At the heart of the public debate over the latest twists and turns in the Trump administration’s ongoing discussions with Russian and Ukrainian negotiators is a fundamental moral question on which there is no consensus: Is it wrong to seek a compromise to end the war in Ukraine? To judge from the anguished reactions to the leak of the White House’s “28-point plan”—which was not really a plan so much as a rough snapshot in time of what US negotiators thought might bridge the gaps between Ukrainian and Russian demands—much of the Western commentariat believes the answer is yes.
In fact, the foreign policy establishments in Europe and Washington—which until recent years had presided over the West’s post-Cold War foreign policies—appear to view compromise itself as anathema. They insist that Russia should not gain in any way from its invasion of Ukraine, arguing that any other outcome would reward aggression, which would not only tempt Russia to resume its military conquests at some future date, but also invite similar aggression by China and others.
As a result, they argue, Ukraine should not withdraw from territory in Donetsk it now holds, even if that is reciprocated by Russian withdrawals outside the Donbass region, as Moscow has offered. Nor should Russian-occupied territory be recognized as Russian in any way. Moscow should have no say in how Ukraine treats its linguistic and religious minorities or over whether Ukraine joins NATO, hosts Western combat forces, or has caps on its military holdings. All of these, it is argued, should be sovereign Ukrainian decisions, regardless of whether Russia drops its objections to Ukraine joining the European Union, as President Vladimir Putin has pledged. Moreover, Russia must pay war reparations, and its leaders must face trial for war crimes.
The European Union’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, summed up this view in a recent interview: “There are rarely cases as clear-cut as this war, where there is an aggressor, Russia, and a victim, Ukraine. To have peace, we need concessions and obligations from Russia …. We must stick to our values and principles, which is not to trade for anything.” This is not a call for a compromise but a demand for Russian capitulation.
There are three big problems with this uncompromising stance. First, there is a yawning gap between what the opponents of a compromise insist must happen in Ukraine and their willingness to undertake the risks and sacrifices necessary to make it so. Neither the United States nor Europe has been willing to go to war with Russia to force its unconditional surrender, understanding that this would very likely end in nuclear conflict. Although many who reject compromise with Russia argue that Ukraine should be brought immediately into the NATO alliance, precious few of them call for the United States or other NATO members to declare war on Russia now and directly defend Ukraine. Left unexplained is why they believe a treaty obligation to defend Ukraine in the future would be credible if the alliance has proved unwilling to do so in the present.
Second, having ruled out both direct military intervention and compromise, Ukraine’s rejectionist benefactors assume that they can sustain a prolonged battlefield stalemate that will ultimately exhaust Russia’s resources or its patience. That assumption is wishful thinking at best. Ukraine’s military efforts suffer from two increasingly problematic shortages: manpower and air defenses. The West cannot remedy Ukraine’s recruitment and desertion problems without sending hundreds of thousands of its own forces to fight. It cannot plug Ukraine’s growing air defense gap because Russia is building attack missiles, drones, and glide bombs faster than Western factories can manufacture air defense systems. This is not a formula for a prolonged stalemate; it is a recipe for Ukraine’s collapse, probably within months rather than years.
“Effective statesmanship cannot treat either of these principles as absolute.”
Third and most important: The principle that lies at the root of the Ukraine conflict, which the opponents of compromise claim to defend—the principle that every nation has a sovereign right to choose its military allies—was never intended to be absolute, and the United States historically has not treated it as sacrosanct. When Fidel Castro’s Cuba chose to ally itself with the Soviet Union, the Kennedy administration made clear that Cuba’s freedom to host foreign forces would not outweigh America’s own right to protect its national security. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a dramatic clash between Cuba’s right to choose its allies and the principle of “the indivisibility of security”: the notion, later enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act and the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, that a state should not enhance its own security in ways that threaten another state.
That crisis was resolved through a compromise in which the Soviets agreed to remove their missiles from Cuba in return for America’s pledge to remove its own missiles from Turkey and to refrain from efforts to overthrow the Castro regime. That solution was both principled and pragmatic. Almost no one has regretted it in retrospect.
A truly principled approach to ending the war in Ukraine cannot be uncompromising. It has to find a reasonable balance between principles that are by their very nature in tension with one another, such as Ukraine’s freedom to choose its allies and Moscow’s insistence that this freedom be limited by Russia’s security concerns. Effective statesmanship cannot treat either of these principles as absolute. And it must balance what German theorist Max Weber called an “ethics of conviction” that battles against injustice with an “ethics of responsibility” that considers the potential unintended consequences of such battles—such as Ukraine’s collapse or an escalation into nuclear conflict—when weighing moral choices.
Had American statesmen sought such a balance in dealing with Russia and Ukraine in the decades following the Soviet breakup, rather than insisting that Ukraine would one day join the NATO alliance, we might well have avoided the current war. Finding one now is the key to ending it.
Note: All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.