Perhaps the memory of Senator Lindsey Graham, who died in July at age seventy-one, can accomplish what his presence could not: persuade President Donald Trump that his path to a historic presidency runs through stopping Russian President Vladimir Putin’s revanchist designs in Ukraine and beyond.
The late senator understood something that slips in and out of the president’s grasp. A secure, sovereign, democratic Ukraine—integrated in Western institutions—would be an American strategic triumph worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. Conversely, the United States would pay a generational price for a Ukraine abandoned to Russian coercion, however its terms are packaged.
“The world misses Lindsey Graham, and never more than now as President Trump sides more decidedly with Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine and Europe,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board argued on October 11, after Trump announced that Russia would immediately supply 2.25 million barrels of diesel to the global market. “The late Senator might have been able to persuade the President to avoid this moral and strategic mistake.”
That commentary came a few days before Trump, in the words of the same editorial board, further “stuck a shiv in the back of the legacy” of Graham by waiving new tariffs against the primary purchasers of Russian energy—tariffs contained in a bill named in the late senator’s honor that passed by overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate. (The Senate vote was 87-11.)
As always with Trump, it’s important to wait for the show’s next episode before settling on conclusions. The administration appeared to take two steps in the right direction this week. The first was a positive meeting in Oslo involving US special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European allies. The second was that Washington and Kyiv appear to have moved past a recent disagreement over intelligence sharing. The next day, Zelenskyy himself said that Ukraine would be open to an agreement that would leave Ukrainian territory under temporary Russian control. These are necessary steps toward peace. Then in St. Petersburg, Putin said that he was prepared “in principle” to resume trilateral talks with the United States and Ukraine before Witkoff praised him as a “humanitarian” after releasing an American imprisoned in Russia.
The Trump administration remains too keen to offer rhetorical gifts and negotiating concessions to the Russian side.
Counterproductive patterns and proposals
Since December 2024, a month before Trump returned to the White House, I have argued that his handling of Russia’s war would determine his foreign policy legacy more than any other single issue. The reason for this is the magnitude of what’s at stake, which is not only Ukraine’s survival and Europe’s security. It is also the United States’ continued leadership in an era when Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are cooperating to challenge it.
Trump began his second term with a chance to confound his critics. Played right, his appetite for disruption and his willingness to challenge convention would be assets. By recognizing the opportunity and acting with resolve, he could achieve what President Joe Biden’s excessive caution had failed to deliver: a durable peace that preserves Ukrainian sovereignty by countering and deterring Russian aggression.
That opportunity still exists, but Trump’s latest decisions are making it harder to seize.
Consider the accumulating pattern: an agreement opening US markets to Russian diesel; last-minute waivers withholding new sanctions and tariffs Congress designed to squeeze Moscow; suggestions that Ukraine should replace its president, followed by calls for someone else to negotiate on Kyiv’s behalf; uncertainties about the continued provision of life-saving US intelligence and munitions.
Then came Putin’s proposal for a summit with Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss Ukraine’s future, without Ukraine at the table, on the margins of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen on November 18–19. Europe would also be absent, though its security is inseparable from the outcome in Ukraine, and its participation would be a precondition for any settlement.
The Shenzhen summit remains a proposal. Even entertaining its premise, however, sends a dangerous message: that the world’s most powerful countries may decide the fate of smaller ones among themselves. Carried forward, that approach would secure Putin recognition of the “spheres of influence” world he wants to build alongside Xi and at the expense of the United States.
False dreams of another Yalta
What explains Trump’s repeated return to a Russian leader who has so consistently throttled his peacemaking aspirations?
The most generous plausible explanation deserves a hearing. Anyone who has spoken to Trump about the war in Ukraine doesn’t doubt that he wants to stop the carnage. He wants cheaper energy for Americans, though it’s doubtful the diesel sale will have much impact on that. And like Biden before him, Trump worries that a desperate Putin might turn to nuclear use in Ukraine. He believes personal relationships and commercial incentives can unlock agreements that conventional diplomacy has so far failed to produce.
Less generously, a close Trump ally explains it to me this way: on the world’s chessboard, the president regards Russia as one of the most significant players. He sees Ukraine—or at least the part of it that Putin demands to control, the Donbas—as a potential “pawn worth sacrificing” for strategic gains with a larger, resource-rich, nuclear superpower.
