Predicting Trump’s Policy on NATO & Ukraine

A spectre is haunting Europe. Specifically the spectre of a second Trump administration.

The 2024 election has been one that observers in Europe have not been looking forward to. The reason for this anxiety is the uncertainty that existed coming into the election. Unlike the 2020 election in which most people expected Biden to defeat Trump, the 2024 election has been far more tumultuous and uncertain. Going into election day, most polls left the race up to a coin flip. For the European security community, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Kamala Harris essentially ran on a continuation of Biden’s strong support for NATO and Ukraine. Trump, on the other hand ran under an “America First” platform based on weaker support of Ukraine and NATO.

This sense of dread turned into panic as the election results started coming in. Trump was decisively elected president, defying most polls that predicted a close race. In a record landslide, Trump won over every single swing state and managed to be the first republican in 20 years to win the popular vote. This overwhelming electoral mandate now gives Trump room to enact his most extreme policies. He will no doubt additionally be helped by the new republican trifecta in congress and domination of the supreme court.

However, have European observers overreacted? How much of Trump’s populist rhetoric will really translate into his policy?

The General Outlook

It’s useful not to sugarcoat this - Trump’s victory is not good for you if you are a fan of NATO or American protection of Ukraine and Europe. The most optimistic best case scenario is that Trump will be a net neutral for these issues, unceremoniously continuing Biden’s policies. In the worst case, America will completely pull back from the world, irreversibly damaging American power and influence on the world stage and paving the road to an even more difficult war for Ukraine. Europe will be in severe trouble if Donald Trump pulls out of NATO and a continent-wide reckoning over security will have to happen.

However, neither of these extreme scenarios are likely to happen. Whatever does happen still likely won’t be what most European leaders wanted.

(Ending) The War in Ukraine

When it comes to the war in Ukraine, the Ukrainians define victory as moving the line of control all the way back to internationally recognized Ukraine. In other words, no inch of Ukraine would be occupied by Russia. To put it simply, this is an unachievable goal. Even with billions of dollars of Western aid, the best Ukraine can do is to stem Russian progress and to freeze the lines of fighting to the best of its ability. Additionally, the future of this war does not look bright for Ukraine. Russia has the luxury of a vastly bigger population, which means that Ukraine will certainly loose the longer the war goes on as it runs out of military-aged men. Even the Russian economy is doing fine despite historic sanctions ¹.

Anyone who says that Ukraine will win this war is either engaged in wishful thinking or is lying to themselves. As it turns out, the world is not like a Disney movie. Aggressors are not always valiantly defeated by the little guy. Little guys loose because they are little and aggressors win most of the time because they would not have become aggressors if their loss was guaranteed.

Now the goal of the current US involvement is to punish Russia for violating international norms by elongating the damaging effect of economic sanctions as well as to diminish the Russian military. According to an analysis of data from a number of sources², just four days of fighting the war in Ukraine cost the Russian military about 7 billion dollars. The immense cost will certainly cause damage the longer the war goes on.

Arguably, this goal has already been achieved. Almost all western countries have enacted strict and punishing sanctions on the Russian economy. Additionally, the war in Ukraine has revitalized NATO, with Finland and Sweden joining in 2023 and 2024 respectively³. (Montenegro and Macedonia also since 2014⁴) Additionally, NATO spending is up⁵.

To summarize, since invading Ukraine, the Russian sphere of influence has shrunken tremendously at a comparatively negligible western cost.

Because the conflict has been relatively contained (so far), not a single soldier from any western country (excluding Russia, Ukraine, and a handful of Western volunteers) has been killed in this effort. Even the costs of American support for Ukraine have been modest. Most military equipment sent to Ukraine is considerably old, outdated technology. Getting rid of them may have even saved a moderate amount of money as scrapping them would have been more expensive. Additionally, this process frees up space for more modern and advanced weapons.

The New Strategy

One of the hallmarks of Donald Trump is his trademark lack of specificity. What we do know from Trump is that he wants to end the war in Ukraine. While it may seem foolish to end a war that has almost unambiguously benefited the West, there are costs for the United States of the war in Ukraine continuing absent of course the tremendous human cost. These reasons can be summarized as follows:

1. We really should be focusing on China
2. Russia’s isolation pulls the “Anti-Western” axis (nations like Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, etc) closer together

When looking at threats to American hegemony, most strategists consider China the chief threat instead of Russia. China’s power is growing while Russia has been in decline for the better part of half a century and this decline may worsen. Simply speaking, Russia is not that important. And all of the billions sent to Ukraine could be billions sent to secure, for example the south China sea.

