Trump’s deal would plunge the world into war
Summarize
Rewarding aggression and overturning rules-based order will simply trigger many more invasions
Con Coughlin23 April 2025 6:04pm BST
Credit: MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/AFP
US president Donald Trump’s seven-point proposal for ending the Ukraine conflict may be many things, but it most certainly is not a peace plan. It is a blueprint for more war.
Surrender, capitulation, betrayal, appeasement, abandonment. These are the words that better describe the egregious apology of a peace deal that the Trump administration is currently hawking around Europe.
For, rather than attempting to address the fundamental causes of the conflict – namely Russia’s unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state – Trump and his band of fellow travellers have reached the perverse conclusion that the best way to achieve peace in Ukraine is by rewarding Russian president Vladimir Putin for his blatant act of military aggression.
That certainly seems to be the essence of the terms presented in the one-page document given to Western diplomats meeting in London yesterday. It proposes allowing Putin to keep nearly all the Ukrainian territory he has seized since launching his initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, while giving the Ukrainians – who are unquestionably the innocent party in the conflict – next to nothing in return.
By far the most outrageous suggestion made in the proposal, which Trump has called his “final offer”, is that, in return for Russia halting hostilities along the current front lines, Washington would agree to de jure recognition of Russian control of Crimea. In addition, Russia will enjoy Washington’s de facto recognition of all the territory in eastern Ukraine that Moscow has captured, occupied and illegally annexed during the past decade or so.
This concession not only rewards Putin’s decade-long military effort to destroy Ukraine’s independence; it is a flagrant breach of one of the key pillars of the post-war international order, which decrees that the sovereign integrity of any nation is inviolable.
If Russia is allowed to drive a coach and horses through such a fundamental premise of international law, then what is to stop China from seizing Taiwan, or Argentina the Falkland Islands? Far from being a prescription for future peace, Trump’s capitulation to Moscow lays the foundations for future conflict.
Other aspects of Trump’s so-called “peace deal” are equally unpalatable to anyone who supports the principle of defending Ukrainian sovereignty from Russian aggression. Apart from requiring Kyiv to surrender its territory, the deal demands that Kyiv abandon its aspirations to join the Nato alliance. In return, an ad hoc collection of European countries – no doubt a reference to Sir Keir Starmer’s “coalition of the willing” – will commit to providing a “robust security guarantee” to protect Ukraine from any future acts of Russian aggression.
As Trump’s deal makes no mention of the US providing any military support for such a force – one of Starmer’s key requirements – the proposition already looks dead in the water.
Trump is also offering Putin some important incentives for agreeing to the deal, such as the lifting of US sanctions that have been in place since 2014, and the offer of future economic cooperation in the energy and industrial sectors.
It almost beggars belief that Trump, who took office vowing to end the Ukraine conflict in “24 hours”, could produce a document that is not just deeply flawed, but one that constitutes such a blatant threat to world peace.
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, apparently produced this mockery of a peace deal having had four hours of talks with Putin in Moscow last week. To judge by the eventual outcome, the most charitable view of the US envoy’s endeavours is that he simply took dictation from the Russian leader.
Putin will certainly claim this deal – assuming he agrees to it – justifies his warmongering in Ukraine which has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and left large tracts of Ukraine uninhabitable.
More importantly, it will allow Russia’s battered and exhausted military to regroup and prepare to engage in future aggressive acts against Europe’s borders, safe in the knowledge that, even if such attacks occurred against Nato member states, he has nothing to fear in terms of an American military response.
Suddenly, Trump’s quip, made during the presidential election campaign, that he would encourage Russia to attack Nato allies in Europe who did not make adequate financial provision for their defence, deserves serious consideration by Washington’s erstwhile European allies.
Given this administration’s open disdain for European concerns, which saw US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Witkoff withdraw at the last minute from yesterday’s London summit on the peace proposal, European leaders need to take a leaf out of Ukraine’s book and acknowledge that the US can no longer be trusted to protect their interests.
Judging by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s initial response to Trump’s offer, Ukraine is likely to conclude that it is better to continue fighting than suffer the national humiliation of surrendering its territory to Russia.
And if European leaders need any further evidence that they must safeguard their own future security needs, then the Ukrainian “peace deal” devised by Trump’s administration of mavericks should give them all the persuasion they require.