America’s interest is not a Putin victory camouflaged as ‘peace.’ It is to degrade Putin’s forces for as long as Ukraine is willing to fight.
All hell broke loose last night when Marco Rubio, left to be the face of the Trump administration’s shameful policy of squeezing Ukraine on behalf of Vladimir Putin’s regime, was overcome by a fleeting fit of honesty: The secretary of state admitted to a bipartisan group of senators that the administration’s vaunted “28-point plan” was essentially a Russian wish list.
When some of the senators inconveniently went public with this concession, the Trump State Department, instinctively, accused them of a bald-faced lie and insisted that the plan was made-in-the-U.S.A., albeit with some inputs from the parties.
That’s what, in the Watergate era, used to be known as a non-denial denial. If, as obviously happened, Russia gave the president’s emissaries its wish list and the emissaries then wrote them into a plan, it is both a Trump administration plan and a Russian wish list. There is no daylight between those two things, which is no surprise since this has been the dynamic since Trump won the 2024 election.
The only real misstatement is that there is some discernible Ukrainian contribution to the plan. As the Trump-Putin plan contemplates, Ukraine’s task is to capitulate, not contribute.
There’s not a lot of mystery about what happened here, and why.
In late October, as Reuters reports, Trump’s business partners and envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, took a meeting in Miami with Kirill Dimitriev, a Kremlin insider. Dimitriev runs the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), a so-called sovereign wealth fund that was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2022.
Dimitriev was also sanctioned at the time, with Treasury explaining that he is “a known ally” of Putin and “his inner circle of cronies, [who] have long relied on RDIF and Dmitriev to raise funds abroad, including in the United States.” The aim of the U.S. sanctions, then, was to “further restrict[] these persons and entities from the U.S. financial system,” while helping Ukraine by “impos[ing] costs on Putin’s inner circle or those connected to Putin and his war of choice, and … prevent[ing] Putin’s regime from raising capital to fund its invasion of Ukraine and other priorities.”
Good ideas all. But, alas, they won’t do in the second Trump administration. Although the Russian regime is an incorrigible enemy of the United States, Trump wants to be that regime’s ally. Since Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with which it had by then been waging a lower thrum war of conquest for eight years, the United States has been aligned with our European allies in Ukraine’s defense; Trump, to the contrary, wants to be a non-aligned (but Russia-leaning) arbitrator between what he amorally sees as two equally culpable combatants.
Consequently, the administration quietly waived the sanctions to enable Dimitriev to meet with Witkoff and Kushner. The result is the 28-point “peace” plan – the kind of peace you get when the oppressed party surrenders. Noah has deftly summarized the appalling terms on offer.
Not surprisingly, the plan was seen for what it is by both Ukraine supporters and Americans who recognize the Putin menace — namely, it’s a matter of Trump doing Russia’s bidding, in the name of “peace,” of course. If that wasn’t obvious enough, it was undeniable after the president gave Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky a stark ultimatum: Agree to the plan within one week, or face the implicit loss of American support.
This was deeply unpopular on Capitol Hill, where Trump’s grip on Republicans, while still embarrassingly tight, is not what it was prior to the November election — in which Democrats made big strides in state contests. Since then, Trump’s poll numbers have continued their steep decline, especially among independents. The prospects of a shellacking in the coming midterms may be concentrating what passes for the GOP mind.
In recent days, administration officials have been backpedaling, rationalizing that the big peace plan was merely an ice-breaker for further discussions (because what would discussions that have been going on for a year be without an ice-breaker?). By Saturday, the president — fresh from his volte face on disclosure of the government’s Epstein files — did another about-face, saying the plan wasn’t his “final offer,” after all.
Rubio, who focused on foreign policy and national security as a senator, was clear-eyed about Putin prior to becoming Trump’s top diplomat. It’s hard to be both – as he’s undoubtedly been told by any number of first-term Trump officials who exhausted themselves talking Trump out of his worst instincts. Speaking frankly with some of his former colleagues, he conceded the undeniable – i.e., that the plan was a Putin wish list. And now back in the role of Trump diplomat flying off to Geneva for talks with Ukrainian and European officials, he is half-heartedly denying his admission while implicitly acknowledging it by spinning the plan as a framework for further talks.
To repeat what I’ve argued before (see, e.g., here and here), the problem here is that Trump has focused myopically on his objective of “peace” – which he wrongly takes to be the mere absence of combat, regardless of how that is achieved. America’s highest interest is to degrade Putin’s armed forces and regime for as long as Ukraine is willing to fight.
If you accept the president’s flawed premise that the aim is to end the fighting as soon as possible, then there is no possible outcome besides Russian victory — including Moscow’s rolling of Kyiv at the negotiating table. Putin is more than willing to keep pounding Ukraine if he remains confident that Trump doesn’t want to take sides against him, no matter how many war crimes he commits.
Peace through strength is not a slogan. It’s a theory of national defense and the pursuit of America’s interests in the world. That begins with understanding who you’re friends and enemies are.
If Ukraine is willing to keep fighting, we should keep arming them, remove the restrictions on what we provide, and ratchet up the sanctions and secondary sanctions on Russia and its abettors. Most of all, we should abandon any fantasies that the United States should just be a disinterested broker in a war between a murderous dictator aligned with America’s geopolitical rivals and a besieged European nation that, for all its flaws, wants to be a Western democracy.