The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 25 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Donald Trump just made some surprising new public statements about the Russia-Ukraine war, and the results were pretty unimpressive. At one point, he seemed to get angry at Vladimir Putin over a massive and deadly new Russian attack on Ukraine, calling on Putin to “STOP!” But then, at another point, Trump seemed to suggest that he’s not going to expect Russia to make any concessions of any kind in the quest for peace. That instantly wrecked the illusion Trump is trying to spin that he expects genuine concessions from both sides. We’re trying to unravel all of this today with Ben Burgis, a columnist at Jacobin and a podcaster who has a good new piece for MSNBC.com, arguing that Trump’s strategy for peace in the Russia-Ukraine conflict looks likely to be counterproductive at best. Ben, thanks for coming on.
Ben Burgis: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Sargent: To catch people up, the Trump administration this week started pressuring Ukraine to accept a peace deal that would basically give Russia all the territory it has secured so far while blocking Ukraine from ever joining NATO. Ukraine unsurprisingly has rejected this. Then Russia launched a massive attack on Ukraine that killed at least 12 people—and this prompted Trump to tweet the following, “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying. Lets get the Peace Deal DONE!” Ben, I know Trump really wants to appear as if he’s putting pressure on both Russia and Ukraine to make a deal, but does that tweet get the job done? And is there any reason to think Trump’s negotiators are putting real pressure on Russia?
Burgis: Well, I haven’t seen any indication that they’re particularly serious about any of this. And in fact, one of the things that really hit me again—hearing that tweet and hearing you talk about it—is that there is this weird assumption that seems to be underlying a lot of what Trump is doing, not just with Russia-Ukraine but with a lot of the rest of what they’ve done in the last few months: that the United States has an unlimited ability to shape what happens everywhere in the world. And they’re just nonplussed when everybody doesn’t fall into line. It’s just a very strange and honestly childlike view of geopolitics.
Sargent: He’s just saying, Canada would be much better off as a fifty-first state, so what’s the holdup, guys?
Burgis: Exactly.
Sargent: So what do you think, though? Is there any evidence at all that they’re actually pressuring Russia in any sense for concessions in this whole thing? They’ve already, as we just discussed, put out this proposal that would essentially require Ukraine to concede everything. Are they expecting anything from Russia in the real world here?
Burgis: Well, the best defense of them on this point would be who knows what they’re saying behind closed doors—maybe that’s where the pressure is happening. But if that is the case, what’s confusing to me is why is only that part being done behind closed doors? Part of the thing about this peace proposal that they floated is not that, in certain respects, it would even be shocking if an actual deal that was arrived at in some ways looked like this. It’s that it’s being presented as an ultimatum before the parties themselves talk it through. And it just seems like a very strange conception of how diplomacy works.
Sargent: Yeah, can you explain what you mean by that? In other words, they’re really browbeating Zelenskiy publicly to accept this thing. JD Vance went out and he basically said, Take this or we’ll walk away. Trump is saying very similar things. Can you talk about what they’re actually saying, what their position is publicly—the browbeating aspect of it?
Burgis: Really, if you go back to that bizarre meeting that Trump, Vance, and Rubio had with Zelenskiy at the White House a while back that I think many people said seemed like Trump thought he was doing a season finale of Celebrity Apprentice, that this is the big boardroom scene at the end where you fire somebody ... But the problem with that is that Volodymyr Zelenskiy can’t be fired by the United States government, because he’s not an employee of the U.S. He’s a politician in Ukraine, right? An entirely different society with its own local politics that he has to answer to. And again, there just seems to be fundamentally no awareness of this.
There seems to be this view that the U.S. can reshape the rest of the world at will, that, Oh, we’d really like Greenland, so we’ll just figure something out. One way or the other, we’ll figure something out. We’d really like the trade balance to be different, so we’ll just impose that on everybody, and everybody will fall into line. And it seems to be much the same thing here. In this case, they had these proposals, which, according to a report in The Associated Press, were originally floated as Oh, these are just ideas. That was the phrase that was quoted there: just ideas, these can change. And then they were presented as this very public ultimatum, which is pretty much all of the most painful concessions you could imagine Ukraine agreeing to in peace negotiations all at once. Here’s all the territorial stuff, here’s the foreclosed future NATO membership, etc.
Again, this seems very much not how peace negotiations would typically work, where you’re trying to coax both parties to the table. At the table, there’s push and pull; you’re trying to get people to make concessions without alienating them so much that they just walk away. And whatever this is, it’s certainly not that.
Sargent: Well, that brings me to what Trump said to a reporter on Thursday. The “master dealmaker” was asked by a reporter what concessions Russia is willing to make toward peace. Listen to this.
Reporter (audio voiceover): What concessions has Russia offered up thus far to get to the point where you’re closer to peace?
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): Stopping the war. Stopping taking the whole country. Pretty big concession.
