No Peace In Our Time
Why Trump transactionalism will fail to achieve a grand bargain
By this stage, Ukraine is not just a country that the MAGA right has never visited. It is a fantasy country that they imagine they know everything about — and all of it is bad. Douglass Murray at The Free Press this week
Donald Trump does not like war. He prefers trade war to actual war. Reviving his trade tariffs on Mexico and Canada last weekend, Trump got the kind of war he prefers. Doubled tariffs on Chinese goods are the kind of war Trump prefers with China.
Retaliatory tariffs were quickly forthcoming, all-round. As Warren Buffett says, trade tariffs are “an act of war, to some degree,” or what we might now term ‘hybrid warfare.’ The world’s most successful investor, Buffett is now “dumping stocks and raising a record amount of cash.” Wall Street dropped share values all week as if they were going out of style, cashing out like Buffett.
None of this can be called a surprise. Trump has always been an outlier in American politics for his abiding faith in tariffs. His criticism of the American political consensus that underlay the post-Cold War globalized economy was that it sent American blue collar jobs offshore, where lower wages overseas created price advantages for the companies which left America behind. Which, true enough.
But Trump believes that tariffs will return those lost manufacturing jobs to American soil. Problematically, however, goods and services are now a larger sector of the economy than manufacturing, which means that Trump’s tariffs on imports will raise prices for American workers and businesses, whether or not manufacturing ever returns.
The word for that phenomenon is “inflation,” and it is extremely unpopular with voters. (Just ask anyone who worked in the Joe Biden administration.) The new inflation will belong to Donald Trump, and so its political impact will fall on his brand.
During the week, FiveThirtyEight, Rasmussen, and Gallup tracking polls all showed a downtick in Trump’s approval rating. This, and not the S&P 500, is the trend line that will always get his attention.
On Thursday, Trump once again suspended about half of his tariffs on Canada and 38 percent of his tariffs on Mexico. His tariffs on Chinese goods remain in effect however. “Such two-faced acts are not good for the stability of bilateral relations or for building mutual trust,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi responded.
Notably, Ontario’s Doug Ford is pushing back with an electricity surcharge, while Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has recovered some polling ground with Canadians. Turns out that foreign leaders become more popular, not less, by confronting an aggressive American president. Who knew?
Trump risks having world leaders see him as furtive, a gutless bully, so that they start calling his bluff, making him look weak. At some point, it will be the world leaders he actually respects who do this.
Trump evidently believes that he is reducing the global risk of World War III by pursuing his grand bargain ambitions and trade wars instead of real wars. The US economy is at risk of recession as things stand, and trade war would make things much worse. A bad economic recession increases the risk that American strategic opponents will take advantage of American weakness.
Trump also believes that by cutting off Ukraine, he advances the project of global peace. Ukraine is in the way of peace, he seems to say. In fact Trump knows damn well that he cannot deliver actual peace to Ukraine. Last week’s Oval Office scene collapsed on the absence of security guarantees and the very different meanings of the word “peace” being used in the conversation. That is because what Trump and J.D. Vance offered was not peace at all and they know it.
This point seems to confuse the discussion around Ukraine and Russia: a ceasefire is not peace. It does not even preclude Russia continuing to attack Ukraine, or resuming the instant they please, such as the moment Donald Trump and J.D. Vance leave office.
A security guarantee that is solely based on the future preferences of American voters is no guarantee at all. A peace that depends on certain politicians remaining in office is not really a peace.
For that matter, almost all talk of the “disaster” at the White House has neglected a key fact about Volodymyr Zelenskyy, namely that Ukrainians are his sole constituency. Americans simply lack the power to remove him, and calls for his resignation are coming from American friends of Ukraine, not Ukrainians themselves.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) received a reminder of this from Zelenskyy last weekend. “Lindsay Graham is a very good guy," Zelenskyy said in response to Graham’s call for an election. “I can give him the citizenship of Ukraine. He will become a citizen of our country, and then his voice will gain weight. And I will hear him as a citizen of Ukraine on the topic of who must be the president.”
