Key Points – European leaders are viewed as “quietly sabotaging” President Donald Trump’s efforts to negotiate a compromise end to the war in Ukraine.
-While Trump’s approach is transactional and realist, focused on stopping the killing by recognizing Ukraine’s limited leverage and Russia’s need for a sellable “victory,” European leaders publicly maintain a moralistic stance demanding Russia’s total defeat without Ukrainian concessions.
-This public posture, while domestically popular, masks Europe’s own military vulnerabilities and prevents the diplomatic flexibility needed for a realistic peace deal.
-By encouraging Ukraine’s maximalist aims, European leaders hinder a pragmatic resolution and prolong the conflict.
Europe’s Quiet Sabotage of Trump’s Ukraine Peace Deal Effort
When President Donald Trump promised throughout his 2024 election campaign that he could bring the war in Ukraine to an end within “24 hours,” few believed him. The president himself likely knew there was no hope of making that kind of progress so quickly, but as writer Salena Zito once wrote in The Atlantic, the fatal flaw of Democrats and Trump critics is that they take him “literally, but not seriously.”
The line is relevant to so many Trump controversies, but the reaction to his efforts to negotiate the end of the war in Ukraine is one of the most validating examples of this theory.
After months of effort to get Putin and Zelenskyy to make concessions and bring the war to an end, and even after the U.S. president spoke to the Russian leader over the telephone, the likelihood of a deal arriving any time soon doesn’t seem to have changed much. Many have argued that this apparent lack of progress is a result of Trump’s lack of knowledge on major points of contention between the two sides – but is that really what’s happening here?
Does Trump Know Enough?
Writing for TIME, Simon Shuster argued that a major problem with Trump’s efforts to negotiate an end to the Ukraine-Russia conflict is his administration’s “gaps” in knowledge about the war.
“From Putin’s point of view, the gaps in Trump’s knowledge about the war have always offered an advantage,” Shuster writes. “One of the Russian leader’s favorite negotiating tactics is to overwhelm his interlocutors with a torrent of historical theories and cherry-picked facts.”
Shuster added that while Ukrainian officials have attempted to prepare the U.S. president for conversations with the Russian president, they have “often run up against a wall of ignorance about Ukraine within the Trump administration.”
While there are no doubt “gaps” in knowledge on certain historical, logistical, and political issues regarding the conflict, the reality is that President Trump views wars through a transactional and realist lens. His divergence from the official position of most of Europe along with his insistence on both parties, which each feel confident in their ability to sustain the fighting for some time, making compromises, could be the real cause of the holdup.
With Ukraine confident in its ability to secure long-term military support from Europe and elsewhere, and Russia capable of sustaining its war efforts both in terms of manpower and weaponry, Trump’s demands that both sides make concessions are harder to accept.
They might be easier to achieve, however, if European leaders were willing to face reality.
The Real Reason Europe Wants More War
Trump’s approach to resolving the conflict is not only frequently pitched as a result of a “lack of understanding,” but often unfairly discredited based on the messaging coming from other Western leaders and the media outlets that defend them.
European leaders, for the most part, view the conflict through two different lenses: one shaped by public messaging, and another colored by strategic insecurity – a recognition that Russia could pose a direct threat to European countries in the future.
For the most part, European leaders have long argued publicly that beating Russia is the moral thing to do, that Russia had no right to invade, and that winning this war is the only just resolution to the conflict. However, the darker secret is that European leaders know that without the support of the United States, even the most advanced countries on the continent are militarily underprepared and would face major vulnerabilities to future attacks even if they begin the process of rebuilding their military infrastructure immediately. To reach anything close to parity with Russia and other non-European major powers, Europe must first undertake an expensive and expansive process of rearming, including expanding troop numbers, rebuilding domestic arms industries, and replacing American-supplied hardware like long-range missile systems, advanced fighter jets, missile defense systems, and battlefield intelligence assets.
Rather than confronting these vulnerabilities head-on, European leaders have chosen to elevate a narrative that casts the war in moral absolutes to defend their efforts to topple Putin’s government and thereby, theoretically, eliminating a future threat that they may not be able to defend themselves against without the support of the United States. By framing the war as “good versus evil” and “democracy versus authoritarianism,” even if there are obvious cases to be made that the framing is correct, these leaders miss several crucial points that are relevant to the future success and security of their own states.
Their framing plays well with domestic audiences and helps justify continued financial and military aid, but it also leaves no room for diplomatic flexibility. And in this rigid climate, President Trump’s realist position, that peace may require compromise and that the West must prioritise stability over idealism, is routinely dismissed as defeatist or unserious. Yet Trump’s view is not shaped by ignorance or indifference. It reflects a hard-nosed understanding of leverage, scale, and risk: that Ukraine is outmatched militarily, that Europe cannot defend itself without American support, and that dragging the war out under moral pretenses only ensures more death with no guarantee of victory. By refusing to admit these constraints, Europe has helped discredit the only approach that might actually end the conflict: compromise.
A deal, if struck, could help stabilize the region, give long-term security guarantees to both Ukraine and Russia, and begin the slow but vital process of normalizing relations – not in the name of appeasement, but to rebuild the global order on firmer ground. It would also allow the United States to focus on revitalizing its own economy and military posture, ensuring its role as the anchor of the West while preventing BRICS nations from eclipsing the liberal world order. These outcomes would benefit Europe more than anywhere else outside of the U.S., particularly if its leaders get on board with the plan now and demonstrate to President Trump that they will continue to make strides to rebuild their own militaries and consistently meet their NATO defense spending commitments.
And yet, because European leaders are unwilling to admit just how exposed they are, or to confront their own failures to properly maintain their own militaries, they seem willing to accept endless bloodshed on their own continent in pursuit of a war that, absent U.S. military assistance, they are unlikely to win.
So What Is Trump’s Plan?
Rather than being unread or uninterested in key sticking points, as his critics suggest, President Trump is doing what he has always done: reducing a conflict to power balances and deal-making leverage. In his view, as he has stated on multiple occasions, Ukraine “doesn’t have the cards” – a fact European leaders also know to be true, no matter what they might claim publicly.
Not only does Ukraine have no real leverage, the mounting death count on both sides of the conflict remains the driving factor behind Trump’s efforts – as it always has been.
“You’ve got to get people to stop dying,” Trump told a CNN Town Hall on May 10, 2023.
In August of the same year, Trump told Tucker Carlson that without a deal, Ukraine was “being wiped out” and will “end up with nothing.” The president has been nothing if not consistent on this.
Trump’s plan, then, isn’t about picking winners or rewriting history, but forcing a compromise that ends the killing. That outcome, however, hinges on two things: first, whether one or both sides come to believe the war is no longer winnable on the battlefield; and second, whether Russia is handed a concession big enough for Putin to sell it at home as a victory worth the blood and ruin. Ukraine, for its part, still thinks the war is sustainable, largely because Europe keeps feeding that belief.
Until European leaders stop indulging their illusions and start backing a serious path to peace, Trump will remain one of the only major figures willing to say the obvious out loud. He’ll stick to that line regardless, but with Europe’s support, he might succeed sooner.
About the Author:
Jack Buckby is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society. His latest book is The Truth Teller: RFK Jr. and the Case for a Post-Partisan Presidency.
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