Sargent: Ben, I think what Trump just said there is that it would count as a really big concession by Russia if it agrees not to take over the entire country of Ukraine. It seems like this blows up Trump’s whole scam posture of wanting to look as if he’s pressuring both sides. But to your point, it doesn’t make sense as a public strategy, does it? It concedes at the very outset that he’s not expecting anything from Russia, which empowers Russia more and reduces the pressure on them, doesn’t it? Can you talk about that?
Burgis: Yeah, definitely. This is really out of sync with observable reality. The idea that Russia could just take all of Ukraine if it wanted to is something that lots of people believed in January 2022—but it’s long since been clear that that’s not the case, that general post-Soviet dysfunction in the Russian state hollowed out the military machine to a very great extent. So the initial attempt to push all the way into Kyiv and impose their regime change in 2022 flopped. That didn’t work. It didn’t work even before the big infusions of American funds and weapons, which is a crucial point. It’s not that they would have been able to do this if not for that. I’m no military strategist, but it certainly looks like from the basic public facts that that’s not the case.
Now, it could still be true that American support has kept Ukraine in the game for longer than it would have been otherwise in the last few years. But also, to the point earlier about how the U.S. really doesn’t have the power to just reshape everything that happens in the world according to its own singular will, there are all these other countries that are also capable of sending Ukraine aid. It might not be a full substitute for American aid if that were completely cut off. But it seems overwhelmingly clear that even if Russia did win eventually—they got the best-case scenario for them, which would be that they actually slowly ground their way through to invading the entire country, at which point presumably that would play out much like the American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan—[it’s] not like the violence would be over as soon as regime change was imposed. That’s not how this ever works anywhere. Even if they got that, it would take them a long time to get it. So it’s not like Putin could just storm Kyiv tomorrow if he wanted to but he’s generously conceding that he won’t do that. If that were the case, why would Putin bother with negotiations?
Russia has really lost a lot in the war. It’s been a very slow grinding effort. It’s a little bit hard to be sure about the exact numbers of soldiers because they’re not very forthcoming about that, but it seems like they’ve lost a tremendous number of soldiers. There are lots of Russian men who have fled to other countries because they don’t want to fight in the war. There’s certainly been an economic hit from it. So it’s just not the case that this is something they could do right now, which, again, is why Russia is willing to engage in peace negotiations. Peace negotiations are something that typically happen when two countries are at war and neither of them can just decisively win on the battlefield, so you’re willing to see what can happen at the negotiating table.
Sargent: You wrote this piece for MSNBC.com saying that while we should all want a diplomatic resolution of the Russia-Ukraine war, the approach that Trump is taking to Zelenskiy is actually counterproductive if the goal is an actual peace compromise. As you said earlier in this talk, he’s treating Zelenskiy as an employee who’s expected to snap into line. And Trump and JD Vance browbeating and bullying Zelenskiy to accept the terrible deal only makes it harder for Zelenskiy to make any concessions from his side. Can you talk about that element of it?
Burgis: Exactly. Look, as distasteful as Trump’s way of going about it was, if I thought it was going to end in a peace deal, I think there’s an obvious utilitarian case that that’s a good result. It’s like, OK, great, all’s well that ends well, right? And to be really clear about this, for whatever it’s worth, I’m somebody who’s been writing articles in Jacobin, The Daily Beast, and other places for years, saying that the U.S. should push for a negotiated deescalation and some settlement in Ukraine. I think there are all sorts of obvious reasons to want that. There have been times in the last three years when the prospect of a wider war has seemed terrifyingly close; that could be horrible for the entire world. Certainly, the immediate humanitarian consequences of the war have been awful in Ukraine. Again, those Russian men who’ve had to escape into other countries to avoid fighting—I think everybody’s sympathies should be with those people and their desire not to be fed into the meat grinder.
So there are many, many reasons to want a negotiated peace settlement. And again, if I thought this was going to get it, then sure, I guess. Maybe this would be the one good thing that Trump does. But I think there’s every reason to suspect that it won’t work. I would love to be wrong, but I don’t think it’s going to work—because the effect of Trump and Vance, as you say, so publicly berating and scolding Zelenskiy is that when Zelenskiy stands up against them, that surely shores up his domestic popularity. You’d have to not know very much about people not to think that, right? Seeing the leader of your country stand up against the 800-pound gorilla in the world and the bullying from the U.S. of course is going to have that effect. And if anything, being given like, Here [are] all the bitter pills that you might have to swallow in peace negotiations, and I demand that you swallow all of them right up front before you even start talking, is the kind of thing that seems very likely to harden Ukrainian public opinion against making any concessions for a peace deal.
Sargent: Ben, doesn’t it actually look as if they’re trying to do on the global negotiating stage what they did with the ambush in the Oval Office, which is to deliberately try to provoke Zelenskiy into giving the U.S. some pretext to walk away from the talks? Then they’ll blame Zelenskiy’s supposed intransigence for it. They’re already saying Zelenskiy is being intransigent simply because he won’t accept an awful, awful deal that gives Russia pretty much everything it wants. Is that what’s going on here potentially, that they just want to walk away?
