There is no ‘win-win’ with Vladimir Putin

The Trump administration has again sent envoys to Moscow to try to end Russia’s war of conquest against Ukraine. The objective is laudable, but the strategy fails to see Russian leader Vladimir Putin for the tyrant he is and is thus doomed to fail.Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Moscow for meetings with Putin on Monday, Sept. 7. President Donald Trump said his envoys were carrying proposals to end a war that will soon enter its fourth year. The administration asked Moscow to pause its strikes on Kyiv.“I’ve ended eight wars,” Trump boasted in the Oval Office before their trip, “and I get no credit for it.” Witkoff and Kushner met with the Russian dictator, and there was a photo op.“First of all, President Putin, thank you so much for having us,” Witkoff wheedled, adding that the envoys were just “talking about when we retire, we’ll have all these incredible stories and memories, and yours will be right at the top of it all.”This obsequiousness is unseemly, displaying a weak neediness that can have only undercut the chance of success, for it breeds contempt, not respect. Perhaps Witkoff hoped praise would make negotiations easier, but it handed Putin a gratuitous propaganda victory and demoralized his Ukrainian victims.The envoys, who have made several trips to Russia, then went to Ukraine for the first time, where Kushner made revealing remarks of his own.“President Putin has certain objectives that he wants to achieve, but there are different aspirations for his country that can also be achieved once that is concluded,” Kushner said. “We’ll continue to have a positive dialogue in order to find a pathway to get there.”“President Trump comes from the business world. In the business world, you think about things in the context of win-win: How do you create opportunities for both sides to do what’s in their interest?” Kushner continued. “War is a negative sum; everyone loses from war. Whereas business and peace are a positive sum, and hopefully you can find big benefits from that in a big way.”Trump and his team deserve credit for trying to end the conflict, but there is probably no “win-win” available when dealing with Putin. It is dangerous to think he views a win through the same lens as American negotiators.He is not searching for an outcome in which both Russia and Ukraine emerge better off. He wants to impose costs on Ukraine, expand Russian power, and demonstrate that aggression wins strategic gains.Any negotiation that begins by assuming a shared preference for mutual benefit misunderstands Putin and motivated his war in the first place. Putin and autocrats like him don’t believe “everyone loses from war.” If he did, he wouldn’t have started it.Ivana Stradner, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, pointed out that for Putin, international politics is a “zero-sum game,” and if he can’t win, “the other side has to lose more.”“Americans negotiate deals,” Stradner observed, whereas “Putin measures victories in the damage he can inflict on the other side. Putin only understands the language of power.”Shortly after the envoys left, Russian forces bombarded Ukraine with anti-ship ballistic, cruise missiles, and 166 attack drones.“Putin is making a mockery of the peace process, and of us,” Meaghan Mobbs, a noted expert on Ukraine, said.The late conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer called the win-win idea a “mirror-image fantasy.” For decades, the West has repeatedly made the mistake of believing that other nations and peoples have much in common with us, sharing our beliefs and motivations.But that is not true. There are inescapable political, cultural, and ideological differences between America and its foreign opponents, Russia today as much as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran in recent decades.The U.S. must be clear-eyed. Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has posed the greatest challenge to NATO since the end of the Cold War more than three decades ago.TRUMP’S QUIET JOBS REVOLUTIONThe Trump administration should make more trips to Kyiv and fewer to Moscow. Its envoys should abandon the idea that Putin’s Russia may have objectives similar to our own and those of our allies.Wars have winners and losers. Putin intends to win and make both Ukraine and NATO lose. It’s the job of American foreign policymakers to ensure that he doesn’t succeed.