Nigel Gould-Davies
Ten days of diplomacy in Brussels, Munich and Riyadh have laid bare President Donald Trump’s approach to the Russia–Ukraine war. It is a policy of rapid, unilateral concession of long-held positions on fundamental interests to persuade the aggressor to stop fighting. The established name for such a policy – not a polemical but a well-established one – is ‘strategic surrender’. In the classic study commissioned by the United States intelligence community in 1957, this is defined as ‘orderly capitulation … to obtain some political concession’.
This term captures, far better than ‘negotiations’, the dynamics of the US–Russia talks that began last week in Riyadh and are expected to continue in Moscow and Washington. Genuine negotiations involve carrots and sticks: offers that will benefit the other side if it agrees to a desired outcome and threats to impose costs if it does not.
America is using little of either. It is instead accepting a series of escalating Russian demands without extracting any quid pro quo except the promise of an end to the war on terms that Russia dictates. In doing so, America has reversed a series of fundamental positions. Having isolated and constrained Russia, it is normalising their relations and exploring new trade and investment opportunities. Having given Ukraine military and financial help to defend itself, it has announced the end of aid, and reportedly threatened to cut the essential Starlink satellite link while demanding access to mineral wealth on onerous terms. Having pledged to protect Europe for eighty years, it is scaling back its protection to a smaller, unspecified and increasingly doubtful commitment. Vice President J.D. Vance has raised the possibility of troop withdrawals from the continent – a demand that Russia has reportedly already made.
Russia, by contrast, has ignored the few requests that America is known to have made. When US officials asked Russia to suspend attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities before talks began, their counterparts claimed that no such attacks were taking place. Russia has also categorically rejected the deployment of foreign forces in Ukraine, despite Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s suggestion that ‘European and non-European troops’ could be deployed as ‘peacekeepers to Ukraine’.
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