Because contrary to Elon Musk, that is how democracy actually works. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is already more popular in Ukraine than Donald Trump is in the United States. He isn’t going anywhere.
Trump seems to think that by withholding air defense aid and intelligence, he can help Russia kill enough Ukrainians to make Zelenskyy surrender, or make Ukrainians remove Zelenskyy. He is reportedly talking to Zelenskyy’s political opponents in Ukraine, hoping to force an election.
Putin is happy to take advantage of the situation by killing Ukrainians, but this Trump strategy quite ignores the entire history of the behavior of civilian populations under bombardment. It also makes American allies reconsider sharing their intelligence with the United States.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio now sounds exactly like his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, when he calls the fighting in Ukraine a “proxy war” between the US and Russia. Only an administration that intends to speak for Ukraine at the negotiating table would ever embrace this talking point.
Ukraine is quite simply not going to hold an election just because Americans say so. They are not going to quit fighting just because Trump says so. “Ukraine will not collapse — they already experienced an aid cutoff last year, but the effect will be cumulative,” Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute says. It will tell in Ukrainian lives.
However, drones dominate the actual battlefields of Ukraine, the Ukrainians are outproducing the Russians in this domain by a wide margin, and there is little that Donald Trump can do about it. Ukraine continues to strike Russian oil infrastructure with long-range strike drones, deterring any return of western oil companies to Russia, no matter what sanctions Trump reverses.
Put simply, the American president is reducing every means of leverage over Vladimir Putin in expectation that it will force Ukraine to capitulate. This plan will fail. The Kremlin refuses to negotiate with Zelenskyy, but they see Trump’s falling out with him as a blow to the kind of ceasefire they want; Trump cannot deliver Ukraine. Putin will continue to give Trump nothing in return for all the nice gifts.
Dropping sanctions, cutting off aid and weapons sales, reportedly ordering Cyber Command to stand down offensive planning against Russia — what does Trump expect to receive?
Why, world peace, of course. And a Nobel peace prize.
Putin is going to help Trump negotiate with Iran. Remember, Trump tore up the JCPOA, better-known as the Iran nuclear deal, which was also negotiated with the help of Putin’s ambassadors.
Now Trump wants some sort of deal that would replace that treaty when the rulers of Iran have learned to distrust and loathe him. Iranians are not happy that Trump wants Putin to negotiate on their behalf, either. The lesson is lost on Trump.
“Negotiations with America do not solve any of our problems,” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in February.
Khamenei’s statement seemed to respond to Trump’s social media post two days earlier saying that “I would much prefer a Verified Nuclear Peace Agreement, which will let Iran peacefully grow and prosper.”
“Reports that the United States, working in conjunction with Israel, is going to blow Iran into smithereens, ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED,” Trump wrote.
Meanwhile, in Iran, the regime appears to be racing towards nuclear breakout, and the only thing that has recently brought Iran close to any sort of negotiating position of any kind has been the hard power of Israeli arms, some of which are American-made. This lesson too is lost on Trump.
Trump also wants to have direct talks with Hamas, cutting out the Israelis, a move which Benjamin Netanyahu adamantly opposes. The pattern is clear: Trump wants to speak for his peace partners, who don’t want to be spoken for, because of course they don’t.
“U.S. peace-making without willing parties — as we see today with Russia and Ukraine, and with Israel and Hamas — is sure to backfire, tarnishing America’s global image while planting the seeds for more war,” Lawrence Haas writes at The National Interest.
“In fact, a Washington that seems too eager for peace, even a hollow peace that provides only a short respite before the fighting returns, could make war likelier in other places as well.” Reports of imminent world peace waiting on the other side of Ukraine or Gaza are greatly exaggerated.
Although the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has denied reports that they have been instructed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to stand down offensive planning against Russia, it is important to note that any “pause in offensive operations — even briefly — could take months to recover from,” as one former NSA hacker tells Axios.
“Planning a cyber offense requires months of lurking and learning about a target's networks to understand their weak points,” while any significant downtime in that planning would leave Russian hackers free to disappear and harden their networks.
