The administration of Donald Trump will not be able to finish the war in Ukraine while several key players act independently without a single strategy. That is what Ivo Daalder, former U.S. ambassador to NATO and senior fellow at Harvard University, wrote in a column for Politico.
Chaotic talks
In recent months there have been meetings in Moscow, Anchorage, New York, Washington, Miami, Kyiv and Geneva, with a slew of informal calls between participants. Summits were announced and canceled, deadlines set and postponed, plans approved and altered, with constant rotation of negotiators.
According to Daalder, one reason for this kaleidoscope is that Trump gave his team an almost impossible task. He wants to stop a war between two countries committed to fighting for opposite goals: Russia seeks to subjugate Ukraine, and Ukraine seeks to preserve its sovereignty.
But the main problem lies elsewhere — the Trump administration has no formal process for policy development, engagement with foreign governments, and setting a clear course.
Lack of a system
The expert notes that the president runs the U.S. government much as he once ran the family business — from his desk in the Oval Office, where he meets with everyone in turn and makes decisions spontaneously. His aides operate almost autonomously.
On Ukraine and Russia, only a handful of people are in the president’s inner circle: Vice President J. D. Vance, Secretary of State and national security adviser Marco Rubio, chief of staff Suzie Wiles, special envoy Steve Witkoff and, since October, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The defense secretary, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA leadership are not involved in the process on a regular basis.
Of those players, only Rubio has a sizeable apparatus at the State Department and the National Security Council, but even then there is little evidence that he relies on them as his predecessors did. Foreign diplomats in Washington say officials from both agencies are available for contacts but know almost nothing about what is going on.
Troubling examples
Witkoff attends meetings with Putin and Russian officials without a protocol officer and relies on Putin’s own interpreter. Kushner is deeply involved in the talks but holds no formal position in the administration. The Secretary of the Army, Daniel Driscoll, who was brought into discussions about Ukraine in November, was only given a weekend to get up to speed on the history of the war and the negotiations before flying to Kyiv with yet another plan.
Conflicting moves
In mid-October, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sent Rubio a memorandum with ideas for ending the war. The plan envisaged a meeting between Putin and Trump in Budapest at the end of the month to agree on the points.
The document contained familiar Russian demands: territorial concessions, strict limits on Ukraine’s armed forces, and renunciation of NATO membership. When Rubio called Lavrov to discuss it, he learned that Moscow’s position was unchanged and advised Trump not to go to Budapest. The president canceled the talks, saying he did not want a pointless meeting.
At the same time, while Rubio and Trump were ramping up pressure on Russia, including the first new sanctions since the president’s return, Witkoff was talking to other Russian interlocutors in an effort to get the negotiations back on track. In a conversation with Putin’s adviser Yuri Ushakov, the special envoy allegedly said the president would give him plenty of room to clinch a deal.
Witkoff and Kushner’s plan
Two weeks later Witkoff and Kushner met in Miami with Kirill Dmitriev, a close emissary of Putin, to sketch out a plan of more than 20 points to end the war, similar to what they had done for Gaza a few weeks earlier. Unlike Rubio, they largely accepted the Russian position and made it their own.
According to a leaked transcript, Dmitriev told Ushakov after the meeting that he had passed on an unofficial document as the basis for a final plan so that it would be "as close to the Russian one as possible."
When Rubio first saw the 28-point plan from Witkoff and Kushner, he called it simply "a list of potential ideas," telling senators that it was not an American recommendation or a peace plan. However, Trump liked it and ordered Ukraine to sign by Thanksgiving or be left without support. That forced Rubio to quickly change course and declare that the peace proposal had been created by the United States.
Expert’s conclusion
Daalder emphasizes: all the American players are governed not by a formal process or a coordinated assessment of what is actually needed to end the war. Instead, they are engaged in relentless efforts to satisfy the president’s persistent demand to be recognized as a global peacemaker.
As long as that continues, the chaos and confusion will also continue. And none of this will bring the war any closer to a real end
– Ivo Daalder, former U.S. ambassador to NATO
Context
Previous administrations also relied on a small circle of advisers to discuss critical foreign policy issues. George H. W. Bush ran the Gulf War with seven top officials, and Joe Biden made many decisions during daily national security briefings with a handful of aides.
The difference is that the top advisers of previous presidents relied on an interagency process, run by their staff, to discuss issues, develop policy options and oversee implementation. Trump acts differently, resulting in unprecedented chaos in the negotiating process.
