Europeanization Then Normalization

Since the war is not ending anytime soon, the administration should turn its attention to normalizing ties with Moscow.

Much has been made of Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky’s tête-à-tête in Saint Peter's Basilica over the weekend. If nothing else, the optics were stunning: The US and Ukrainian president looked to be patching things up— perhaps the spirit of Pope Francis awakened the better angels of their nature—in the aftermath of their disastrous Oval Office confrontation in late February.

Yet the photo-op should be seen for what it is: A staged attempt at demonstrating comity, agreement and goodwill where little, if any, exists.

Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said,

…This week is going to be a really important week in which we have to make a determination about whether this is an endeavor that we want to continue to be involved in.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke to CBS’s Margret Brennan and dumped cold water on the idea that Russia would accept a ceasefire.

As he put it,

…If you want a ceasefire just to continue supply arms to Ukraine, so what is your purpose? You know what Kaja Kallas and Mark Rutte said about the ceasefire and the settlement? They bluntly stated that they can support only the deal which at the end of the day will make Ukraine stronger, would make Ukraine a victor. So if this is the purpose of the ceasefire, I don't think this is what President Trump wants. This is what Europeans, together with Zelensky, want to make out of President Trump's initiative.

Meantime, Mr. Zelensky has made his position clear: He has no intention of abandoning Ukraine’s maximalist aims of re-taking Crimea and the Russian-occupied territories of eastern Ukraine. Encouraged (or deluded) by European promises of endless support (the European are still, even now, dangling the promise of NATO membership before Ukraine), Zelensky has seemingly dug himself in for the long haul. Putin, for his part, seems to understand this—hence the recent barrage of drone and missile attacks on civilians in Kiev—perhaps with an eye towards shifting Ukrainian public opinion against the Ukrainian president. This would be a mistake on his part as there is little historical evidence that bombing campaigns against civilians—by the Luftwaffe against the British; by the US and RAF against the Germans; or by the US against the Vietnamese—have ever had the desired effect of turning public opinion.

Moscow has also indicated that it, in effect, wants something for nothing: the entirety of the territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia—territory they have yet to completely conquer by force. That Ukraine finds this unacceptable is reasonable enough, though a wiser leader, if there was one, would cede it. After all, Ukrainian nationalists have spent the last 30 years attempting to marginalize and anathematize the Ukrainian citizens of Russian descent living on those lands—therefore giving up those oblasts would speed up the process of Ukraine becoming the mono-ethnic state the ultras in Lviv and Kiev have wanted all along.

The President, his ostensible Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his de facto Secretary of State Steve Witkoff have all expressed their intention to “walk away” from the negotiating table should the intransigence from Kiev and Moscow continue. They might as well walk away now—there is no indication that either side is in a mood to bargain. As such, the immediate American goal should be to remove the US, once and for all, as a co-belligerent in a war we had no business starting (and then prolonging) in the first place. Trump should take a page from Richard Nixon’s playbook and Europeanize the war, in the same way Nixon sought to hand responsibility for the Vietnam War back to South Vietnam via the policy of Vietnamization.

We might expect the Europeans to go along, after all, the British, with the enthusiastic backing of the EU, Germany and France, have claimed that they are ready to step into the breach. To which the Trump administration should say: Go ahead. If Starmer, Macron and Merz are so eager to deal with Zelensky, then they can have him. Meanwhile, Trump should pull the plug on all military and economic aid as well as intelligence sharing and military targeting assistance to Ukraine. After Europeanization the administration would be well advised to pursue the normalization of relations with Moscow.

The re-establishment of direct flights, talks over arms control including, perhaps, the establishment of an arms control commission to re-establish the abandoned INF and Open Skies treaties and the renewal of the New START Treaty should lead the list. A broader collaborative diplomatic effort on areas of joint concern might usefully be headed up by Mr. Witkoff and Minister Lavrov in the form of an inter-governmental commission at a later date.

James W. Carden is editor of TRR.