In the event that the Trump administration then needed to launch a cyberoffensive against Russia — or any sort of offensive, really, because cyber is now an intrinsic part of all military operations — it would cost more, take longer, and probably be less successful than if CISA had been allowed to continue developing offensive plans.
Cyber is most useful in the deterrence of an enemy. A decision to stand down CISA offensive operational planning against Russia makes all forms of Russian aggression more likely, not less. Once aggression starts, history says that the winner will have the larger alliance, and it is exactly America’s system of alliances that Team Trump seems determined to reduce in advance of their grand bargain with Putin and Xi Jinping.
When J.D. Vance criticizes nascent European plans for a peacekeeping force in Ukraine, it is because he has no interest in actual peace for Ukraine, or for Europe. Trump does not care about the peace of Ukraine or Europe. They are in the way of the peace he wants.
In the Oval Office, Vance pressed Zelenskyy to accept responsibility for avoiding World War III, displaying the same Kremlin reflexive control as the Biden administration, but with even less credibility after three years of empty nuclear saber-rattling by the Kremlin.
This reflects the presidential team’s desire for a grand bargain that eliminates lingering 20th century nuclear tensions and brings world peace. It was always a fanciful dream. It will end, sooner or later, in rude awakenings.
Imagine a world in which the trade wars of Trump result in elevated foreign leaders, indeed a whole club of them hanging out with Zelenskyy, as well as increased anti-Americanism abroad in countries which had been relatively pro-American.
Imagine a national recession, or even a depression, brought on by trade wars.
Imagine a world where France is the main nuclear guarantor for NATO while Poland and Germany have both added their own nuclear deterrents. Imagine that Europe has separated its military and intelligence organizations from the United States. So have Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
Then imagine foreign aggression against American interests: China attacking Taiwan and sinking US Navy ships. The glee with which MAGA-land celebrates all this dominance display today will turn to ashes if the resulting war costs tens of trillions of dollars and thousands, if not tens of thousands of American lives.
As I have recently taken pains to repeat, transactionalism is more general to American foreign policy than Trump, but it is normally attenuated by diplomatic language agreed upon in advance of the Oval Office meeting. Vice presidents rarely get to say much in a normal White House meeting with foreign dignitaries. They are normally there to be seen, not heard.
Trump is abnormal. He strips American policy of its moral veneer. Vance even scoffs at “morality” as a concern in their approach to world affairs. This is the actual change they bring to their offices.
But the grand bargain they seek is not really about minerals or money, just as their talk of ceasefires and peace will not stop Russian or Chinese aggression. They can make the war worse for Ukraine, and they can make Vladimir Putin very happy, but they cannot get to world peace this way.
They can however make it very possible to lose the next war. They can make war more likely by failing at deterrence in Ukraine, badgering American allies, and losing friends of America.
The United States has nothing to trade China that will convince them to give up on the dream of destroying or absorbing Taiwan.
The United States has nothing to trade the Kremlin that will convince them to give up on the dream of destroying and absorbing Ukraine — and then more.
Neither the United States nor Russia has anything to trade Tehran in exchange for the dream of a nuclear deterrent against Israel and the United States.
The United States has nothing to tell the Ukrainians about nuclear proliferation, which would offer more real protection to them than fifty Minsk agreements. They saw how differently the United States treated Israel after 10/7. They got the lesson.
Some things are not marked for sale. Team Trump will find out. They are not the first Americans to ever try haggling their way to a peaceful world, but they are certainly the most naive and self-assured in recent memory.
They are taking risks, giving up leverage, diminishing assets, and fracturing alliances as if it will never hurt America. In fact the world is hurtling towards war while they play at making world peace.
"This point seems to confuse the discussion around Ukraine and Russia: a ceasefire is not peace. It does not even preclude Russia continuing to attack Ukraine, or resuming the instant they please, such as the moment Donald Trump and J.D. Vance leave office."
Yes, let's ask the now-unified Korea how that worked out.
Oh, wait...what?