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If it seems striking that a U.S. president would rebuff another national leader as overtly as Donald Trump did Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy [ [link removed] ] last Friday, really the oddness is mostly in the public nature of the encounter. This is because of what we expect from the ossified pageantry of the White House and the newsless encounters of the past, and the seriousness of the situation at present.
With his recent comments putting at least some of the blame for the war on Zelenskyy’s intransigence, Trump has shown himself to be either a ham-fisted troglodyte [ [link removed] ] or a shrewd troll [ [link removed] ]. But amidst the cries from many in the commentariat that the sky is falling, Trump’s approach reflects a realization that the time has come to bring the bitter 3-year-old war to a conclusion one way or another.
The fact is, it doesn’t matter who started the war or who is at fault for its continuation, whether or not Russian President Vladimir Putin must ultimately carry the scarlet letter for aggression. The conflict has reached a point that, barring a significant surge in commitment by Western Europe and the United States to bolster Ukraine on the battlefield or to sanction Russia’s trading partners (*cough* China), nothing more will be accomplished by fighting—except more Ukrainian territorial diminishment, and continued death and dismemberment on both sides.
Many will disagree, asserting that it matters very much that Putin ordered the invasion in 2022 to build on territorial gains he obtained from earlier encroachments and incursions, even to the point of replacing the government in Kyiv. Russia is a serial aggressor, such thinking goes, and must be defeated or at least not benefit from its criminal acts. Many (although not all) officials in NATO countries say Putin, like Adolph Hitler, should not be rewarded with a settlement, lest he take this as a signal to plan further expansion, perhaps first at the expense of the Baltic States, Poland or Finland. Berlin itself may be on the menu, which, given the sorry state of the current German military [ [link removed] ], may not be as outlandish as it sounds.
Comparisons of Putin’s Russia with Nazi Germany are endemic. World War II was the most significant event in living memory, even though the last participants and witnesses are now fading from the scene [ [link removed] ]. Yet the scale and ramifications of that conflict were such that generations of military and international relations experts have been informed by the experience [ [link removed] ]. Moreover, academics, historians, journalists, authors, filmmakers and popular culture to this day are steeped in the lessons and lore of the Second World War.
Arguably, the top takeaways from that war are that appeasement of aggressors leads to more aggression from them, and the only acceptable conclusion to wars against aggressors is their unconditional surrender. Certainly, both of these arguments have been in play from those balking at a negotiated settlement to the Russo-Ukrainian War. Unfortunately, the concepts of total victory and ultimate punishment of evildoers are artifacts from the largest conflict in human history and not generally applicable to wars throughout the ages.
Absolutely Relative
As this time-lapse video from French YouTube data visualist Cottereau shows [ [link removed] ], the map of Europe has been in flux since at least 400 B.C. The animation was created in 2017 and is already obsolete. Lest you suppose Europeans are especially prone to aggressive border changing, this animation from YouTuber davidjl [ [link removed] ] reveals it has been a worldwide phenomenon for 6,000 years. The only thing preventing clearer understandings of border shifts in pre-contact Africa, the Americas and swaths of Asia are a lack of written records available to us today. But we can assume, given human nature, that they were similarly malleable.
The relative stability of international borders in the modern era and the norms that support this are a product of the rules-based world order that itself is a product of the Allied victory in World War II. The current theorists and enforcers of that system are now removed from the life experience of its creators. Whatever the future of the rules-based system or whatever a new world order might entail, horse-trading for territory is at least as old as the war chariot.
Without excusing Putin’s responsibility for launching the most devastating war in Europe since World War II, the question becomes, what is anybody going to do about it? Among the powers most loudly in favor of militarily supporting Ukraine’s war effort, the U.K. is one of the least capable. It has been widely reported [ [link removed] ] that the British Army may only have 25 functional main battle tanks. British officials’ original commitment of 20,000 troops [ [link removed] ] for a peacekeeping force to patrol a possible future armistice line in Ukraine has been scaled back to 10,000, and even that might be a stretch. It is worth remembering that British analysts said the country would run out of ammunition in one day [ [link removed] ] in a war with Russia.
Germany has long been unable to field any kind of serious military force. And in spite of recent promises to do better, the country is even less capable today than it was three years ago when Russia invaded Ukraine. Perhaps France and Poland, the two most powerful continental NATO land and air powers, might shoulder the burden of bolstering Ukraine’s might in the field. But that’s a definite maybe.
Regardless of the composition of any peacekeeping force, Europe lacks the power to force Russia to the bargaining table. No NATO member is going to threaten nuclear war over Ukraine. And no NATO member, bar the United States, has any credible conventional military that it could project to support Ukraine, even if it were so inclined.
And the Trump administration clearly is not so inclined.
Old Is New Again
By neglecting military power in favor of generations of social welfare spending, Europe largely has given up its seat at the preliminary bargaining table. Europe can still play some kind of role as a political and economic pressure bloc. This is not inconsiderable. However, Russia has spent the last few years building itself to a war footing, and Europe has elected not to do so. Since any new “soft power” pressure on Russia would entail sanctioning trade with China, to which Europe is also increasingly beholden, this is likely a nonstarter. So, we are back to Europe’s military power, which Russia may dismiss for the near future.
