Trump Has a Chance To Stop Putin—But He Can't Do It Alone

Newsweek

11 hours ago

Donald Trump's second-term foreign policies are turning out to be a string of disasters—alienating allies, driving India towards Russia, sowing uncertainties with whipsaw tariff changes that rattle markets, zeroing out foreign development aid, and continuing to supply an Israeli prime minister who has descended into a frenzy of revenge killing and destruction.
Now Trump's latest bid to end the long war of attrition in Ukraine, parts of which Russia has occupied since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, appears only to have strengthened Vladimir Putin's hand. Before meeting the Russian president in Alaska, Trump had for weeks threatened new sanctions on Russia if Putin did not agree to a ceasefire and the start of peace talks. Instead, Putin got validation, refused to stop his total war on Ukraine's civilian infrastructure, and Trump has backed off the sanctions threat, right when Russia's economy is starting to falter.
Worse, Trump now looks likely to press Ukrainian leaders to give up not just Crimea, but the country's eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, where Putin ginned up separatist movements before his February 2022 invasion. And worse still, Trump may pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to yield most of Ukraine's vital southeastern provinces on the Black Sea as well. Such an outcome would reward the greatest violations of international law in Europe since Adolf Hitler's occupation of Poland. That would be a catastrophe of epic proportions that is sure to enourage dictators worldwide.
In exchange, Trump's foreign envoy Steve Witkoff is talking about a "security guarantee" that would promise Ukraine direct military intervention by the U.S., Britain, and France if Russia tries to bite off more Ukrainian lands in future. But Witkoff and Trump appear not to know that Ukraine already received such supposed protection at the end of the Cold War in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons: Russia promised to respect Ukraine's new borders, and the U.S., U.K., France, and China promised to enforce this deal.
TOPSHOT - Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and US President Donald Trump participate in a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on August 18, 2025.
TOPSHOT - Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and US President Donald Trump participate in a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on August 18, 2025.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
Putin proved that 1994 guarantee to be hollow, just as Hitler's meeting with Neville Chamberlain taught the "Fuhrer" that he could get away with seizing part of Czechoslovakia. So it's no wonder Putin is willing to trade another such Western "guarantee" in exchange for total triumph in Ukraine's east and southeast. In his eyes, that is a lot of something for nothing.
But Trump's instincts, if naive, are not entirely wrong: a tighter economic vise could move Putin to concessions. Direct and secondary sanctions, like tariffs, can be used as effective tools of pressure under the right conditions. Trump's fundamental error lies in not realizing that these tools would be far stronger when wielded not by the U.S. alone, but by a global alliance of democracies of the kind that John McCain had the foresight to advocate in 2008.
Such a league of democratic states has to be broader than Europe. It must include Asian and potentially southern hemisphere partners that are not part of NATO. While we should try to coordinate with our European partners on any new sanctions against Russia, U.S. leaders must also be realistic: the EU is not going to mount a credible challenge to Putin's mass-murdering depravity, which has violated all the most sacred principles of international law.
Europe's paper tigers could have placed forces from their own nations into eastern Ukraine in January 2022 to enforce the 1994 treaty, thereby preventing the entire war. Instead they dithered, wrung their hands, and eventually imposed largely ineffective sanctions, while delaying shipments of tanks, long-range missiles, anti-missile defenses, and fighter aircraft to Ukraine. And as usual, they shamelessly waited for the United States to take the lead against yet another assault on democracy and human rights on their own continent.
About this, Trump's instincts have been correct: weakness, cowardice, and appeasement has been the EU's policy against tyranny since the 1990s—and this has weakened NATO as well. Even with the strong resolve of British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to get European members to rebuild credible offensive armed forces and do their share within the NATO alliance, it will take time for them to catch up—time that Ukraine does not have.
But imagine a broader alliance that includes most of NATO and the EU, along with South Korea, Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and potentially also India. Imagine that all the governments within this new bloc collectively imposed new sanctions banning commerce of all kinds coming from Russia (including natural gas)—and combined this with 50 percent extra tariffs on goods coming from any country that trades with Russia. That would put China in danger of losing over half of its export markets unless it cut economic ties with Putin.
If Trump could manage this feat, he might actually end Russia's total war on Ukraine's people, and force Putin to abandon most of the stolen territory. Trump needs to learn that a united front of many large-economy nations is far more powerful than the U.S. acting alone.
Imagine how much stronger the free world would be as a result. Trump could offer to make such a new alliance into a free trade bloc with mutual economic protections, which would bring nations into an economic alliance of all democracies in the OECD. Instead, he has returned to the unilateralist strategy that failed under George W. Bush, which led McCain to his landmark proposal.
Such a global democratic alliance would be the sort of institution that, like NATO, can give a real security guarantee. With inspiring leadership, it could endure the stress that enforcing a total global embargo on Russia would mean. Its allied leaders would have to explain to their peoples that we have reached a critical moment: it is now or never to break Putin's tyrannical empire. This would also require a massive new effort to supply Europe with natural gas from non-Russian sources and to supply India with oil, which would cut off Russia's main revenue stream. It would be a bit like the Berlin airlift, an act of shared sacrifice and determination to return the arc of history to its proper trajectory—towards freedom, democracy, and hope for all peoples on Earth. Then we, rather than Putin, would be "holding all the cards."
John Davenport is professor of philosophy and director of peace and justice studies at Fordham University.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.