Right now, they’re not there because of the slowness . . . in delivering these weapons.”
History shows that only a clear demonstration of strength will deter Putin. When Putin smells weakness, he acts upon it. That is what he did with his invasion of Georgia in 2008, which came at the end of the George W. Bush administration. It’s what he did with his invasion of eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014, following then President Barack Obama’s failure to enforce his red line on Syria’s chemical weapons use. And it’s what he did in his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which followed the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
For the dealmaker Trump, who during his campaign said that he could stop the war in Ukraine in twenty-four hours, it’s important to understand that Putin has never seen diplomacy as the principal vehicle for his revanchist pursuit of Ukraine. Nothing would be worse for the incoming president than a bad deal with Putin, showing Trump to be weak in the face of an autocratic adversary.
Unless Ukraine and its friends can demonstrate that Putin’s military efforts are failing, don’t expect Trump’s potential negotiations to be anything other than the continuation of Putin’s war aims through other means. Anyone who thinks the United States can conduct successful diplomacy from the standpoint of military weakness doesn’t understand the Putin playbook.
Last weekend’s Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, the largest of their kind since this past summer, underscore two realities.
First, Putin has heard enough questioning of US support for Ukraine from the Trump campaign this year to smell blood in the water. He perceives signs of US weakness that are encouragement for him to strike. Despite reports that Trump told the Russian president in a phone call last week not to escalate—a call the Kremlin still insists didn’t happen—Putin presses on.
“[Putin] has not taken the president-elect’s advice,” said McCaul, reminding his audience that he told his fellow members of Congress that they faced a choice when voting on additional Ukraine aid earlier this year. The representatives were deciding, McCaul said, whether they wanted to be Winston Churchill, the World War II hero, or Neville Chamberlain, the appeaser of Germany’s dictator.
That same historic choice now confronts Trump.
Second, Putin sees a golden opportunity in the Trump transition to break the will of the Ukrainian people, who have also been concerned by indications that US support could evaporate in 2025. There is no planet on which any perceived Ukrainian defeat doesn’t embolden adversaries around the world and send a message of Trump weakness in the early days of his second term.
Some in the Trump camp don’t accept this, but there are also other prominent Republican voices who understand the historic moment and the rising challenge from the “axis of aggressors”—Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
“They are all in it together,” McCaul said on Thursday. “When I gave my closing argument on the emergency wartime supplemental [spending bill], I had a picture. There they were, all four—Putin and Chairman Xi [Jinping] and the ayatollah and Kim Jong Un . . . You cannot separate them. What happens in Ukraine will forecast the Indo-Pacific.”
Negotiating from a position of strength
Where Trump is right is that both Kyiv and Moscow need a negotiated end to the war, and Ukrainians seem ready as well to explore alternatives. It’s likely that 2025, early in Trump’s second term, will be a time for such talks, hence the need to provide Ukraine with the strongest possible negotiating position.
By providing Ukraine greater support now, it will demonstrate to Putin that the cost of ongoing war isn’t sustainable for him either. According to recent estimates, he’s lost between 100,000 and 200,000 Russian soldiers, with perhaps another 500,000 wounded, alongside a half million Russians who have left the country. North Korean troops arriving is troubling, but that they are needed underscores Russian weakness.
What could be the contours of such an agreement, if negotiated from a position of strength?
James Stavridis, a retired US Navy admiral and former NATO supreme allied commander Europe, offered one potential solution in a compelling Bloomberg Opinion column this week.
He proposes a meaningful ceasefire by forging a demilitarized zone, perhaps five to ten miles wide, between territory currently held by each side, using the model of the Korean peninsula, where such a zone has been in place for seventy years following the Korean War. The opposing parties could patrol the area, or a neutral force of United Nations peacekeepers could be brought in.
Stavridis says that the next necessary step would be security guarantees for Ukraine that would prevent Putin from reinvading. NATO membership isn’t realistic, but Stavridis sees “the possibility of a defined level of NATO engagement in training and equipping the Ukrainians, short of membership.” He suggests that a starting point for negotiations would be putting the possibility of European Union membership off for five years and NATO membership for ten.
Stavridis provides Finland as a model. The Soviet Union invaded Finland in 1939 in the Winter War. “The Finns fought the Russians to a standstill, but ultimately traded about 10% of their land for peace and pledged neutrality. Now, they are vital members of NATO.”
Ukraine could have a similar or better outcome, but only if Trump embraces the Biden administration’s gift of leverage, which the self-described dealmaker knows is the most important starting point for any such negotiation. History will treat Trump badly if he agrees to any deal that shows him to be weak or naïve in facing Putin—or indecisive in supporting Ukraine.
Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.
This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.
Further reading
Thu, Nov 21, 2024
Five questions (and expert answers) about major new US sanctions on Russia’s Gazprombank
New Atlanticist By
To decipher these moves, we turned to some of our top sanctions experts to reveal what’s behind the decision and what to expect next.
Thu, Nov 21, 2024
‘You cannot separate’ the ‘unholy alliance’ that is Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, warns Congressman Michael McCaul
New Atlanticist By Katherine Walla
Ukraine is central to US interests because if Ukraine falls, it will embolden US adversaries, McCaul said at an Atlantic Council Front Page event.
Mon, Nov 18, 2024
Putin got into Biden’s head about ‘red lines’ in Ukraine. Trump must not be as timid.
New Atlanticist By John E. Herbst
News that the Biden administration will allow Kyiv to use Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) against military targets in Russia is welcome but overdue.
Image: US President Joe Biden, right, and President-elect Donald Trump during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024. Biden will argue in favor of continued US aid to Ukraine during the transition to President-elect Donald Trump's administration, according to national security advisor Jake Sullivan. Photographer: Al Drago/Pool/Sipa USA