President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to bring a swift end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict in his second term, but it remains unclear what exactly he means to do. His Cabinet appointees are an eclectic mix of national security hawks and skeptics, and Trump himself seems far more focused on competition with the Chinese Communist Party than European affairs. At this point, practically anything could be on the table for the incoming administration.
One thing that Trump should absolutely do, though, is avoid the mistakes of his immediate predecessor. President Joe Biden’s hasty retreat from Afghanistan was probably the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of a presidency marked by countless mistakes. Biden was motivated by a desire to be seen as a president who could end a war, but his choices, in fact, consistently signaled weakness. America’s enemies understood that the Democrat was unwilling to deter their aggression — and they declared open season on the U.S.-led global order. The chaos stretching from Kharkiv to the Red Sea can be traced directly back to Biden’s decision to surrender Afghanistan to the Taliban.
If Trump reduces American support for Ukraine or cuts it off completely, he would be sending the exact same message to America’s enemies that Biden sent in 2021. Simply giving up on allies should not be a live option. Instead, the new administration needs to put the “peace through strength” principle it avows into action. Trump’s top priority here should be showing the world that America will no longer cut and run from its allies.
Any strategy for ending the war must begin from the unfortunate truth that Russian President Vladimir Putin has no intention of stopping his invasion any time soon. In late November, for instance, he launched a new type of ballistic missile on Dnipro — a clear step up the escalation ladder and an implied threat to go further. Putin’s deployment of thousands of North Korean soldiers on the front lines and use of Iranian weapons technology also demonstrate his willingness to expand the war from a regional conflict to a truly global affair. This aggression is not a problem that can be isolated if Trump gives Putin an easy victory.
If anyone can end the war, then, it must be the Ukrainians themselves. Totally forcing Russian troops off every inch of their soil is likely impossible at this point, but the Ukrainian army needs to achieve a position of genuine battlefield superiority if negotiations to end the war will benefit the West and secure Ukrainian independence. As helpful as American aid has been to that effort, many of Biden’s policies have hindered that mission as well.
One excellent road map to Ukrainian victory from which Trump’s team could take its cues was recently released by the Vandenberg Coalition and the McCain Institute. Bringing together some of the top conservative foreign policy thinkers in their fields, the report sketches out several policies rooted in a truly Reaganite approach rather than the limp-wristed liberalism of the Biden administration. As Hudson Institute senior fellow Rebeccah Heinrichs put it in her contribution, “Securing Ukraine’s sovereignty is the only way to guarantee that Russia will cease military expansion into Europe and weaken its ability to undermine U.S. commercial and national security interests, to say nothing of its impact on [CCP Chairman] Xi’s calculation vis-à-vis Taiwan.”
Probably the most important step the experts recommend that the Trump administration could immediately take is lifting the restrictions to which its predecessors have unnecessarily tied Ukraine. Biden has taken far too long to deliver vital weaponry to the Ukrainian army, and he waited far too long to lift his prohibition on strikes on military targets within Russia. He believed he was preventing escalation, but in fact, he was choosing not to reestablish deterrence. Instead, businessman and diplomat Stephen Biegun, who served in the first Trump administration, argues in his essay that “the Ukrainians must be given the latitude to fight to win, not simply to fight as long as it takes.” We cannot ask the Ukrainians to fight for Western security if we will not allow them to win. Defeat is more to be feared than the abstraction of “escalation.”
The incoming Trump administration should also announce that it will not reduce the amount of aid being sent to Ukraine. Bipartisan support for the Ukrainian cause remains high in Congress, and the vast majority of the public continues to sympathize with it as well. There is no need to turn off the spigot and give Putin the upper hand, even as the Trump administration prepares for some kind of negotiations to end the conflict. Getting another supplemental aid package through the legislative branch would both show support for allies at a crucial moment in their war effort and demonstrate resolve to the Kremlin.
But the Vandenberg Coalition report’s experts acknowledge that Russian aggression is a long-term problem that requires long-term solutions. Putin’s neo-imperial ambitions do not end at Ukraine’s western border, and he has already found ways to harm the American homeland directly. He has spent his time in the Kremlin, as American Global Strategies Vice President Brian Cavanaugh points out, “targeting critical civilian and commercial infrastructure” in the West, as well as military assets both digitally and kinetically. And even weakened after three years of warfare, the Russian armed forces continue to pose a major threat to American interests.
