“Humility” isn’t a word often associated with President Donald Trump, though he does occasionally indulge in self-deprecating humor. Discussing his efforts to end the war in Ukraine this week, he displayed a little of both.
“I want to try and get to heaven if possible,” Trump told Fox News. “I hear I’m not doing well. I hear I’m really at the bottom of the totem pole.” He noted that it wasn’t Americans dying in the Russia–Ukraine war, but thousands of lives could be saved by ending the conflict. According to a British estimate, 1 million Russian troops have fallen as casualties since the invasion began.
This isn’t totally uncharted territory for Trump. In Georgia during one of his last campaign rallies before the 2024 election, Trump said that his mother was “definitely looking down” on him as he hit the trail but quipped his father was “questionable”and might be looking up.
But it is nevertheless a bit unusual and it may be one of the explanations for Trump’s focus on ending this war, long after the 24-hour window. He has repeatedly called for the killing and dying to end.
Many don’t give Trump any credit here or take seriously his talk about peacemaking at all, long before hawk summer. Some make him into a villain coequal with, or perhaps subordinate to, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. This allows them to simultaneously engage in a bit of Cold War nostalgia while still making Joe McCarthy’s party the bad guy.
“Ukrainians obviously cannot trust Putin, a man with a long history of broken promises,” Nahal Toosi writes in POLITICO. “But they also cannot trust Trump, another man with a long history of broken promises.”
Others like to say that Trump is only in this because he covets the Nobel Peace Prize—which isn’t such a bad thing, if he does more to earn it than did Barack Obama.
Trump has played hardball at times with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. He is also uninterested in this becoming the latest forever war. “We’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business,” Vice President J.D. Vance said in an interview before the much-maligned Alaska summit. “We want to bring about a peaceful settlement to this thing.”
Putin learned during Trump’s first term how to flatter the American president. The Ukrainians and Europeans are playing catch-up in that regard, though the head of NATO has gotten pretty good at it. But Trump hasn’t done the easiest thing, which is to unilaterally cut off Ukraine regardless of what Russia promises or does, and has devoted a considerable amount of finite political capital to a diplomatic resolution he acknowledges Putin may never agree to.
“We’re going to find out about President Putin in the next couple of weeks,” Trump said.
Trump should keep in mind a key promise he made during last year’s presidential campaign: to keep America out of unnecessary wars. Diplomacy aside, he has been less risk-averse on this front in recent weeks than he was in his first term.
Trump is counting on Americans taking his promises seriously as he appears willing to make concessions on Western security guarantees to Ukraine in an effort to secure a broader peace deal. When Fox News asked him about keeping American boots off the ground, he replied, “Well, you have my assurance, and I’m the president.”
“The president has definitively stated U.S. boots will not be on the ground in Ukraine, but we can certainly help in the coordination and perhaps provide other means of security guarantees to our European allies,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at a daily briefing.
Subscribe Today
Get daily emails in your inbox
There is the risk that NATO-lite security guarantees could keep Putin on the battlefield, jeopardizing more Ukrainian lives in addition to those of his own soldiers. Those guarantees might not be credible, given what little Western Europe has already shown in terms of willingness to sacrifice for Ukraine. Or they could raise the prospects of a wider war, which both Trump and the former President Joe Biden have mostly tried to avoid.
All these scenarios are among the reasons NATO membership for Ukraine has been and remains a nonstarter.
Trump wants a deal, which he has made evident in his White House meetings with the Europeans every bit as much as in his outreach to Putin. Let us hope his bold diplomacy comes closer to delivering on his predecessors’ promises of a humble foreign policy.
