A 28-Point Mess
Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle, No. 31
The 28-point Trump Plan to end the Russia-Ukraine War is many things to many people, it seems. To me, whatever else it may be, it is yet another attempted distraction from Trump’s self-wrought Epstein Files fiasco. But even if its main purpose is distraction, its potential to harm U.S. national security interests, as well as those of several other countries, is in no way diminished.
But leaving politics aside for the moment in favor of a more pure foreign policy analysis, the plan is, first of all, a piece of very unfinished business as of this writing. Starting as a U.S.-Russia discussion, it is now the subject in Geneva of a U.S.-Ukraine discussion. One would think that after all this time the Russians, Ukrainians, and Americans could find a hotel conference room somewhere that could seat as many as three delegations.
That said, the idea of proximity talks is not in itself a bad thing, and has sometimes proved a necessary thing. When adversaries cannot stand one another to the point of being unable to sit together in the same room, it falls to a third-party mediator to despise both sides separately--that’s often what it comes to when dealing with willful intractables--in order to bring them together. But the mediator, to be trusted sufficiently to be successful, must be what is known as an honest broker. Even if by history or tradition the mediator is known to favor one side more and the other less, the mediator must ply its diplomatic talents to imitate the late sainted Nestor Chylak, and just call ‘em as one sees ‘em.
The Trump Administration, however, cannot do that credibly. No government can be a successful honest broker that has earned a reputation as a generally untrustworthy or incoherent actor; and a great power pretending to be an honest broker but really intent on horsewhipping a weaker power into submission for selfish, transactional reasons of its own, will shroud its reputation in ignominy to ultimately counterproductive consequence. If President Trump thinks that’s the only way to end the war, then better he should not try to end it.
As is well known, in just one year the second Trump Administration has given diplomatic flip-floppery a new and far grander surrealist definition than most of us thought it could ever have. As I have described the record elsewhere [“Trump’s Flip-Floppery on the Ukraine-Russia War,” RSIS Commentary 112/2025, 20 May 2025] the Administration started out starkly pro-Russian and anti-NATO Europe [see my “The End of NATO, or the Sixth Impossible Thing,” Quillette, March 1, 2025] only to flip to being, if not pro-Ukrainian, than more evenhanded when Vladimir Putin failed to fulfill Trump’s imagination of his role. Then the Administration line drifted vaguely back toward Russia only to become openly pro-Ukrainian, and even pro-NATO to a point, after the most recent NATO Summit in The Hague in late June. That lasted for a vanishingly short while, soon to be punctuated by the sterile and frankly embarrassing August 15 Trump-Putin summit in Alaska. Then the wind seem to catch a bluster of energy again favoring Ukraine….but now, suddenly, comes the sharply pro-Russian 28 point-plan….and from where? (More on that below.)
Each of these flips and flops so far has resulted in three things. First, each White House tergiversation has involved the U.S. military and intelligence community having to screw with, or threaten to screw with, the supply of weapons, ammunition, logistical aid, and photo-recon assets to Ukraine. It’s a pain the ass, as well as expensive and inefficient, to have to turn this stuff on and off again on a Trumpian midnight whim or brain wobble. Second, no senior official in Europe knows what U.S. policy is: Are Pete Hegseth and J.D. Vance’s proclamations from daises in Brussels and Munich in February still operative, overtaken by events, or what? Whatever the policy actually is, if there actually is a policy, lacks credibility and so reliability since it is liable to change with the next replacement of the toilet paper roll in the Oval Office bathroom. And therefore third, each flip and flop, pretty much regardless of direction, has had the inadvertently benign effect of helping the major NATO-European powers to get their act together to defend Ukraine now, against the understanding that they may need to defend themselves later—without significant or any assistance from the United States. If this skein of behavior were to have a name like TV shows have names—and nothing describes the Trump 2.0 Administration’s ur-mentality better than a reality-TV show—with each flip and flop being an episode in the series, it could well be As the Diplomatic Stomach Turns.
The plan is, secondly, a textual mystery in the sense that, even before U.S.-Ukrainian discussions began, it was and remains of unknown and disputed provenance: Who wrote it, when, why, at whose behest if anyone’s? No one knows for sure, and worse, various claims by U.S. officials, not to exclude the dual-hatted Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, contradict each other. Demands by various Senators and Congressmen, some of them even Republicans, that this get sorted fast and a single plausible narrative on behalf of a well-intentioned diplomacy be laid out, have so far gone unrequited.
