US President Donald Trump has made it very clear that he is an enemy of Europe. His  administration’s recent National Security Strategy contained deranged and racist raving  about Europe facing “civilizational erasure” due to immigration from the Middle East  and Africa, while also calling for interference in Europe’s internal affairs by propping up  far-right elements in the continent. The policy document was consistent with US Vice President JD Vance’s screeching about European immigration policies at the Munich  Security Conference earlier this year and even prompted some mild rebukes from the  usually spineless European leaders. Paradoxically, however, Trump’s original 28-point  peace plan represents the least bad option for Ukraine to end the almost four-year-old  grueling conflict with Russia. It might also have beneficial consequences for Europe as  a whole. Trump’s foreign policy agenda is mostly horrendous, and his desire to pursue  peace in Ukraine may be solely motivated by a vain ambition to win the Nobel Peace  Prize, but that does not mean the merits of the peace plan should be discounted.  Trump’s peace plan was greeted with almost universal dismay in Europe, whose  political leaders and media commentators argued it was too favorable to Russia while  essentially amounting to Ukraine’s capitulation. The unfortunate reality, however, is  that there are two realistic alternatives for Ukraine at the present juncture; accepting a  peace deal in which Kyiv has to make painful concessions, or the continuation of  carnage within Ukraine. Russia is making incremental progress on the battlefield (with  an obvious advantage in terms of weaponry and troop numbers), and the sanctions on  Russia, while harmful for the country’s economy, are unlikely to exert sufficient  pressure on Moscow in the near future. Under such circumstances, it is completely  unfeasible that Ukraine could achieve a military victory in the conflict. 

Trump’s original peace plan may have been acceptable to Moscow (at least partially),  but the revised plan (based on the European counter-proposal and worked out in US Ukrainian negotiations) is unlikely to be accepted by the Kremlin. The European counter proposal was portrayed in Europe as a noble effort to save Ukraine from the Big Bad  Wolf in the White House, but what it actually did was to once again undermine the  hopes of ending the conflict. It was widely claimed that Trump’s peace plan would have  amounted to Ukraine’s capitulation, but under the plan, Ukraine’s sovereignty would  have been confirmed, a non-aggression pact would have been signed between Russia  and Ukraine, and Ukraine would have been allowed to have a standing army of 600 000  troops (dwarfing the size of the UK, French and German armies). The plan also outlined 

a reconstruction package for Ukraine and affirmed its eligibility for membership in the  European Union. The plan’s stipulation of Ukraine abandoning its NATO aspirations was  considered unacceptable by Kiev’s European allies, but this is something the  Ukrainians already agreed to in the ill-fated negotiations in the spring of 2022. It’s also  something that common sense dictates; everybody understands that the US  government would not tolerate for a second Mexico joining a Moscow-run military  alliance. Furthermore, the provocative and needless expansion of NATO in the post-Cold  War period is what contributed to the current turmoil in the first place. Continuing to  insist on Ukraine’s sacred right to join NATO is sheer madness and a severe obstacle to  peace. Indeed, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently announced that Kyiv  was willing to abandon its NATO ambitions in exchange for Western security guarantees. The issue of territorial concessions is the most painful aspect of the Trump peace plan,  but none of its provisions amount to “capitulation”; on the contrary, Ukraine already  ensured there would be no capitulation by thwarting Russia’s early attempts to topple  Kyiv and install a puppet regime in the country. A peace deal which includes painful  concessions but nevertheless maintains Ukraine’s sovereignty is the best realistic  option on the table. 

If the Ukrainians themselves want to fight to the bitter end before ceding a single square  meter of their territory, that is their right. However, there is a curious feature in the  contemporary European discourse on the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Those who urge  Ukraine to keep fighting an unwinnable and massively destructive war until Kyiv is  magically able to secure better terms for itself are considered “pro-Ukraine”.  Meanwhile, those advocating for a peace deal in which Ukraine would have to make  painful concessions to end the bloodshed are denounced as “Kremlin sympathizers” (or whatever nonsensical derision can be cooked up by the mainstream media with its  remarkably limited tolerance for dissenting views on the issue). One could argue that the actual “pro-Ukraine” position is that instead of continued death and destruction,  Ukraine should recognize what it has already achieved by preventing a Russian  conquest of Kyiv and accept an agonizing peace deal which would nevertheless save  the country from further misery. As stated, however, if the Ukrainians wish to keep  fighting, that is their business. 

Trump’s original peace plan includes provisions that might also be beneficial for Europe  as a whole. For example, the plan states that “[a]ll ambiguities of the last 30 years will  be considered settled”, Russia and NATO will engage in a dialogue to “resolve all  security issues”, and that “[i]t is expected that Russia will not invade neighboring  countries and NATO will not expand further”, with Ukraine enshrining neutrality in its  constitution. Although many of Trump’s own foreign policies conform to standard US  bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxy, he is not wrong when he describes past US foreign  policy as disastrous and stupid. One of the most disastrous elements of this pre-Trump foreign policy was the US insistence on the expansion of NATO, an anachronistic monstrosity whose great achievement has been the needless escalation of tensions in  Europe in the post-Cold War period. Following the collapse of the Berlin wall in  November 1989, alternative visions for Europe’s future were presented. One of these was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s “Common European Home”, a pan-European  security structure in which both NATO and the Warsaw pact would disappear in favor of  West-East co-operation and harmony. Instead, only the Warsaw Pact vanished, while  NATO not only remained, but eventually expanded, guaranteeing heightened tensions in  Europe for decades to come, eventually culminating in Russia’s illegal invasion of  Ukraine. The Trump peace plan might also enhance global security, given that it calls  for US-Russian cooperation on nuclear arms control, including an extension to the  START I Treaty. No matter how distasteful it may seem to some people, US-Russian cooperation on this issue is a prerequisite for the survival of the world, something that  former US President Ronald Reagan understood as well, abandoning his earlier “evil  empire” rhetoric about the Soviet Union. 

Trump is not the only one who believes that past US foreign policy was foolish. Jack F.  Matlock Jr., who served as US Ambassador to the Soviet Union under the Reagan and  first Bush administrations, wrote shortly before the invasion was launched that  “obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no  expansion of the [NATO] alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion  had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included  Russia”. Citing his own 1997 US Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony,  Matlock added that he believed at the time that the decision to expand NATO might be  “the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War”. Matlock’s  views were echoed in a 1997 New York Times opinion piece by prominent Cold War era  US policy architect George Kennan, who warned that the expansion of NATO would be  “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era”. One could, of course, argue that the expansion of NATO was justified because most people in  Eastern European countries wanted to join the alliance. It should, however, be  permitted to question the prudence of even the will of the majority. On a more personal  note, I might add that I very much question the prudence of my native Finland’s  decision to join NATO, thereby ostracizing myself from the sphere of social respectability  in a country that is gripped by powerful pro-NATO fervor. 

The existence of NATO appears to be an immutable fact of life and Gorbachev’s dream  of a pan-European security structure with no military alliances died a long time ago. However, there is no need to further escalate tensions by admitting new members into  NATO (especially Ukraine or Georgia). Therefore, Trump’s peace plan has the potential  to resolve the core issues that have been contributing to tensions in Europe since the  end of the Cold War.

---