Ukrainians, fighting for their lives, as well as the people of nearby Poland, the Baltic States, Finland, and other Europeans most exposed to Russian aggression are watching with trepidation as President Donald Trump seems to vacillate in his behavior toward Russian President Vladimir Putin — one day flattering the aggressive tyrant but another day apparently prepared to put pressure on him to stop his war against Ukraine. Leaders and citizens of neighboring countries I speak with regularly express their fear that Trump will stand by while Moscow again imposes its rule on its neighbors — on them — through violence and war. They often note President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s soft approach to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as a cautionary tale:
“I think if I give [Stalin] everything I possibly can and ask nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” — Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1943
My interlocutors wonder whether Trump is following the same dark path; they often ask that of me in particular, an old friend of the region involved in U.S. policy toward it from 1989 onward.
My answer is that Ukraine’s strategic position today is far better than was Poland’s or the Baltic States during World War II. Roosevelt played his cards badly, but his hand was weak in any event, and Trump has better options toward Ukraine than Roosevelt ever had toward Poland and others in Central and Eastern Europe, and thus less excuse for weak policy. Trump veered again this week in a bad direction, but he is not (yet) set on a disastrous course.
History can help us make sense of current turmoil. By the time World War II broke out in 1939, the odds of its ending with all of Europe free were vanishingly small. The Western democracies faced not one but two aggressive tyrants on the continent – Hitler and Stalin. The failure of the United States to help the beleaguered French and British democracies deal with the more powerful Nazi Germany and Soviet Union meant that those two dictatorships could form an alliance and carve up Central and Eastern Europe between them, which is what they did in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. By the time the United States entered the war in 1941, it needed the Soviets to defeat the Nazis. The consequence of that dependency was a U.S. unwillingness to break with Moscow, even as it started to impose communism in Poland amid its push West against the Germans in 1944.
U.S. Options Then and Now
Roosevelt, as the quote above shows, was trying to flatter Stalin into going easy on Poland and other countries in Central Europe that the United States hoped the Soviet Union would liberate but was in fact conquering. It makes for bad reading now, but U.S. options were limited. George Kennan, the first U.S. “Sovietologist” then serving at the U.S. Embassy in wartime Moscow, urged visiting Roosevelt special envoy Harry Hopkins in 1944 to push back on Soviet demands over Poland. But U.S. leverage was complicated. The United States could have threatened to curtail Lend Lease support for the Soviet war effort, but U.S. and allied European leaders needed Soviet armies to keep battling the Germans, especially after the United States and the U.K. were on the ground in France struggling to advance east. Before the success of the atomic bomb test in 1945, Roosevelt also wanted Soviet help in finishing the war against the Japanese. Given the way the war started, it was going to end with Soviet armies in place from Germany eastward to the Soviet borders. And Stalin could work his will.
Trump’s options are better. There is but one major aggressive tyrant in Europe today. Ukraine is not caught, as was Poland and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, between two aggressors, but has friends and potential allies at its back. The United States doesn’t need Putin’s Russia for very much. Most European countries also don’t need Russia for very much now that most have altered their sources of oil and natural gas, at great cost. Some in the United States used to argue that Russia could be an effective ally against China, which they regard as the bigger threat. But that is scarcely credible given Russian dependence on Chinese support and its vulnerability, especially in the Russian Far East, should it turn against the much stronger China. In any case, trying to re-create Roosevelt’s dilemma of needing one tyrant to deal with another hardly seems wise policy.
Nor does Putin’s Russia possess the relative power of Stalin’s USSR. Stalin was able to occupy the Baltic States within days and seized almost 20 percent of Finland’s territory in a few months of war. Putin cannot manage to overcome Ukrainian resistance after more than three years of fighting. Russia’s economy is vulnerable, and Ukrainian attacks on its energy infrastructure are beginning to bite. Putin possesses nuclear weapons, while Stalin had none before 1949. But Russia does not have strategic superiority and is unlikely to obtain it.
In short, by 1943, Roosevelt had few options to deflect Stalin from imposing his will on the countries his armies occupied. Trump has many options to help defeat Russian aggression against Ukraine but has chosen not to use them. He has withheld additional measures of economic pressure on Russia. He has hesitated as much as the Biden administration in providing new advanced weapons to Ukraine. For the present, Trump has chosen not to use U.S. leverage.
Not the Worst Case – But Still Missing Opportunities
But Trump has not, as some critics claim, sided with Putin against Ukraine, at least not yet. U.S. intelligence is apparently still flowing to Ukraine. Trump reportedly pressed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in their Oct. 17 White House meeting to accept a Russian demand that Ukraine surrender land in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces that Putin claims but is unable to conquer. That was ill-advised. But Trump apparently accepted Zelenskyy’s refusal and agreed to push for a ceasefire along the existing front line, a reasonable starting point that Zelenskyy has accepted as such. Trump also had agreed to yet another meeting with Putin in the ill-considered venue of Budapest — the site of the failed 1994 “Budapest Memorandum” that offered Ukrainian what turned out to be empty security assurances in exchange for its surrendering its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal — but the latest reports suggest that Russian maximalism has met with U.S. resistance, and the meeting is postponed indefinitely.
In short, while the United States has fallen short of using its favorable strategic position and the leverage it possesses to help end Putin’s war against Ukraine, it has not sided with Russia nor stood aside, as Roosevelt essentially did, due to lack of better options.
The best explanation for Trump’s approach to the Russia-Ukraine War is that he considers the United States — and especially himself — a mediator that needs to retain the ability to push and cajole both sides. That’s better than siding with the aggressor, as some fear, or grasping at weak straws, as can be said of Roosevelt trying to defend Polish freedom. But it’s not enough, given the many U.S. opportunities to exert the pressure that only it can wield.