In a lead editorial Wednesday, under the headline “Trump’s New Global Triumvirate,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board—which I quote again as one of the most significant and unbiased voices on Trump’s foreign policy—wondered whether the president has a larger global reordering in mind to the benefit of Russia and China, the world’s leading autocratic powers and US adversaries.
“It’s hard to know what President Trump is up to at any one moment because he operates so much on tactical impulse,” wrote the editorial board. “But he has long coveted grand bargains with Russia and China, and that might be his motivation now as he hardens his hostility to Ukraine and Europe and courts a Yalta 2 summit with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.”
The paper reminded its readers that the Yalta analogy breaks down because Stalin and Churchill were US allies in a war against Hitler in 1945, whereas Putin and Xi today are bent on reducing US global leadership to their own advantage. “But the trio did try to carve up the globe, and that’s the danger with what Mr. Trump says he’s open to now. As we wrote before the 2024 election, this was one of our main fears for his second term.”
Trump still has choices
I’ve embraced Trump’s desire to talk to US adversaries, to explore unconventional openings where traditional diplomacy had failed, and to seek opportunities to end wars. When it comes to Ukraine, the problem appears to be Trump’s transactional starting place and his potential strategic solution.
Thus far, the president has approached Russia’s war on Ukraine as a transaction in which he’s looking for sufficient leverage to close a deal between two flawed combatants. That’s not Putin’s approach, however. He is pursuing a historical and imperial project that subordinates Ukraine, weakens Europe, and demonstrates the limits of American power.
Trump finds Ukraine to be the easier of the two parties to pressure, as it still relies (albeit less than previously) on American military and intelligence support. The danger, as the Wall Street Journal has pointed out, is that Trump is moving from that transactional starting point to embracing Russia’s and China’s potential interest in a new Yalta.
What’s undeniable is that each concession that makes war more affordable and sustainable for Putin reduces Russia’s incentive to end it. Each successive Trump threat against Ukraine encourages Putin to believe that he can outlast Ukraine and the West. Zelenskyy told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that if Russia and the United States “will be together, of course we will not prevail. And we will not be able to stand.”
Republicans increasingly recognize the perils. Republican senators including Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski joined a bipartisan demand that Trump reverse the diesel agreement and implement the sanctions Congress approved.
There is a deeper historical imperative at work.
The United States emerged from World War II understanding that its security depends on preventing hostile powers from dominating Europe. The institutions and alliances it helped build were imperfect and sometimes frustrating, but they were enormously beneficial to American interests. They gave countries reason to organize their futures around deeper transatlantic relations with Washington rather than accommodate Moscow.
Trump is right that Europeans must assume more responsibility for their defense. Their growing defense investments, prompted in large part by Trump’s pressure, have helped create a historic opportunity to strengthen the transatlantic alliance while distributing its burdens more fairly.
Abandoning Ukraine would squander that historic moment. It would tell allies that greater defense efforts and investments won’t be accompanied by continued US reliability. Putin is betting that his persistence in Ukraine will pay off, despite the enormous cost of more than 1.5 million Russian casualties, according to Ukrainian estimates.
Beijing would draw its own conclusions, too, and it would apply them to Taiwan.
Trump still has choices, and he has demonstrated more than once that he can change his approach to Ukraine and Russia abruptly. Specifically, he can make sanctions relief contingent on verifiable Russian concessions instead of providing it as a carrot. He can sustain Ukraine’s defenses and its ability to impose costs on Russia’s war effort ahead of what could be a murderous winter. He can work with Europeans on credible security guarantees for Ukraine, and he can insist Ukrainians participate in negotiations determining their future.
The Russia-US-Ukraine talks reportedly agreed to this week are an opportunity. A durable settlement can leave territory Ukraine doesn’t currently control under Russian occupation for now. At the same time, however, it must leave Ukraine able to defend itself, choose its leaders, and determine its international relationships.
Graham understood that American resolve and unrelenting support for Ukraine would be the most certain path to a durable peace. The legislation carrying his name still offers Trump a means of demonstrating both.
The president inherited Putin’s war, but he will own the consequences of how it ends. It’s not too late for Trump to recognize that Ukraine can still help cement his legacy through a peace that preserves its freedom and strengthens US leadership.
The alternative is that history remembers Trump as the leader who had the power to constrain an aggressor, but who chose instead to rescue Putin from the cost of his illegal war and occupation of Ukraine.