Another problem is how the sanctions have effected relations between the “Anti-Western” axis. Russia and North Korea have never had closer relations in a while. Why? Because both of these nations have been extensively sanctioned by the West. Russia needs North Korea and North Korea needs Russia. Why has Russia been so close with Iran as of late? Same reason. The effect that sanctions on Russia have had so far have been negative in terms of pushing America’s enemies closer together.

So these are all good reasons why Trump would try to end the War in Ukraine, other than, of course, the massive human cost. Is Trump motivated by these reasons? Or is he motivated by the money/dirt Putin has on him? Is he just an idiot who doesn’t think through his takes in a scholarly manner? I don’t know the answer to these questions and they largely don’t matter for this discussion. The main point is how will the War in Ukraine be ended by the US.

So how will Trump end the war in Ukraine? Nobody knows and Trump certainly hasn’t said so yet, but a report published by the Trump-allied America First Policy Institute (AFPI)’s Center for American Security⁶ hints at some specifics. The methods for getting a deal expressed in the AFPI report are as follows, where carrots are rewards for compliance and sticks are punishments for noncompliance:

Another component of the deal is that it is designed to be a short-term solution to stop the fighting while kicking the can down the road. The main priorities of the deal are in fact peace, but Ukraine would of course consider it an unjust peace as the deal does not return any occupied land to Ukraine, at least not immediately. The deal suggests that these issues can be worked out diplomatically and not through force, “with the understanding that this would require a future diplomatic breakthrough which probably will not occur before Putin leaves office,” (16).

Something to know about this deal is that the Ukrainians certainly will not be happy with it. They will see the deal as codifying Russia’s victory and waiting until a miraculous negotiation breakthrough that will never happen. And they are right to think that. Any possible outcome of this war will be a Russian victory in some way. The only relevant question is how much of a victory and how many Russians and Ukrainians die before it is realized. Additionally, whoever Putin’s successor is, it is unlikely that he (or she) will be willing to give back Ukraine Russian-occupied territories out of the good of his heart.

It is worth noting that this plan to strike a deal with Russia and Ukraine is way better than what I feared Trump would do: unilaterally end all aid without any conditions.

NATO

Trump’s rhetoric on NATO does indeed sound threatening. Trump seems to think of NATO as a protection racket where you pay for American defense guarantees. And in Trump’s eyes, Europeans are not paying.

The worst case scenario would be Trump pulling the US out of NATO. This would harm America geopolitically for generations and would pull Europe away from the American sphere. It would essentially mean American conceding it’s superpower status and focusing inwards. It also isn’t going to happen. Why I am I so confident this won’t happen? The first reasons is of course that Trump didn’t leave NATO in his first term. But if you look at the people he has appointed to foreign policy positions, they are all hawks in terms of foreign policy. For example, Trump choose Marco Rubio as his secretary of state. This is definetely strange if you think Trump wants to leave NATO or even be especially hard on NATO. Marco Rubio was one of the few republican congressmen to introduce a bill in 2019 banning Trump from withdrawing from NATO⁷. Clearly Rubio is not some sort of Russia dove or isolationist.

What, then, explains the difference between Trump’s isolationist rhetoric and his hawkish actions? Was his rhetoric just BS to excite the base? Did Trump get captured last-minute by the deep state? Paid off by the military industrial complex? Was he targeted by a shadowy cabal of Jewish foreign policy hawks? Or maybe, just maybe, all of this is part of Trump’s plan. What if Trump’s goal was not to leave NATO but to strengthen it? When looking at the situation through these lens, Trump’s erratic actions seem to fit into a coherent plan. Everybody agrees that NATO is stronger when all the nations in it meet their 2% spending minimum. And most NATO members, frightened by the prospect of a Trump presidency have increased their spending in response. What if this is exactly what Trump wanted to happen?

Conclusion

I hope you guys liked this foreign policy-based post. I plan on making programming content on this blog but I just felt like I had to write about this. Anyways, thanks for reading and I would love to see your comments.

Updates

1. Changed the name from “What is Trump’s Policy on NATO & Ukraine” to “Predicting Trump’s Policy on NATO & Ukraine” (2024-12-26)