Are there grounds to hope the Trump administration is preparing a deal of genius to end the war in Ukraine?
Donald Trump is the author of a book called The Art of the Deal. It’s an admired volume—the Chicago Tribune wrote of it: “Donald Trump is a dealmaker. He is a dealmaker the way lions are carnivores and water is wet.”
But we are entitled to ask how and indeed whether that private-sector skill is transferring to the world of international politics.
If you look at Trump’s presidential experience, both during his first term and now, you must conclude that at every step of the way he has been outplayed, in no small measure due to his or his administration’s own faults.
This is deeply worrying for Ukraine, whose existence depends on Trump’s ability to negotiate, and whose people will be plunged into a profound darkness of torture and persecution if the Kremlin and its thugs win control.
If you doubt the change in tune to Kalinka, then listen to Trump’s envoy Ambassador Steve Witkoff singing Russian tunes during a March 23 interview with the credulous Tucker Carlson.
Among other ahistorical and plainly untrue statements, Witkoff accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s word in private talks that he was worried about the fate of supposedly trapped Ukrainian troops. (They are not trapped, as the CIA has told the administration, and Putin was the man who ordered the razing of Mariupol, which caused at least 20,000 civilian deaths, along with the destruction of numerous other towns and cities.)
No deal has been agreed on Ukraine; Russia is dragging out talks that resumed in Saudi Arabia on March 23. Meanwhile, a ceasefire deal in Gaza has collapsed, with no sign it will be restored.
Trump’s record during his last administration offers no brighter picture. Look at North Korea and Afghanistan. As Sir Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College in London, has observed of those two cases, Trump “thinks if he blusters enough, then people will sort of fall away and that you can get on to the stuff you really want to do. But because it’s not based on a serious assessment of the situation—of the problems at hand—it doesn’t really work.”
In Afghanistan, the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban over the head of a U.S.-installed Afghan government, then left to his successor a no-win situation that the Biden administration further disastrously misplayed.
Negotiations with North Korea began more hopefully, with real indications that Trump was making progress. After Trump issued bloodcurdling threats, North Korea’s splenetic dictator Kim Jong Un agreed to talks in 2019. But the U.S. president walked away when he heard the regime’s ludicrous terms. He completely ignored that international negotiations work like this: People make inflated demands, and that leads to hard bargaining, or at least an agreement to further talks.
The results have not been great. Far from Pyongyang denuclearizing, the Arms Control Association reported that “North Korea is estimated to have assembled 50 nuclear warheads, as of January 2024, and to have the fissile material for an estimated 70-90 nuclear weapons, as well as advanced chemical and biological weapons programs,” adding that “Pyongyang has accelerated the pace of ballistic missile testing,” including submarine-based systems.
It’s not a great surprise, then, that Trump and his team have failed even to achieve the 30-day Ukraine ceasefire they proposed as an initial step. Ukraine has agreed, Russia has not.
Trump’s team, now led by Witkoff after retired General Keith Kellogg was sidelined, says it is earnestly engaging and only wants peace and an end to the killing.
Critics describe it as a policy of preemptive surrender.
It also appears that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, and Witkoff either believe or are forced to agree with ridiculous statements that are both false and that weaken Washington’s and Kyiv’s positions in negotiations with Moscow.
Thus they and Trump have denied that Russian aggression is the cause of the war, insisted in advance of a ceasefire that Ukraine make concessions to Russia, asserted that Ukraine’s actions and NATO enlargement provoked Russia’s attack, and claimed that the majority of residents of the Donbas are Russian because they speak Russian.
Similarly, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard justified the closure of the Agency for Global Media that comprises Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America, among other organizations, by reposting nonsense issued by Malaysian podcaster and journalist manqué Ian Miles Cheong, who writes for the Russian propaganda outlet Russia Today, that these organizations “produced and disseminated far-left propaganda” and “perpetuated pro-war narratives against Russia.”
Consequently, it is no surprise when Trump and members of his administration insist that Ukraine must make a-priori concessions to begin peace talks when there has been no pressure on Moscow to do the same.
Witkoff in particular has failed to justify the administration’s belief that he is a master negotiator. He actually claimed that Russia’s coerced and rigged referendums in the four occupied regions of Ukraine were legitimate because the “voters” speak Russian. He went on to ask: “The question is, will the world acknowledge that those are Russian territories?”
By that standard, whole neighborhoods in New York City (his and my hometown) are Russian given the large number of Russian speakers there, Ireland is Britain, and Switzerland should be removed from the map altogether.
In his memoirs, Averill Harriman, wartime ambassador to Moscow, noted that, of the Big Three leaders, Stalin was the best briefed and most informed of the allied leaders concerning developments in Central and Eastern Europe.
President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on Saturday, February 22, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley.
That was in part the reason Stalin achieved so many of his strategic goals. Some 80 years later, after generations of close negotiations with Moscow and with the benefit of hundreds of Russia experts in and around Washington, D.C., there is no excuse for allowing another leader in the Kremlin to accomplish the same.
Despite the Trump administration’s contempt for experts, it might consider tapping the knowledge of those ones who intimately understand Russia and Ukraine. It would matter less if the United States were run by a master tactician whose aides understood the art of dealmaking. But there is no sign so far that they do.
About the Author: Dr. Stephen Blank
Dr. Stephen J. Blank is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program. He has published over 900 articles and monographs on Soviet/Russian, U.S., Asian, and European military and foreign policies, testified frequently before Congress on Russia, China, and Central Asia, consulted for the Central Intelligence Agency, major think tanks and foundations, chaired major international conferences in the US and in Florence; Prague; and London, and has been a commentator on foreign affairs in the media in the US and abroad. He has also advised major corporations on investing in Russia and is a consultant for the Gerson Lehrmann Group. He is the author of Russo-Chinese Energy Relations: Politics in Command (London: Global Markets Briefing, 2006), and Natural Allies? Regional Security in Asia and Prospects for Indo-American Strategic Cooperation (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 2005). Dr. Blank is also the author of The Sorcerer as Apprentice: Stalin’s Commissariat of Nationalities (Greenwood, 1994); and the co-editor of The Soviet Military and the Future (Greenwood, 1992).
