President Trump: Here’s Why You Want Ukraine To Win

Whether to push Ukraine toward a peace deal with Russia is shaping up to be one of the first and most important foreign policy decisions to face the second Trump administration. A thousand days into Russia’s latest round of brutal aggression in Ukraine, some are advising President-elect Donald Trump to pressure Ukraine to give up territory and its desire to join NATO to reach a peace agreement, while others see a hasty capitulation to Russia’s demands as creating more problems than it solves by emboldening Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.

We’ve both served in top foreign policy posts in Republican administrations, and we think that Trump’s stated foreign policy aims — particularly “peace through strength” — would be best accomplished by continuing to support Ukraine and standing up to Putin. The pro-Ukraine camp in his new administration has a chance to convince him of that — if they make the right case.

Here’s the argument we would make if we were advising Trump on Ukraine.

President Trump, your return to the White House comes amid a growing chorus of voices calling for negotiations with Moscow to end the war in Ukraine, especially given a rising consensus that the situation on the battlefield has deteriorated and that the outlook for Ukraine has grown more perilous. Ukrainians as well as their Western supporters, this line of argument goes, are suffering from war fatigue.

But the fact that many in the United States are ready to sell out Ukraine doesn’t mean it’s the best move. In fact, it would not only not end the war but it would create an even bigger menace to the United States in the form of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Since your election victory, Putin has ignored your reported request to not escalate the war. In fact, he’s done exactly that, including launching an intermediate-range ballistic missile that appears to be a successor to a missile the Russians were developing in violation of the INF Treaty, from which you rightly withdrew. He continues to rain down missiles and drones on Ukrainian civilian targets and energy supplies, inflicting horrible harm on Ukraine’s citizens. He shows no interest in any negotiated settlement — unless it would be one in which he could declare victory by keeping significant Ukrainian territory, nullifying Ukraine’s goal of NATO membership, dictating Ukraine’s leadership, and leaving a rump Ukraine that would be vulnerable to renewed aggression.

Such a deal is not something you should want to own. Even entering into negotiations on this basis could lead to a Ukrainian collapse that would mar your first year in office.

What’s more, such a deal would be a display of weakness, one that Putin would exploit and the Chinese leadership would view as an opening for its ambitions toward Taiwan. Iranian leaders would also read it as a withdrawal of the United States from the global stage and open season for their designs against Israel. Cutting a deal on Ukraine that favors Putin, in other words, would lead to greater instability and escalation around the world, maybe even World War III.

The better approach is stand up to Putin and support a Ukrainian victory over Russian forces. Helping Ukraine win is not only the right thing to do, but it would advance U.S. national security, send a warning to U.S. enemies and bolster your new presidency and America’s standing in the world.

Putin started this war and he’s the one who could end it tomorrow. The problem is that he still thinks he can defeat Ukraine, replace its leaders and occupy large chunks of the country, which he doesn’t view as a separate, independent state. He also thinks he can outlast the West. You have an opportunity, even a duty, to prove Putin wrong.

To be sure, nobody wants the war to end sooner than Ukrainians themselves. They are the ones fighting and tragically dying from Putin’s barbaric aggression. But the many crimes against humanity committed by Russian forces against Ukrainian children, soldiers who have surrendered, and average citizens have strengthened many Ukrainians’ determination to see this war through to victory. We shouldn’t force them into a bad deal with Putin.

It is true that Ukrainians are frustrated and demoralized by the Biden administration’s dilatory responses to Ukrainian requests for specific weapons systems, despite the recent partial easing of restrictions on the use of U.S.-made systems to counter Russia’s escalation of the conflict. Your election offers you an opening to do what the outgoing administration failed to do: Speed up the decision-making process to provide Ukraine the weapons it needs.

Owing to Biden’s delays, the Ukrainians have been fighting with one hand tied behind their back. Still, their indigenous development of drone capabilities has delivered serious blows to Russia’s efforts and demonstrated its ability to reach distant targets inside Russia. Imagine what the Ukrainians could have accomplished had the West delivered the assistance Ukraine needed, when it needed it? Imagine how much worse off Russia would be were it not for help from U.S. adversaries including Iran, North Korea and China. Imagine what you can do by untying Ukraine’s hands and letting them fight with the support from the United States that they need.

And don’t believe Putin’s nuclear bluster. Ukraine and the West have already crossed so many so-called Russian red lines — not least Ukraine’s August incursion into Russian territory in the Kursk oblast — that Putin’s threats to use tactical nuclear weapons have lost much of their credibility. (Sadly, Putin continues to ring that bell hoping that, like Pavlov’s proverbial dogs, the U.S. continues to self-deter.)

Even though it’s outnumbered and now faces the introduction of more than 10,000 North Korean soldiers onto the battlefield, Ukraine has managed to destroy Russia’s Black Sea fleet; regain more than 50 percent of the territory Russia occupied in the initial stages of the full-scale invasion; inflict losses of more than 700,000 Russians killed and wounded; and taken over chunks of the Kursk region.

Yes, Russian forces are on a very slow, but accelerating march in the Donbas part of Ukraine, but at enormous cost. Western intelligence agencies estimate that September and October were Russia’s bloodiest months in the full-scale war. The North Koreans’ arrival signaled both a disturbing widening of the conflict but also Putin’s desperation to avoid a second mobilization that risks angering Russians in Moscow and St. Petersburg. He does not have enough troops to win unless he risks serious domestic unrest.

Putin is at a turning point. The economic costs of the “special military operation” are beginning to take their toll. The Russian governmentreportedly has cut by two-thirds its compensation payment to soldiers not “gravely” wounded in the war (from the equivalent of $33,000 down to $11,000). Official inflation is running at 9 percent per year. Government interest rates are at 21 percent. Labor shortages abound. The Bank of Russia now estimates 2025 GDP growth at a paltry 0.5-1.5 percent, and the ruble is plummeting in value. Russia can’t afford to keep up the war much longer.

Cutting off U.S. military assistance to Ukraine and rushing to negotiate will not lead to a lasting settlement. Although sources supposedly close to the Kremlin like to highlight Putin’s openness to a deal, spokesman Dmitri Peskov recently pointed out that simply “freezing the conflict” along current lines of contact wouldn’t be acceptable to the Russian leader. Putin is trying to signal that he has the upper hand, but he doesn’t.

What’s more, an imposed settlement on Ukraine would create dangers for the United States from other parts of the world. It would make Taiwan more vulnerable to Chinese aggression by potentially communicating to President Xi Jinping that he, too, could get away with such a move. It would signal an American retreat from the global stage and risk reinforcing the impression — like the one that followed Biden’s abysmal 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan — that the United States is an unreliable security partner.

You can do better than the outgoing administration did.

And don’t be fooled by those who worry about the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO. Welcoming Ukraine into NATO would be a complicated undertaking, for sure, but rejecting the prospect would be an unmistakable sign of weakness, grant Putin a de facto veto over NATO membership, and remove the most certain deterrent you have to future aggression from Russia.

Should the Ukrainians decide that it’s time to sit down with their Russian invaders and negotiate an end to the war, that would be their call to make. Pressuring them into doing so would demoralize their fighters on the front lines and undermine any leverage that you and the Ukrainians would have to actually get a deal.

Finally, supporting Ukrainian victory over Russia would enable the United States to focus more on China. It would allow the United States to reaffirm its leadership on the global stage and demonstrate that “peace through strength” works.

You have a golden opportunity to use your second term to demonstrate the return of American strength and leadership by helping Ukraine win and making sure Putin’s defiance and aggression aren’t rewarded.