Ending the Ukraine war? Trump is the man for the job

TWO MONTHS after the Operation Midnight Hammer strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities and the ceasefire with Israel that soon followed, President Trump has once again upended conventional foreign policy wisdom. After years of escalatory rhetoric, moral posturing and seemingly endless funding packages, Trump’s twin high-profile summits with Russian President Viadimir Putin in Alaska and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other European leaders in Washington offer the clearest road map yet to finally end the tragic war in Ukraine.

- JOSH HAMMER CONTRIBUTING WRITER

PRESIDENT TRUMP with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House.

And perhaps the toughest part for the foreign policy establishment to swallow: It would come to pass not in spite of Trump's nationalist “America First” instincts, but because of them.

Three and a half years after Putin's February 2022 invasion, the Russia-Ukraine war is a humanitarian catastrophe and a financial sinkhole. It has often seemed to be an intractable quagmire; the permanent foreign policy class has no idea how to even begin to end it. Ever since Russian tanks first rolled into the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, Western elites have clung to fanciful, idealistic slogans — “as long as it takes,” “until the last square inch” and so forth — while sending oodles of U.S. taxpayer dollars to a deeply corrupt country at an alarming clip.

No one in President Biden's neoliberal blob had any plan to stop the killing. Trump does. And he’s showing us yet again how a sober realism — not liberal internationalist fantasy — can yield results.

It begins with clarity of purpose as it pertains to the American national interest. Trump has never pretended that the precise delineation of the historically disputed Russia-Ukraine border is a question that implicates the United States’ vital interests. Simply put, Ukraine isn’t in NATO. If the invaded country were a NATO country like Estonia or Latvia, this would be a different conversation. But that’s not the case.