Why American Transactionalism Will Never Deliver Peace To Ukraine
Escalation management, make it anti-woke
According to the Russian press for the Oreshnik intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM), which is “believed to be a direct derivative of the existing RS-26,” it ought to terrify the world with “six independent re-entry vehicles” in a warhead that “weighs about 1,800 pounds and, according to Putin, impacts at a speed of Mach 10.” A “military propaganda campaign designed to exaggerate the capabilities of the Russian military-industrial complex and the might of a new weapon” started with the demonstration strike on Dnipro in November and shows no sign of letup. “America is defenseless,” breathes one Telegraph headline.
Like the T-14 Armata supertank, however, Oreshnik is mostly hype. Because so much of the rocket is devoted to reaching thousands of kilometers, each conventional warhead has only about the same effect as a standard 2000-lb JDAM — hardly the “rod from God” of science fiction. A flight of Su-34s would be cheaper and just as effective.
“The buildings are still standing. The strike may have done some additional damage to the buildings, but I don't see much," Dr. Jeffrey Lewis of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey and the founding publisher of Arms Control Wonk.com, told me.
In reality, “Russia’s unleashing of the Oreshnik experimental ballistic missile on Ukraine was a propaganda operation designed by the Kremlin, the military, and intelligence agencies to reignite fear in Kyiv and Western capitals that had grown accustomed to Moscow’s nuclear saber-rattling,” according to The Moscow Times. “There were brainstorming sessions about how to respond and put the Americans and the British in their place for allowing Zelensky to use long-range weapons. And how to scare Berlin and other Europeans into submission,” one anonymous Russian official reportedly said.
Get that? No one in Moscow was prepared for the Biden administration to greenlight ATACMS inside any part of Russia. They were confident that the sheer inertia of Jake Sullivan’s frenetic bladder would prevent it from ever happening. When the White House belatedly authorized the use of ATACMS around the Kursk salient (though not the rest of Russia bordering on Ukraine, natch, because we are still managing escalations) there was no measured escalatory response ready in the Kremlin. They instead had to throw something together, and then throw themselves behind it, in an act of “psychological warfare act against the West.”
They chose the Oreshnik, which is still years away from mass production, to strike a city they have bombarded with ballistic missiles for almost three years, but from a further distance than before. Slow clap.
Putin gave Biden a half-hour’s prior notice of the launch. This bit of theater was the best counter-escalation Russians could come up with in response to Ukrainian use of an American short range ballistic missile (SRBM), the ATACMS, that was first manufactured in 1989. While the world’s most obvious PSYOP did succeed in making Joe Rogan hyperventilate, I was specifically promised World War III the very instant ATACMS were used on targets inside Russia, and I feel disappointed, for these missiles were Cold War relics when the Biden administration dusted them off for Ukraine, and I do not see any nuclear mushroom clouds.
I keep saying that Cold War II is a lame sequel and I hate being proven right, time and again. The counter-escalation narrative — “managed escalation” — is not a uniquely left- or right-wing phenemenon. It is a false nonpartisan consensus of American political transactionalism: the art of horse-trading, or The Art of the Deal, to use the title of Donald Trump’s 1987 book.
Indeed, Trump’s “America First” motto and “transactional” approach to NATO “put little stock in a sense of Western civilization based on values as the underlying bedrock of the Alliance,” creating a “parallel crisis of leadership not unlike the 2003 loss of confidence in the United States during the period of the Iraq invasion,” Jeffrey Larsen observes in The Routledge Handbook of Strategic Culture.
Now returning to the White House, Trump has signalled a willingness to revise the old world order and leave both NATO as well as Europe behind — while meeting in public with all the old world order leadership to discuss what the new world order will look like.
Transactionalism defined the alleged leadership of Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor to Joe Biden. If the United States only gave Ukraine a handful of M-1 Abrams tanks and a couple dozen F-16s, Vladimir Putin would not start nuking cities. Now Sullivan can wave away questons about these weapon systems by calling them irrelevant, since there aren’t enough Ukrainian crews or pilots trained to use them and they didn’t do much, anyway.
