OPINION:
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On Feb. 24, the Russia-Ukraine war will reach its second anniversary. As America enters a third year of proxy war with Russia, the leadership failures that have defined our engagement in this war cannot persist.
Namely, we cannot accept the consensus that peace talks are a sign of American defeat or that they are impossible while Russian President Vladimir Putin is in power.
America needs a drastically different approach to the war in Ukraine — one reminiscent of the America First approach to national security that Presidents Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy demonstrated in times of conflict.
After two years, the war in Ukraine has become the largest land war in Europe since World War II. Combined casualties are nearing 500,000, and Americans are growing weary of sending aid to Ukraine without an accompanying strategy for victory.
The protracted conflict in Ukraine can largely be attributed to the leadership failures of the Biden administration, which for over two years has dithered and failed to define an achievable end state.
Recently, Mr. Putin stated that he “prefers” President Biden as president because he is “predictable.” This is true. Mr. Biden is predictably hesitant and weak in his approach to foreign policy. In Ukraine specifically, predictability refers to the risk-averse pattern the Biden administration has set by arming Ukraine in piecemeal while placing all its bets on Ukraine achieving a decisive military victory over the Russians.
This approach is not only contradictory, but its tenets work in direct opposition to one another. As a result, Mr. Putin recognizes that with Mr. Biden in office, Russia can likely achieve its objectives in Ukraine.
Outside of failed military strategy, Mr. Biden has bungled diplomacy. One of the greatest failures of the Biden administration has been its outlook on negotiations.
A recent report reveals that the Biden administration “dismissed” a call from Mr. Putin to commence negotiations. This is a further instance in which the Biden administration has turned down such peace talk offers, and Mr. Biden has yet to have one direct conversation with Mr. Putin since he invaded Ukraine two years ago.
The question is, therefore, why, after two years of war where Ukraine’s ability to “win,” or militarily defeat Russia and liberate all its territory, seems increasingly unlikely and American resources become scarcer, would the president of the United States dismiss a call from a foreign leader to discuss peace?
First, the Biden administration has so blindly clung to the goal of enabling Ukraine to achieve a decisive military defeat of Russia, made inexplicable given its slow-rolling of lethal aid, the notion of entering peace talks with Mr. Putin has become synonymous with defeat.
Mr. Biden has heralded this conflict as a fight for democracy against autocracy, and from this view, entering talks with Mr. Putin means placating a dictator. This is a position of the administration’s own making, as Mr. Biden failed to match hard words with hard action early in the conflict. As a result, Mr. Biden is in a disadvantaged position that serves Russia’s interests, not ours.
Second, the Biden administration has argued against the commencing of talks because of the widely held view that negotiations with Russia will never work because you cannot trust Mr. Putin, which means that negotiating with him is futile. Mr. Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have repeatedly voiced this outlook on negotiations.
For three former presidents, however, an opposite mentality was applied when the U.S. faced foreign leaders: the America First approach to national security. This approach does not disregard the nature of the foreign leader. Rather, it places primacy on America’s interests.
Mr. Trump’s America First policy agenda prioritized nation-state level “transactional” diplomacy as the mechanism by which the U.S. can prevent war engagement without achievable victory.
In the Trump administration, direct engagement between leaders and maintaining effective deterrence was chosen over the national security apparatus’s favored options to respond to dangerous leaders: launching wars, overthrowing governments via regime change, or backing new proxy forces to dismantle regimes at odds with the U.S.
Mr. Trump enacted this America First policy framework in his engagements with adversaries including Mr. Putin, Afghan Prime Minister Abdul Baradar and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
Similarly, Reagan prioritized developing a relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev in a time of peril between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The relationship Reagan built with Gorbachev and the subsequent negotiations between the two leaders ultimately led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and marked an end to the Cold War.
When President John F. Kennedy was faced with Nikita Khrushchev threatening the use of nuclear weapons just 90 miles from the U.S., he recognized the importance of exhausting all options of diplomacy before resorting to military force. Kennedy believed talks with the Soviet leader were the best course of action — even as his national security advisers proposed only military options. In doing so, Kennedy prevented a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the USSR and a hot, open war.
In each of these circumstances, prioritizing negotiations was not because the U.S. could trust the adversary’s intent, but because it was necessary. The only other alternative was military engagement. Presidents Trump, Reagan and Kennedy recognized that state-level engagement — if backed by credible American deterrence and strength — could keep America out of unnecessary, unwinnable wars.
The assessment that entering talks with Mr. Putin is futile and America must therefore pursue continuous indirect military engagement with Russia cannot be accepted by Americans as a feasible course of action from their commander in chief.
Peace talks with Mr. Putin will undoubtedly be difficult and will require extensive American strength with scrupulous negotiations. The largest barrier by far to a peace deal will be Russia’s insistence that the U.S. recognize the “new territorial realities” of Russia controlling the eastern provinces of Ukraine. The U.S. will also have to contend with the fact that Mr. Putin may be calling for negotiations because he already has what he wants — eastern Ukraine — and only wants to solidify a treaty of Russia controlling eastern Ukraine.
However, as President Kennedy stated: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”
If America can approach negotiations with Russia from a position of strength, such as enabling Ukraine to gain a significant tactical advantage on the battlefield and reestablishing credible U.S. deterrence, the U.S. can lead in moving this conflict toward resolution.
As the U.S. enters its third year in support of what has become an attrition war, one that favors Russia, the approaches of Presidents Trump, Reagan and Kennedy — leaders who challenged the U.S. national security apparatus status quo and used bold, state-level diplomacy with dangerous adversaries to mitigate wars — offer a lesson today.
We cannot fall for the belief that peace in Ukraine is impossible and continued warfare is the only option. There is a path to victory with strong, America First leadership.
• Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg is a former national security adviser in the Trump administration and was chief of staff of the National Security Council. A former Army officer with numerous combat deployments, he commanded the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division and is now co-chair of the Center for American Security at the America First Policy Institute.
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