What will Trump's victory mean for Ukraine?

The election of Donald Trump has led to a lot of questions and speculations about what this means for the war in Ukraine. I just want to make a quick and a rough video where I share some of my reflections and maybe address some of the questions. The reality is that we know very little about what Trump's policies about Ukraine would be.

He's given some indications about how he wants the war to end, but there is very little about the specifics of how this is supposed to be achieved. And if we just take at face value what he has said, then it's quite difficult to see how that in itself would be enough for the war to end. And that's why there is so much talk and uncertainty right now.

There are many missing pieces and there are sort of blanks that we have to fill in with interpretation and that leaves a lot of room for different theories about what is it that Donald Trump might do. But if we start with what we do know, then it is that Donald Trump has clearly said that he wants the war to end as soon as possible. And at first glance, that can seem like a big departure from the Biden administration's policy on Ukraine where they've been providing consistent military assistance on an ongoing basis so that Ukraine can continue the fight.

But if we look at what the Biden administration, what their policy has actually been, then it's been characterized by a desire for escalation management first and foremost. And this means that the most important priority has been that the war would not escalate beyond the borders of Ukraine. And I made a whole video about this policy of escalation management, but the short version is that the Biden administration saw several different ways that the war could escalate.

And one of them was that Russia would win the war and take over all of Ukraine and it was Biden's assessment that Putin would not stop after Ukraine. So instead, that would mean that Putin would continue the war in other countries if they had success in Ukraine. So a Russian victory could lead to escalation and therefore it was necessary to support Ukraine so that Ukraine wouldn't lose.

But another way that the Biden administration saw that the war could potentially escalate was if Russia was destabilized. So this could lead to a chaotic situation where Putin might escalate the war in a sort of desperate attempt to maintain power in Russia. And for that reason, the Biden administration also saw it as dangerous if Ukraine was suddenly empowered to make a very decisive blow against Russia.

So we ended up with a kind of strange situation where the policy of the Biden administration was based on a kind of assumption that no matter who won the war in Ukraine, then it could be dangerous and it could lead to escalation. So the right policy for the United States was to make sure that neither side could win. And that's why Ukraine would get just enough weapons to keep them in the fight, but not enough to actually gain the upper hand.

So at first glance, it might seem that Trump's policy will be very different from Biden's because he's talking about not helping Ukraine while Biden was continuously providing help to Ukraine. But on a more fundamental level, the difference is maybe not as big as it seems because both of them are essentially built on the sentiment that it would be just really nice if the war would just go away and stop being a problem. So Donald Trump says he wants to do something that is very different from what Biden wanted, but it might be more a question of methods than a question of what they want to achieve in the end.

So if we look at how Donald Trump says he wants to achieve the goal of stopping the war, then it essentially boils down to him. Well he will be having a conversation with Zelensky and Putin and he will tell them to stop fighting and then they will do that. And there might be a little more to the plan than that, but we've heard very little about the specifics, at least from Trump.

We've heard some people in that camp, like some of his advisors and JD Vans, they've been a bit more specific about the types of coercion that Trump might be willing to use to convince Zelensky and Putin to do that. But honestly, it's quite vague and it's also unrealistic. I've covered this in several videos.

I won't go deep into the argument here, but it's important to know that there is no realistic peace plan on the table that both sides can just sort of accept at this point. And the ideas that are being floated in the American media about what a plan might look like, that they will be totally unacceptable for both Russia and for Ukraine. So both sides would reject the outline of a plan that has been described in some American newspapers.

So one thing we can say with a pretty high degree of certainty is that the things that Trump says he will do and that he will achieve, that they are unrealistic. And that means that the real question is not actually what Trump says he will do, but rather what Trump will do when those things that he says he will do, they don't work and the war doesn't stop. So that's the real uncertainty.

And to get an idea of the possible scope of outcomes in that situation, I think it's important that we move beyond just observing that Donald Trump wants the war to end. We have to ask, why does he want the war to end? Why is this important to him?

What does he want to achieve? Does he want Russia to win the war? Is he actually on board with Putin's ideological project or does he just want the war to end because that's an important goal in itself or maybe for humanitarian reasons or because of prestige or is the real issue that he just doesn't want the United States to pay for the war anymore?

His actions can be very different depending on which of these motivations he has. So if Donald Trump secretly wants Russia to win the war and Ukraine to lose, then if Zelensky doesn't agree to a very bad peace deal, then Trump is going to cut all the military support for Ukraine. He's going to remove the sanctions on Russia to save the Russian economy and he will also turn off Starlink and that will cause all kinds of problems for the Ukrainians with command and control of their forces and all these things.

So he could do those things and it would be absolutely detrimental to Ukraine. But the thing is, it would also be detrimental to the security of the rest of Europe and it would in practice be the end of NATO because there is no way that Europe can have an ally that undermines its own security and helps its main adversary. And it would mean that Europe would have to very quickly cut all ties with the American defense industry because he could no longer trust the United States as a security partner.

So if Donald Trump goes all in on helping Putin, then that would not only mean the end of NATO, but it would also cost the American defense industry just an absolutely ridiculous number of billions of dollars. If we consider Donald Trump's very sort of transactional approach to politics and how he likes to see himself as a businessman, then I think it's more likely that his motivation isn't so much about ideologically wanting to help Putin and to make Russia great again, but rather that he just doesn't see the point in spending American tax dollars on this war that he doesn't really understand. And that gives quite a different perspective because it would mean that even if there's there isn't any more help coming from the American government, then the American defense industry might still function as a supplier of weapons to Ukraine as long as just someone else is paying for it.

So it might require squeezing something more out of the European governments, but it would still be possible to supply weapons to Ukraine. And at the same time, the Americans would be making a lot of money. So as you can see, there is a very broad spectrum of possible consequences and a lot of it comes down to the answer to the question, what does Donald Trump actually want from ending the war in Ukraine?

What is he trying to get out of that? And there is a big difference between assuming that Ukraine is doomed because Trump wants to help Putin win the war and that he's willing to spend a lot of dollars on doing that or thinking that Donald Trump is just out trying to squeeze some more money out of the Europeans. And we don't know the answer to that question because Donald Trump is not in office yet and he hasn't explained his plans in sort of enough detail to say anything for certain.

But it's these types of questions that we have to ask ourselves if we want to have a conversation about the consequences of Trump's election for the war in Ukraine. Okay, I will just end it here. Thanks for watching.