Historically, great powers impose their will on lesser powers. Nations with relative parity may risk conflict over a province or a port, but such wars are limited and prone to negotiated settlements. Even large wars, such as the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars or the more recent Arab-Israeli wars are characterized by periods of conflict separated by peace treaties and land swaps, and even shifting alliance partners. Wars in China and the Indian subcontinent followed similar patterns, as probably did tribal and imperial warfare in the Americas and Africa. If the good guys didn’t always prevail in these conflicts, well, who’s to say who was good and who was bad? Sometimes aggressors made out like bandits.
If the rules-based world order was supposed to put an end to imperial aggrandizement, national opportunism and warlordism, only the hard power behind those rules made it possible. Even with such a system in place, borders still vanished (South Vietnam), countries fragmented (Yugoslavia), regimes changed (postcolonial Africa and Asia), rebellions flared (Congo), dictators slaughtered their own (China) and wars regularly occurred (take your pick). On those rare occasions when aggressions were completely reversed, military intervention by much larger interested powers made it possible (Falklands, Kuwait, Kosovo).
Thus, even in the rules-based order, military force was needed to preserve existing borders. In almost every case of military conflict in the post-WWII world, some negotiations were necessary to bring the conflict to a close. At times these negotiated agreements rewarded an aggressor and merely provided a fig-leaf for the loser, as in the Paris Peace Accords, which enabled the U.S. withdrawal from the Vietnam War and sounded the death knell of South Vietnam, or more recently the agreement that ended the fighting in Russia’s first incursion into Ukraine in 2014. Such has always been the case.
Right is on the side of Ukraine, which is clearly the aggrieved party in the war. However, if the nations of European NATO are not up to backing their demands with military force and the United States is unwilling to, the Russo-Ukrainian War seems destined to end in a negotiated settlement [ [link removed] ] that will leave a lot of people unhappy, including people not in the war zone who think more should have been done.
The Cliffs of Insanity
In the justifiably famous duel atop the Cliffs of Insanity [ [link removed] ] in the 1987 film “The Princess Bride,” thoroughly impressed sword master Inigo Montoya says he must know the identity of his masked opponent, the Man in Black. “Get used to disappointment,” the latter politely demurs. The duel continues, with Inigo taking the rebuff in stride.
Duels of nations are never as spruce and well-mannered, even in a rules-based order. In literature or cinema, war may be depicted in formalized ways, such as in Age of Enlightenment Europe or shogunate Japan. This is pleasant fiction. In real life, examples of chivalry and fair dealing exist, but war has always primarily been an abattoir churning out carnage and ruined lives.
During World War I, the belligerents of the Entente and Central Powers experienced over a million casualties in its first five months. By the end of 1915, the number of dead and wounded were in the many millions with no victory in sight. If there were opportunities for a negotiated settlement—and there were various overtures from one country or another throughout the war—nobody wanted to take them.
The main reason for this was that no leaders were willing to face their own people after so much blood had been spilled with anything short of total victory. This is often described as an example of the sunk cost fallacy [ [link removed] ], wherein decision-makers continue investing in fruitless ventures to justify the resources they have already invested. In this case, the resources are human beings.
Intriguingly, some foreign policy experts in the West have accused Putin of suffering [ [link removed] ] from the sunk cost fallacy in his continued prosecution of the war in Ukraine. Many of these observations were made relatively early in the war, when Russia’s initial invasion objectives were thwarted and Ukraine was pushing back with freshly mobilized forces and newly arrived Western military equipment.
Nobody is really saying this anymore.
These days, the Russian advantage in manpower, resources and industrial capacity is grinding Ukraine down. The prospects of Ukraine reversing battlefield trends with some stunning stratagem or influx of Western largesse are essentially nil.
While it might be overreaching to suggest Zelenskyy and his supporters in the West in favor of continuing the war are suffering from the sunk cost fallacy, carrying on the fight and expecting a reversal of fortune smacks of insanity. If there is a cliff involved, it is the temptation for direct Western military intervention, as French President Emmanuel Macron flirted with last year [ [link removed] ]. Fortunately, there is no real appetite in the West for achieving total victory through Russia’s unconditional surrender.
In World War II, the Allies had the will, resources and commitment to drive the Axis powers and their ideologies into the ashes. Total victory involved killing and dying on such a scale that we pray never to see its like again. This is why future wars, even among great powers [ [link removed] ], will probably never be prosecuted to unconditional surrender.
With Europe unable and the U.S. unwilling to intervene directly to change the trajectory of the war, the only course left is the unpalatable one of negotiating with Putin. Ukraine will lose territory. Much to the West’s chagrin, Russia will likely claim victory. The best Ukraine can hope for is a result similar to the deal Russia reportedly offered before all the killing started [ [link removed] ]: Crimea and the Donbas to Russia; no to Kyiv joining NATO; yes to Ukrainian membership in the European Union.
And so, another war will end as so many have ended previously—in disappointment, relief and tragedy—and as so many more will end in the future.

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