Trump a master negotiator no longer
National Post, 1 March 2025
The president's behaviour may mean others will be less eager to make deals with someone not bound by his own words
President Donald Trump has spent a lifetime negotiating. He prides himself on being a tough negotiator. He evidently learned along the way that there is a shortcut to getting a deal quickly — pre-emptive concessions.
That was his approach to ending the “endless war” in Afghanistan. And that is now his apparent approach to ending the war in Ukraine. He has already made significant opening concessions to President Vladimir Putin. The manner of the negotiations is the greatest concession of all, namely conceding the premise that Ukraine is not a sovereign country.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in Washington on Friday to finalize a minerals agreement with Trump, and to press for future American security guarantees. The meeting did not go well, as Trump and Vice-President JD Vance berated Zelenskyy in front of the media. It is revealing that no one thinks it’s strange that Trump will not make security commitments for peace, stability or democracy, but he will make them for commercial reasons. Trump himself implied as much this week, suggesting that Americans would be around to help if they had some mining plays at stake.
Trump opened his Ukraine strategy by talking with Putin by phone and engaging Russian diplomats in Saudi Arabia.
This is all very familiar. When Trump wanted to get American forces out of Afghanistan, he began by committing himself to a hard deadline for same. In a master stroke of negotiating, he then found an opposing party that was only too eager to grant his demand.
It turned out that the Taliban were all too happy to drive a hard bargain on getting American forces to leave the country. So Trump went over the head of the actual Afghan government — which would have preferred American forces to keep the Taliban at bay — and cut a deal. The Taliban got what it wanted — Americans out — in exchange for granting Trump what he wanted — Americans out. The Taliban are accustomed to rather severe deportment, so it was not easy for them to keep from chuckling.
While the Biden administration’s execution of the Trump plan was catastrophic, the eventual outcome had already been conceded by Trump. Thus the Taliban returned, just immediately instead of after a modest pause for good manners.
With Ukraine, Trump has committed himself to ending the war, to permanently ceding occupied Ukrainian territory to Russia, and to no NATO membership. Putin’s biggest challenge will be to conceal his glee, lest he puncture Trump’s inflated sense of diplomatic brilliance.
More than the concessions Trump has offered, the manner of the surrender is certainly maximally pleasing to Putin. In negotiating Ukraine’s fate without Ukrainian involvement, Trump has accepted the foundational premise of Putin’s invasion, that Ukraine is not real country, with no right to its own existence.
That was at the heart of the Oval Office shouting match on Friday, where Vice-President JD Vance — who campaigned for the Senate in 2022 saying, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine” — bitterly accused Zelenskyy of being insufficiently respectful and grateful. Zelenskyy has thanked the United States a thousand times, including last week, even after Trump called him a “dictator.”
What evidently rankled Vance was Zelenskyy’s unwillingness to sit quietly in the corner, meekly accepting his exclusion from determining the future of his own country. Vance considered it effrontery that the president of a country at war, which has sacrificed in blood, might choose to speak truths amidst the cataract of lies that Trump and Vance tell about Ukraine.
Even by Trumpian standards of prevarication, it was quite a week in the Oval Office, with President Emmanuel Macron of France, Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the United Kingdom and then Zelenskyy all publicly objecting to American untruths told about Ukraine.
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