The communicative chaos here, leaving questions of origins in the ether, has re-raised suspicions that the Russian leadership has “got” something on Trump that would be embarrassing in the extreme were it to be made public. This something, it has been averred, works a little like a leash. Putin lets the doggie roam and sniff, but if he gets obdurate or troublesome—yank!—and he comes mewling back to obedience. Maybe what the Russians have on Trump, some speculate, is Epstein File-like in nature. That would be timely, wouldn’t it? Or maybe the claim that Trump was recruited back in Soviet times as a useful U.S. business community idiot, an “asset” but not an agent—the Krasnov Theory—may turn out to be true, although that possibility is not the same as a more radical Manchurian Candidate interpretation of his behavior that some have claimed to see. I don’t know what Putin may have or not have, but something does seem to be missing by way of explanation in the overall picture of Trump’s behavior toward the Russians. And that is true even if we take the dimmest view of Trump’s mental dimness.
As to the actual negotiation of the 28 points, let me offer only two comments.
It does not matter what the fine print will end up saying if this document is actually signed in due course by the warring sides. Agreements of this kind are not self-enforcing, and there is no magic dust that Western diplomats can sprinkle on eastern Europe to make them self-enforcing. The current Russian regime, in my estimation, is unwilling to accept a genuinely sovereign Ukraine in any borders whatsoever, a Ukraine that is functionally independent and so can chose its own trading and security partners. At a minimum Russia seeks the Belarussianizarion of Ukraine. So at a time of its own choosing under its current regime, Moscow will violate any agreement it may sign in order to achieve its aims so long as it is confident that no effective resistance to renewed aggression will be forthcoming.
One may argue that it is therefore the West’s job to obviate any such confidence in Moscow. That condition satisfied, signing a peace arrangement, even if in actuality it is only a calculated truce, could be worth it just to stop the bloodshed. The problem is that the inevitable atmospherics of signing a deal would undermine what it will take to satisfy the condition.
The Russian view of its war aims is not hard to understand looking at it from Moscow. Ukraine has been ruled from Moscow, with the exception of a brief period in 1919-20 and again fairly recently, for longer than the American Southwest has been ruled from Washington. How would a U.S. government feel about losing control of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, most of Utah, parts of Colorado, and southern California to a breakaway government in cahoots with a perceived enemy of the United States? Make no mistake: This is not just a matter of bruised pride, although it is also that. It speaks to a palpable national security liability, and not a small one as seen from the Kremlin, to have a hostile entity encamped near or even on territory formerly under one’s own tight control. We would doubtless feel that way, too, if it happened to us; goose, gander….you know.
None of this justifies Russia starting a war of aggression against Ukraine whose manifest aims contradicted agreements signed and sealed with Ukraine and the West at the end of the Cold War. But understanding Russian motives as an element in constructing a reasonable U.S. diplomatic position doesn’t require forgiving Russian behavior. Understanding Russian motives is not a favor to Russia; it’s a favor to ourselves.
Which brings us to the matter of some theoretical possibility of Ukraine joining NATO in the aftermath of a supposed peace settlement. I have written about this before, and I’m tempted just to paste my own words here with verb tenses slightly adjusted. I’ll resist the temptation; you, however, may indulge it simply by looking up this essay—“The Vilnius Fiasco,” Quillette, January 4, 2024—all 6,400 words of it.
So to summarize: It has long been the brass-ring aim of Russian statecraft to separate U.S. power from Europe and to foil any transformation of the European Union into a viable defense pact, either along with or de facto replacing NATO. This has been a tough row to hoe, however, since the rescission of U.S. power from Europe will logically and likely advance European defense cooperation, and major advances in European defense cooperation would more easily allow for the rescission of U.S. power from Europe. The Russians could imagine having one of these desiderata come true, but not both at the same time….unless it were possible to first get rid of the Americans of a sudden and then scare the slowly compensating and squabbling Europeans into having a continental scale laundry problem.
How could Moscow swing that? Invade Ukraine; wait for a second Trump Administration to sell NATO-Europe down the river; then sign a fake peace with Ukraine that demobilizes European energies and so undermines plans for greater defense efforts and coordination; and then restart the war and dare the Europeans to resist as the Russians detonate a nuclear air blast over the North Sea as an unmistakable warning of maximum peril. Boom: No Americans, no NATO, and no replacement for NATO. Game, set, match.
It is true that Russia’s starting the war galvanized and helped to expand NATO with Swedish and Finnish entry. It also helped a long wobbling Ukraine finds its own institutional legs, disabused nearly all Russian speakers within Ukraine of wanting to become part of Russia, and helped turn Russia into an international pariah. It is true, too, that every time the Russians violate a Baltic countries’ air space or launch a digital mega-hack or get an agent to bomb a road or railroad line inside Poland they only redouble European determination to get serious about their own security. At current levels of violence anyway, one could conclude that Putin has been foolishly shortsighted, his own worst enemy. And that is why Russia may be tempted to raise the stakes, make the problem bigger in effect, so as to make rocket-rattle a more effective communications tool, so to speak.
