By Tamar Jacoby
NO ONE IN THE UNITED STATES OR UKRAINE imagines that a re-elected President Donald Trump would be much of a friend to Kyiv. But the so-called “peace” proposal leaked last week by two former national security staffers from the Trump administration, now at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, is even more toxic than many expected.
Predictably enough, the plan stipulates an immediate ceasefire, obligatory negotiations with Russia and a temporary—in truth, likely to be permanent—abandonment of Ukrainian claims to the 20 percent of Ukrainian territory currently occupied by Moscow. The poison pill was less predictable: Under the plan, the United States would strong-arm Kyiv to defer membership in NATO “for an extended period”—again, in the real world, most likely forever.
Trump hasn’t yet endorsed the plan, but his comments on a podcast last month suggest he is open to a NATO ban. “If Ukraine goes into NATO, it’s a real problem for Russia,” the former president told a trio of sympathetic Silicon Valley investors. Echoing a claim that Moscow and its proxies have been peddling for years, Trump argued that it was President Joe Biden’s support for Ukrainian membership in the alliance that provoked Vladimir Putin to invade in February 2022.
