Peace negotiations are for suckers. The ratio of successful peace negotiations to unsuccessful ones is not great and the successful ones generally involve European countries that genuinely wanted to end the fighting. As I’ve said before, that’s not the case with the Russia-Ukraine war. And the J.D. Vance effort to advance an American-led end to the war quickly took on the hallmarks of past failed negotiations.
Neither side really wanted to end the war. Both sides just used the negotiations that we were pushing to maneuver for better positions. Rather than leading to a downturn in hostilities, hostilities actually increased.
Now President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio are signaling that the U.S. is ready to walk away.
U.S. President Donald Trump will walk away from trying to broker a Russia-Ukraine peace deal within days unless there are clear signs that a deal can be done, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday.
“We’re not going to continue with this endeavour for weeks and months on end. So we need to determine very quickly now, and I’m talking about a matter of days whether or not this is doable in the next few weeks,” Rubio said in Paris after meeting European and Ukrainian leaders.
“The president feels very strongly about that. He has dedicated a lot of time and energy to this … this is important, but there are a lot of other really important things going on that deserves just as much, if not more attention.”
Rubio said the issue of U.S. security guarantees as part of any deal came up in the talks in Paris, without going into greater detail.
He said security guarantees was an issue “we can fix in sort of in a way that’s acceptable to everyone,” but “we have bigger challenges that we need to figure out, whether it’s even possible within the short term”.
The better option all along was to just walk away. If Europe wants to take ownership of this war, great.
We’ve invested enough time and money into this. And pushing peace negotiations backed by security guarantees gets us deeper into the war, not out of it.
The Trump administration should be willing to cut Gordian Knots and end the old policy of trying to internationalize and negotiate local conflicts. It isn’t working in Ukraine, in Gaza or anywhere else.
Steven Witkoff needs to go back to playing golf in Florida and negotiating real estate deals, and the Trump administration should focus on our national interests, not playing a 99 cent store United Nations.
We were sold on the idea that the Russia-Ukraine war was WWIII both by supporters and opponents of it. It’s not. It’s WWI with drones driven by ethnic hostilities and local territorial claims. We can move on from it.
Anyone who wants more U.S. involvement, either through negotiations or hostilities, is not advancing an America First foreign policy.