Burgis: I think it’s possible. I think what there is to be said in favor of that explanation is that it would actually make sense of what they’re doing, that the actions would would be consistent with the goal. Now, as I said, oftentimes with Trump, I suspect that the strange, simplistic explanation is actually the right one. And maybe they just are being this counterproductive without any particular strategy. I think that’s possible. But look, I do think it’s worth lingering on the scenario that you’re talking about, because it’s really worth circling and underlining how bad that would be.
If the whole case for what Trump is doing is, Look at these thousands of Russian, Ukrainian soldiers who are dying every week; look at all the devastation that’s been imposed upon Ukraine; look at the dangers of this, the spilling over into other countries, which has seemed to be a possibility at various times in the last three years; and we just need to end this ... Well, if the U.S. did just walk away—and quite likely the result of that would be that other countries, countries in Europe would step up their own weapons shipments; maybe it wouldn’t completely fill the shortfall but it would go some way toward that—then that’s a recipe for the war just dragging on for years and years, which is, if not the worst possible outcome, certainly one of the worst.
Sargent: I think what you’re getting at there is that there’s actually a genuine and deep tension in Trump’s position here. And I think Secretary of State Marco Rubio exposed this without maybe meaning to. I want to play some audio from Rubio who’s been trying to negotiate this peace. Here’s what he told reporters on Thursday.
Marco Rubio (audio voiceover): So what happened last night with those missile strikes should remind everybody of why this war needs to end. It’s horrible, those missiles landed, but what’s even worse is there are people that were alive yesterday that are not alive today because this war continues. And the president wants to stop it. And everyone should be thanking the president for being a peacemaker, trying to save lives.
Sargent: So for Rubio, the most important thing here is that we’re all thankful for Trump’s good intentions. Ben, it seems to me that this gets at this tension I’m talking about. On the one hand, he really seems to want to walk away from this whole thing and blame Ukraine for it for all the reasons we’ve gone through. But on the other, he genuinely wants to be seen as the greatest dealmaker in human history or whatever. What do you make of that tension? Which one weighs more heavily in the end?
Burgis: Look, I think it’s entirely possible that it just depends who the last person is who talks to him the day that he takes a decisive turn on this. I expect that both of those considerations are probably going to be a big deal for him. I don’t think I’m breaking any new ground when I say that the man is fairly unpredictable, that there’s some chaos here in his decision-making processes. So it could go either way. What really hits me about that clip is this just sounds to me like something that somebody would say when they were sitting next to the great leader of some tin-pot authoritarian regime. It’s like, Oh, first, I really want to say that we all need to praise the wisdom and benevolence of the leader. It’s just degrading.
Sargent: Yeah. So what does that mean for the situation we’re in here? He needs to come out of this looking like the most brilliant dealmaker in human history. So how can he just walk away from it?
Burgis: I think, again, he would like to be seen as a great dealmaker, but I don’t think that means that he’ll necessarily make a deal in any given case. This is the same president who tore up Obama’s nuclear détente with Iran in his first term. Just recently, he shrugged at the end of the ceasefire in Israel-Palestine that had been seen as a great accomplishment coming in. So I think it’s the idea that Trump would have results that objectively show that he’s not, in fact, a great dealmaker, but he would just find ways to spin that. It doesn’t seem particularly shocking to me.
I think that there is a very bad outcome here that’s entirely possible where, again, rather than actually ending the war—which I would really, really like to happen; that would be amazing if there was actually a peace settlement—instead, the effect is that it just drags on for the unpredictable future just without the U.S. And maybe Trump would spin that as, Look, I ended the war, by which he means, I ended our involvement with the war, even though the war continues to be ongoing.
Or again, I really think that a lot of people who agree with me, agree with Trump, I guess—that it would be really good to have a negotiated resolution to bring an end to the war—might not quite have wrapped their heads around how bad it would be if the way that the war ended was that Russia just slowly won over the course of the next few years. Because (1) that’s a few more years of war, and (2) even if they won nominally—that they were somehow able to grind through and get the other 80 some percent of Ukrainian territory that they don’t have; right now, I think it’s 18 point something percent—even if they somehow did accomplish that, which they haven’t been able to in the last three years, I think people’s memories are very short if they think that that means that there’s going to be no more violence and killing in Ukraine. That would just mean an inevitable long bloody war of counterinsurgency. This is a very simpleminded point, but that doesn’t sound like peace to me.
Sargent: And it doesn’t seem like Trump is at all equipped to bring about some different outcome. Ben Burgis, thanks so much for coming on with us, man. It was really good to talk to you.
Burgis: Thank you so much for having me.
Sargent: On May 14, The New Republic’s editor Michael Tomasky and staff writers Matt Ford, Timothy Noah, Tori Otten, and myself will host the next in our series, America in Crisis. With the new administration in place, this event will bring together influential political commentators with TNR’s most engaged readers to explore what we can do to fight back against Trump’s anti-democratic rampage. Join us on May 14. You can register at atlasarts.org/events/TNR. Thanks so much.
You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.