On his advice, President Biden set Ukraine up to fail with American weapons, time and time again, while advising Kyiv to raise new conscript formations that the Pentagon has failed to equip or supply, ostensibly for fear that if Ukraine started winning too hard, Russia would start World War III.
Sullivan was so absolutely sure in October 2022 that supplying Ukraine with any ATACMS at all would start the nuclear armageddon with a “dirty bomb” that he nixed earlier delivery of tanks, planes, and missiles alike, eliminating any combined arms effect on Russian formations. Russian concentrations moved beyond HIMARS range, effectively creating a safe zone for ammunition dumps, training grounds, aviation bases, and everything needful for Russian defense of conquered Ukrainian territory.
Public recognition of the 1991 international boundary continued at the US State Department, but meanwhile, American strategic planners assumed that Kyiv would have to give away some part of Ukraine to buy peace in our time, buying the time before this inevitable defeat with Ukrainian lives.
Sullivan’s fecklessness is mirrored in Trumpworld. For various reasons, Elon Musk and Tulsi Gabbard and Glenn Greenwald all swore that Biden’s teensy, tiny expansion of ATACMS authority into Russia would lead to instant Armageddon. That did not happen.
Ironically, Oreshnik is supposed be right at the upper range limit of nuclear missile prohibited under the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. It is in fact one of the Putin vanity nuclear projects that caused Trump to scrap the INF Treaty during his first term in office, another example of silver bullet procurement and hype. Notably, Trump showed no sign of panic at the Oreshnik demonstration strike.
Transactionalism is a key element of Trump’s domestic appeal. His talk of shaking up the world order to make it more directly profitable to Americans makes simple sense. It has the advantage of ‘kitchen table’ political wisdom, whatever we might think about his specific policy choices. Surrenduring Crimea and eastern and southern Ukraine in exchange for peace makes simple, ‘kitchen table’ sense, too.
Trump’s current public position is that Ukraine can buy peace in our time with some amount of land. Drawing a new line on the map will supposedly satisfy Putin and the siloviki. Call it ‘land for peace.’ This concept of the war and its outcome has been popularized by professor William Spaniel, whose “lines on maps” YouTube videos conceive of warfare as an economic transaction. While this frame of reference is useful for understanding wars as macroeconomic affairs, no line on any map will satisfy the desire in the Kremlin to annihilate Ukraine. It is a sacred value.
American policy makers, both incoming and outgoing, are either blind to the revisionism of the Eurasianist ideology that animates the Kremlin or sympathetic to its project of redrawing lines on maps in pursuit of world peace. For Putin and his closest cronies, the destruction of Ukraine is a sacred project. Borders are held to be a foreign concept, a product of weak-wristed Eurocentric western decadence. Borderlessness is inherent to the project of Russkiy Mir, the imperialist “Russian world.” Russian imperialism presses outward until it meets solid resistance. ‘Peace agreements’ are merely pauses to rebuild and prepare forces for the next war of conquest.
At the moment, Donald Trump believes he can make Ukraine give up enough territory to secure their own future safety without NATO or EU membership or American military aid. He will discover that no such transaction is acceptable to Putin or the ruling clique in the Kremlin, who maintain their maximalist demands against Kyiv. They want Ukraine altogether unable to resist the next invasion in five or ten or fifteen years, whenever the Russkiy Mir project is ready to resume, so they demand “demilitarization” of Ukraine and instant sanctions relief for themselves.
As the Royal United Services Institute put it, “without NATO membership and its Article 5 guarantee, there would be nothing to stop Putin from continuing the war after a couple of years of recovery and rearmament.” Crimean geography and extensive land borders with the new Ukraine would require Kyiv to keep millions of males in uniform as active duty and ready reserves at all times. This form of ‘peace’ would be as expensive as a war, if less bloody, and guarantee Ukraine would be disadvantaged immediately in the bloodier-than-ever war to come.