If the war in Ukraine has taught American policymakers anything, it should be that the United States is not investing nearly enough of its resources in national security. From World War II through the Cold War, the U.S. acted as the “Arsenal of Democracy,” supplying those nations that bravely resisted the spread of totalitarianism. While the country continues to develop impressive defense technologies, overall defense spending has declined precipitously since the 1990s. The result is a weakened military that can barely supply the Ukrainian army with enough bullets, let alone the kind of advanced arms and ammunition needed to win a modern war.
One example of an area in which the Trump administration should invest is missile defense. To his credit, Trump has always been a vocal supporter of Israel and its Iron Dome air defense system — he has even said he wants to find ways to incorporate similar technology in the U.S.’s homeland security architecture. American investments in Israel’s missile defense have paid huge dividends in the Middle East, frustrating several Iranian attempts to destabilize the region. A postwar Ukraine will need something like this if it wants to deter or protect against future Russian aggression. But it will also need other kinds of state-of-the-art systems to stay one step ahead of the Kremlin, and only American innovation can provide them.
Other policies Trump is considering could pay for these new investments. Striking a truly Reaganite tone, Trump and his team have promised to make drastic cuts to wasteful domestic spending and overbearing bureaucracy. The savings that could be achieved by reducing the size and scope of the federal government ought to be reinvested in its most important constitutional responsibility: national security. Global primacy and overwhelming strength are expensive, yes, but entirely worth the investments in a larger defense budget.
Even with a much larger defense budget, though, America cannot defend the West alone. Some NATO allies, such as Poland, responded to the Russian invasion by increasing national security spending by record numbers. Others, such as Germany and France, have been far more sluggish — and Trump has been rightly critical of their feet-dragging. He should continue to use the bully pulpit to encourage slower allies to put more skin in the game. At the same time, though, he should understand that reducing American commitments to European security will spur a crisis of confidence rather than a renaissance in military investments.
Building on this hardheaded realism, the Vandenberg Coalition’s report also urges the incoming administration to consider updates to American geo-economic strategy. While the sanctions Biden has imposed on Russia have had a real effect, there is much more the U.S. could do to slow its war machine and strengthen the West’s economic position overall. Matthew Zweig, executive director of FDD Action, offers several innovative solutions to the shortcomings of the current sanctions regime’s enforcement mechanisms. “As Russia continues to seek ways to evade sanctions,” he writes, “comprehensive and well-coordinated international efforts will be crucial to ensuring that the sanctions have their intended effect.”
Beyond sanctions, though, there are a host of economic policies the Trump administration could implement to isolate Russia further, strengthen the West’s alliance system, and benefit working Americans. The Biden administration has pursued a protectionist trade policy that hurt American workers and relationships with global partners at a particularly dangerous moment in world affairs. While Trump has blustered plenty about being a “tariff man,” choosing to reverse these harmful Biden-era policies would energize the economy, as well as vital alliances.
Any strategy for reasserting American primacy must conceive of its goals in terms of the entire Western alliance system. The free peoples of the world are bound together in a struggle against an axis consisting of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian tyrants. Trump must understand that Ukrainian defeat would be felt by all the friends of liberty and strengthen the hand of America’s bitterest enemies. The status quo is utterly unacceptable, and only American leadership can turn the tide.
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This was the lesson Biden refused to learn from the consequences of his Afghanistan debacle. He wrongly believed he could isolate the fallout to just one corner of the globe when, in fact, he was really giving U.S. rivals a permission slip to cause chaos everywhere. But tragic as abandoning Afghan allies was for the country itself, and catastrophic as it was on a global scale, the decision also had political costs for Biden. His approval ratings began dropping considerably after the September 2021 collapse of Kabul and never recovered. Biden’s weakness meant he lost the people’s confidence.
Trump’s stunning victory in 2024 should be taken as a total rebuke of Biden’s disastrous presidency. The voters saw for themselves that fecklessness and extreme liberalism set the world on fire, and they preferred a candidate who offered the confidence of American greatness. Ukraine policy will be the first opportunity for Trump to show that this country still has a fighting spirit — so long as he avoids repeating the worst mistakes of his predecessor.
Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law & Liberty, and a contributing editor to Providence.