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Real Ukraine Peace Talks Require a Real US Security Guarantee

Real Ukraine Peace Talks Require a Real US Security Guarantee

Bloomberg06-03-2025
Don't be distracted by whatever ' minerals deal ' the US and Ukraine may or may not hash out in the coming weeks, for it will not address the main obstacle to the kind of cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine that US President Donald Trump so badly wants to broker. That question is: How can third-party guarantors credibly assure the security of Ukraine after an armistice?
Credibility: Every devil in every detail is wrapped up in that one word. The concept is so slippery that it's kept strategists busy at least since the American scholar Thomas Schelling (who later won a Nobel Prize for his work in game theory) analyzed types of deterrence during the early Cold War. We can't ask Schelling to weigh in on Ukraine today (he died in 2016). But here's what he wrote about American troops — and obliquely about their British and French partners as well — stationed in West Berlin at the time.
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