Ah, and this is why publicly promising Ukraine NATO membership, as the Vilnius Summit communiqué of June 2023 did, was so foolish. It helped Putin escape many of his own errors by creating the worst of all possible worlds for the Western allies: It gave the Kremlin reason to double-down on the war, so that the stated preconditions for Ukrainian accession would not come about; but it raised Ukrainian and mostly east European hopes in such a way as to retard the urgency of then newly inchoate Euro-centered defense efforts. The Biden Administration presumably bought into the communiqué language to both keep alliance members in eastern Europe happy and to chest-bump the Russians as a kind of gentlemanly punishment for their many misdeeds. But given that privately the Biden Administration opposed Ukrainian NATO membership, this public posture was nevertheless unwise.
Fecklessly promising Ukraine membership was bad enough, but still not as bad as actually granting it. That, however, was not really in the cards despite the public ballyhooing in Vilnius. The Biden Administration got the big question answered right: All the reasons why actually bringing Ukraine into NATO was a bad idea in 2023 remain in 2025. There were and still are four:
(1) Full NATO membership is not appropriate to Ukraine’s circumstances. Why should Kyiv obligate itself to defend, say, Finland or Latvia, countries with which it shares no border, while a Russian army sits menacingly on its own eastern frontier? Ukraine needs protracted protection, not gratuitous burdens. Ukraine’s special circumstances require a bespoke security arrangement tailored to its needs, not a one-size-supposedly-fits-all security straitjacket. As with the original 1995 expansion of the alliance, the assumption that NATO is the answer to every and all European security contingencies reveals a poverty of the American strategic imagination;
(2) Ukrainian NATO membership would demand additional U.S. resources devoted to European security, assuming the United States remains in NATO—which now seems likely to persist at some level despite Administration rhetoric back in February—when Asia cries out for more concentrated attention;
(3) Extending full NATO membership to Ukraine would also likely extend and ensconce U.S. strategic nuclear power further east into Eurasia, possibly for a long time. Do we really want to guarantee bad relations with Russia in perpetuity, when a post-Putin Russia may well be a natural partner, if not potentially a full ally, against a possibly still rising and belligerently revisionist China?; and
(4) Most important, to prevent Ukraine from being fully integrated into NATO would the Russians might prefer to use nuclear weapons rather than suffer that level of strategic setback. After all, once Ukraine is inside NATO Russia’s window for achieving its central geostrategic objective at a reasonably non-suicidal cost essentially closes, possibly for a very long time. A Ukraine in NATO, or about to be in NATO, thus raises the overall stakes of great power competition over eastern Europe, and while current levels of fighting are very unlikely to trigger nuclear weapons use, a higher-stakes scenario just might. Running that risk might be justifiable were truly vital U.S. national security interests at stake in Ukraine; but they’re not; the balance of national interests nearly always prevails over the objective balance of power, and while the United States may be more powerful than Russia militarily as well as economically, Russia wins the balance of interests hands down.
As to the 28-point plan, the idea of proscribing Ukrainian NATO membership in its constitution is in a way worse than insulting; it’s risible. A smaller country cannot be asked to foreswear options for strategic protection from a larger neighbor while that larger neighbor is free from any similar constraint. That amounts to a diktat, not a true agreement. The NATO allies must protect against the Russians achieving their core aim with respect to Ukraine, whether that includes a significant U.S. contribution over time or not; they can certainly do this in the face of amply demonstrated Russian conventional military weakness. It would help, too, if a more concerted EU economic diplomacy could bring about a major reduction in fossil fuel revenues that Russia receives to finance the war via secondary sanctions. But bringing Ukraine into NATO should the 28-point plan go by the boards would, as just argued, raise the stakes to a point where the risks abiding in the conflict would actually reduce U.S. policy options and hence its diplomatic flexibility. Not a good thing.
We need to stop acting as though the issue of Ukrainian NATO membership is really the sine qua non, the pivotal strategic question, of this whole conflict. The situation bespeaks a different, deeper, and bitter truth: If for any reason, supposed peace deal or not, the Ukrainians stop fighting to defend themselves, they will lose. If the Russians stop fighting out of exhaustion or a more enlightened view of their interests—and European power and resolve can advance that conclusion in due course—they don’t lose; they merely use their massive defensive depth to bide time and salve memory. This is the wage exacted by the irrevocable asymmetry of this war.
And that, at base, is why this 28-point plan business cannot end well, no matter the terms finally splashed on a piece of paper—if that comes about. As things stand now, no plan, no piece of paper, can deliver a genuine peace. It cannot summarily bring an end to what both sides see as a struggle with existential stakes, and it cannot change the inherently asymmetrical character of the conflict. For the conflict to truly end, something of political and, one may dare say, cultural significance needs first to change inside Russia. One day the Russians as a people will come to understand that European security, at least, is not a competitive value, but a shared value they will have the moment their neighbors have it. That this will one day happen is, to my mind, not in question. The question is, what day, how long into the future, will that be?