Ted Galen Carpenter
April 11, 2025
President Trump should avoid a snare of his own making and extricate the United States from the war between Russia and Ukraine.
April 11, 2025
President Trump should avoid a snare of his own making and extricate the United States from the war between Russia and Ukraine.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly indicated that he expected the war between Ukraine and Russia to end quickly once he entered the oval office. He even boasted that he could bring a halt to the fighting within 24 hours. Trump has not been able to achieve his objective. Indeed, he has not been able to secure even a comprehensive ceasefire between Kyiv and Moscow. The most significant accomplishments to date are the agreements between the warring parties to refrain from attacks on infrastructure and to allow some consumer maritime traffic in the Black Sea to resume. Even those limited agreements are marked by numerous alleged violations by both sides.
Trump’s hopes for a wider ceasefire, much less a formal peace agreement, are fading fast, and his level of frustration is beginning to soar. His annoyance with Ukraine’s president Volodymr Zelensky has been apparent on several occasions, most notably during the infamous White House confrontation between Zelensky and both Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance on February 28, 2025. Recently, however, Trump’s irritation with Vladimir Putin also has increased. On one occasion, the president expressed extreme anger at the Russian leader for dragging his feet on a more comprehensive ceasefire. Other administration officials also stated that it was time for Putin to make up his mind about whether or not he wants a peace accord.
Trump seemingly has wandered into a trap of his own making. Moreover, it is a snare that resembles the one that kept the United States entangled militarily in Afghanistan throughout most of his first term, despite his rhetoric during the 2016 presidential campaign about quickly extracting U.S. military forces from that quagmire. Once in office, Trump allowed hawkish advisers, such as Secretary of Defense James Mattis, to talk him into abandoning his own instincts and following the advice of “experts” who had mired the United States in the interminable Afghan conflict. In the case of Ukraine, there are troubling signs that Trump may be responding favorably to hawks in both the United States and Europe who insist that failing to back Kyiv’s unrealistic position would amount to a shameful betrayal of a beleaguered democracy.
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