The United States has a long history of bad peace deals

Truce is always better than no truce, and that includes the ceasefire which Ukraine, after discussions with the United States in Saudi Arabia, says it’s ready to comply with, provided that Russia does so too. It's also good that the Americans and Ukrainians are talking at all, after President Donald Trump so contemptuously dressed down Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office earlier this month. But the Ukrainian president is right to remain wary of the coming peace negotiations as his American counterpart seems to envision them. The tenor of American peace efforts under Trump is to foist, for the sake of getting any deal, a bad and unfair one on the nation that has been the victim of Russia’s aggression since 2014, and of its brutal full-scale invasion since 2022.

- Andreas Kluth, Tribune News Service

Trump has inverted the moral roles in the conflict, blaming Ukraine rather than Russia for the war and calling Zelenskyy rather than Russian President Vladimir Putin a dictator. It’s clear that Trump will ask a lot of Zelenskyy and shockingly little of Putin. For starters, Trump has preemptively ruled out Ukraine’s membership in NATO and American boots on the ground, and left no doubt that he expects Ukraine to make big territorial concessions. These bad omens have strategists and pundits reaching for historical parallels. Larry Summers, a former US treasury secretary, told Bloomberg that the coming settlement could be “a Versailles-like agreement imposed, not on aggressors, but imposed on the victims of aggression.” He was referring to the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, but on terms which observers such as John Maynard Keynes considered so ruinous and humiliating toward Germany as to assure a new war in due course. The fact that Ukraine, unlike Germany in 1914, did nothing to cause the present war would make such an outcome even harder to bear.