Kicking the can down the road has characterized America’s Ukraine policy for the last two decades. The can is about to stop at the doorstep of incoming President Donald Trump. The assumptions that have guided US policy, crafted under far different geopolitical and geoeconomic circumstances, are simply no longer valid. The new Trump national security team has the opportunity to undertake a comprehensive policy review, reassess conditions and redesign a US approach to Ukraine that corresponds to American interests and the changed ground realities.
President Bill Clinton was famous for his insistence that one never had to choose between two different policy options but should seek to incorporate both. When it came to post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine, a confidential assessment prepared for his Secretary of State Warren Christopher in 1993 predicted that both countries would become members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization by 2005—predicated in part on a belief that after the collapse of the USSR, there would never be any cause for disputes between Kyiv, Moscow and Washington.
This hope animated the security guarantees offered to Ukraine in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. The United States, along with the United Kingdom and the Russian Federation, pledged to “respect the independence and sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine” and to “refrain from the threat or use of force” in return for Ukraine eliminating the Soviet nuclear weapons infrastructure on its territory and transferring the warheads back to Russia. These assurances could be easily offered (and never submitted as a binding treaty for Senate ratification) because the United States, at that time, could not conceive of any possible instance where Russia might violate those commitments. After all, both were on track to become fully integrated members of the Euro-Atlantic community.
In his first term of office, Russian president Boris Yeltsin and his team sought Russia’s full integration into the Western bloc of nations, albeit with the hope that Russia might end up as a deputy chairman of the Euro-Atlantic board of directors. As those expectations fizzled, Yeltsin became less sanguine about the prospects for substantive partnership with the West. His handpicked successor as president, Vladimir Putin, attempted to negotiate a co-equal partnership between Russia and the West, but his insistence that the former Soviet space represented a zone of privileged Russian interests ran up against an American rejection of the very concept of spheres of influence, a point emphatically made by then Vice-President Joe Biden in his 2009 remarks at the Munich Security Conference.
Putin accepted that he could not prevent earlier waves of Euro-Atlantic enlargement, but sought European and American acquiescence that Europe’s eastern border should be at the Vistula. His own definition of Russian interests—and efforts to define a post-Soviet Russian nationality— included a degree of social, economic and political integration between Russia and her neighbors, especially Ukraine. In Putin’s view, smaller powers have to resign themselves to accommodating the preferences of larger states. For the sake of a larger partnership between Russia and the West, Ukraine’s sovereign choices would therefore have to be constrained. Not surprisingly, Ukrainian leaders sought to solidify alliances and partnerships that would enable them to resist Russian blandishments. Moreover, US presidents since George W. Bush have consistently rejected Russian demands.
Yet the Bush, Obama, Trump and even the Biden administrations held out the possibility of improved US-Russia relations. They assessed that Russian objections to Western enlargement would diminish over time, as Russia either realized the importance of reforming its own political and economic models to better conform to Western preferences, or saw its power eroding away. At some point, Russia would no longer object, or be in a position to object, to Ukraine fulfilling its Western destiny. At the same time, Ukraine would be advised to bide its time and wait for more opportune circumstances. This culminated in the famous declaration of the 2008 NATO Bucharest summit that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO”—but with no timeline or crucially, any sort of interim security arrangements. As Andrew Gray concluded, it ended up being “the worst of both worlds: it served notice to Moscow that the two countries … would join NATO but brought them no closer to the protection that comes with membership.”
For the last sixteen years, the Bucharest conundrum has guided American policy. Ukraine’s full integration with the West is treated as an article of faith, to occur at some undisclosed point in the future. But the United States and its European partners are only prepared to support those aspirations so far.
For Ukraine, those efforts have fallen woefully short. But for Russia, even those limited efforts were producing in Ukraine a de facto NATO ally, a country which is, according to NATO summit communiqué in 2023, “increasingly interoperable and politically integrated with the Alliance.” The West hesitates to follow its own stated intentions to their logical end. Instead, Ukraine is promised full integration but only, in the words of the 2024 NATO summit communiqué, “when Allies agree and conditions are met.” The Western approach remains based on the hope that some sort of internal crisis inside of Russia — the financial crisis of 2008-09, the “White Ribbon” protest movements of 2011-12, or the collapse in energy prices in 2014 — might degrade Russia’s ability to object without the West having to risk their own political and economic security.
After Russia reinvaded Ukraine in 2022 – continuing the effort started in 2014 – the US strategy of aiding Ukraine rested on a series of assumptions: that US-led sanctions would cripple the Russian economy and thus Moscow’s war-making capabilities; that, after an initial US surge of military aid, European partners would increasingly take up support and free up the US to resume its pivot to the longer-term challenge of China; that the Middle East would continue to remain quiet; and Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive would break the Russian military and inflict a strategic defeat on the Kremlin.
None of these assumptions have panned out. Europe’s economic model, predicated on access to large quantities of Russian commodities at reasonable prices, struggles to adapt. Russia’s partnership with other US competitors has solidified, while the autocratic entente of China, Iran and North Korea, and their proxies, benefit from Russia “distracting” the United States.
Ukraine wants to completely recover all its territory and integrate as a full member into Western institutions. While this remains the US preference, whether or not the US can afford to underwrite this aspiration for an indefinite period of time, given pressing challenges elsewhere, is what a Trump policy review must ascertain.
This requires determining whether the primary US interest – to prevent Russia from being able to project power and influence into the heart of the Euro-Atlantic region – can be achieved by results short of full Ukrainian integration with the West. Any review will require jettisoning binary thinking: that either Ukraine gains full NATO membership or that the West turns the country over to Putin.
Does the South Korean experience provide a model for Ukraine – ceasefire and armistice line coupled with economic and military modernization? Might Azerbaijan’s strategy of transactional yet armed neutrality be appropriate for Ukraine?
The national security team for the new administration seems to be coalescing around a judgment that China must be the primary focus of US attention and that too much of a focus on Ukraine is a distraction—and that some sort of truce in Ukraine today is acceptable if it strengthens America’s position vis-a-vis Beijing tomorrow. After all, if China ultimately recedes as a peer challenger to the United States, Moscow’s ability to sustain its position in Ukraine over the long run will also attenuate. The Bucharest promise may yet be redeemed. But for now, it seems that the US will shift to a defensive balancing in Europe to concentrate more effort and initiative on securing the real prize—the Indo-Pacific.