Trump, like Biden before him, has so far refused to demand any concessions from Putin. Russia is not required to give up land for peace, or even just agree to a real peace that leaves Ukraine alone. Everyone seems to presume that Ukraine will lose a significant part of itself, probably more than it has already lost, in exchange for nothing at all, receiving no protection from any alliances. Like Biden, Trump so far expects Ukrainians to give, and give, and give, and get nothing in return.
But Trump may yet change his mind. The sort of ‘peace’ that Trump demands today is unsustainable. No Ukrainian politician would survive the imposition of such a ‘peace’ on Ukrainian voters. Nor will Moscow stop shooting because Donald Trump tells them to cease fire. Sooner or later, Trump may reason his way to the same conclusion as Kyiv, fulfilling Churchill’s reputed dictum that Americans always do the right thing after exhausting all other options.
The Kursk salient is Ukraine’s insurance policy, a prize that Russia wants back badly enough to trade something for it. Putin would rather spend tens of thousands of Russian and North Korean lives trying, and so far failing, to expel Ukraine from their Kursk foothold by February, when he hopes that Trump will force Ukraine to freeze the war on his terms. The strategem has so far absorbed tens of thousands of Russian troops and the dregs of Russian equipment reserves at the same time the Ministry of Defense throws every available body into the killing grounds of the Donbas.
This, too, is unsustainable. In the wake of Russian withdrawal from Syria amid the collapse of the al-Assad regime, Russia’s apparent position of strength has suffered a serious public blow. Ruble inflation, a labor shortage created by exhorbitant service contracts in Ukraine, and the exhaustion of state cash reserves all point to economic meltdown in 2025. Whereas Putin tried to create conditions in 2024 to win the kind of ‘peace’ he envisions in the new year, time is no longer on his side.
Refusal to give up anything — choosing the sacred project of Russkiy Mir over peaceful transaction — is a good way to offend the dealmaker president, who can sense Russian weakness, which increases all the time. Oreshnik is not enough to deter anyone anymore. The nuclear saber-rattling has worn thin on western ears, even Trump’s, and now the nuclear shoe may be on the other foot.
Serious Ukrainian talk of re-nuclearization as part of any ‘peace’ — replacing the nuclear weaponry that Kyiv surrendered under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 — points to how little the Ukrainians care for a Russian ‘peace.’ They understand that military victory is the sole means of stopping Russian aggression in the long term; and barring the possibility of victory, they must present a realistic threat to the very existence of Moscow to deter further aggression.
Donald Trump has no native ideology other than the business deal, which is to say the branding of properties and incorporated entities. His choice of William Kellogg, a trusted personal adviser, as special envoy to Ukraine and Russia does not deviate from ‘western values’ or European relationships. A retired general, Kellogg is a product of the Cold War, a decorated Vietnam veteran who understands the conceptual basis of combined arms operations and the staggering ammunition requirements of a wartime military.
The longer the war continues, the worse it will get. Merely pausing the war for a few years will only make the inevitable next Russian war of conquest many times as risky and expensive. Trump wants to put his brand on a peace agreement, but may eventually realize that Russian defeat is the fastest, best way to a reliable peace.
Such a move would not be out of character for Trump, the man who brought professional wrestling talk to American political discourse. The weaker Putin’s position becomes, the more likely that Trump will verbalize his dominance: Volodymyr Zelenskyy is ‘playing ball,’ so ‘Vladimir Putin needs to play ball, too,’ and other such statements.
Otherwise, Trump might just decide to help Russia collapse on the battlefield and put his brand on the victory, however partial, that results from it. We are still a long way from that kind of support for Ukraine, but Putin seems to be leaning into the scenario, which is a choice consistent with his character, too. Something will have to give. Sooner or later, someone will need a shove in the right direction: the Donald Trump way.
