Have you ever watched someone finally decide to end a bad fight, only to see their own friends talk them out of it at the very last second?
That’s pretty much what just happened with the most consequential foreign policy story of the new Trump era—so far.
Last week something remarkable leaked out of the Trump transition: a detailed, 28-point framework to stop the war in Ukraine, complete with a hard Thanksgiving deadline and the clearest threat yet that American military aid would dry up if Kiev didn’t come to the table. For roughly 48 hours it looked like the President-elect was actually going to do what he promised on day one: end the conflict fast and on his terms.
Then Marco Rubio boarded a plane to Switzerland.
A Plan That Shook Both Sides of the Atlantic
Let’s be honest—nobody expected perfection. The document floating around diplomatic channels was classic Trump: bold, brash, and stuffed with ideas only he could love.
There were proposals for demilitarized buffer zones, American oversight of the final deal, and—because of course—some kind of profit-sharing arrangement tied to natural resources. Critics called it eccentric. Supporters called it creative leverage. Moscow, surprisingly, didn’t slam the door. Russian officials described it as “worthy of discussion,” which in diplomatic language is about as warm as it gets.
Across Europe, however, panic bells went off like air-raid sirens.
Suddenly every foreign minister from Warsaw to Paris was warning that any deal “dictated by Moscow” would reward aggression.
Translation: the same crowd that spent three years insisting Ukraine could win outright suddenly discovered the virtues of endless negotiation once victory started slipping away.
The Thanksgiving Ultimatum
The real explosive part wasn’t the fine print. It was the timeline.
Trump’s message—delivered through intermediaries—was simple: accept the framework by Thanksgiving or the weapons and intelligence spigot turns off in January. No more blank checks. No more pretending the front lines are frozen when Russia is advancing meters every day.
For the first time since the war began, Kiev faced a hard choice instead of an infinite credit line.
- Russian forces were closing in on key logistics hubs.
- European warehouses were running dry on 155mm shells.
- American voters had just sent the clearest possible signal that they were done paying for stalemate.
All of that made the pressure real. And pressure is the only thing that ever forces compromise in wars like this one.
Enter the Neocon Rescue Squad
Just when momentum seemed to be building, Senator Marco Rubio—widely reported to be Trump’s pick for Secretary of State—flew to Geneva for previously unannounced meetings with European counterparts.
By the time he left, the Thanksgiving deadline had evaporated. Reporters were told the goal was now simply to “finalize discussions as soon as possible.” In other words, the urgency was gone. The leverage was diluted. The old playbook—talk forever, fund forever—was back in business.
People familiar with the weekend negotiations described a clear shift. Before Rubio arrived, the American side (reportedly channeling Vice President-elect JD Vance through allies) was pushing hard for rapid movement. After Rubio took the lead, everything became “more flexible.”
Flexible is diplomatic code for kicking the can down the road while the battlefield does the real negotiating.
Personnel Really Is Policy
Here’s the part that should worry anyone hoping for real change in American foreign policy: this isn’t new.
During Trump’s first term, every attempt to extract the United States from endless wars ran into the same wall of entrenched advisors. Names change—Bolton, Pompeo, O’Brien—but the pattern stays the same. A president who wants to wind down conflicts discovers that the people around him have spent their careers doing the opposite.
The Afghanistan withdrawal is the clearest example. Even after Trump ordered it, layers of national security staff slow-walked implementation until Biden finally pulled the plug in the most chaotic way possible.
Lesson learned? Apparently not yet.
The moment realists inside the incoming administration started gaining ground—replacing old-guard figures with fresh voices—the counterattack began. And it began with the exact same arguments Europeans have used for three years: we can’t look weak, we can’t reward aggression, just a few more months and the wonder-weapons will turn everything around.
What Moscow Actually Thinks
While Washington and Brussels clutch pearls over “concessions,” the Russian position has been remarkably consistent.
President Putin made it clear in a recent security council meeting: Russia is open to a negotiated settlement that saves lives and infrastructure. But if the other side refuses to talk seriously, the military will finish what it started.
- Kupyansk fell faster than almost anyone predicted.
- Follow-on objectives are already in motion.
- Every week of delay costs Ukraine territory it will never get back at the table.
That’s not bravado. It’s simple arithmetic. Armies that are advancing don’t freeze in place because the losing side asks for another timeout.
The Real Cost of “Flexibility”
Every month this war drags on means thousands more dead, billions more spent, and entire cities reduced to rubble that somebody—probably American taxpayers—will eventually have to pay to rebuild.
The irony is thick: the same voices now warning against a “bad deal” are the ones who rejected every previous off-ramp, from Istanbul in 2022 to multiple back-channel efforts since.
They’ve moved the goalposts so many times that “victory” now means something far short of what they promised in 2023, yet they still can’t bring themselves to admit reality.
Can Trump Still Salvage This?
January 20 is still eight weeks away. A lot can change.
If the President-elect wants his Ukraine settlement to be the signature foreign policy achievement of his second term—and maybe the thing historians remember most—he’s going to have to do what he didn’t quite manage the first time around: impose his will on the bureaucracy before it imposes its will on him.
That probably starts with personnel decisions that haven’t been announced yet. It definitely means listening to the voices who actually want to end wars rather than manage them forever.
Because here’s the hard truth nobody in Brussels or Washington wants to say out loud: the longer this drags on, the worse the eventual settlement gets for Ukraine and its backers. Russia isn’t getting weaker. The Western arsenal isn’t magically refilling itself. Public patience in the United States has already run out once—it won’t come back.
Thanksgiving came and went. The deadline passed without consequence.
But wars don’t respect diplomatic calendars. And battlefields have a way of forcing decisions that conference rooms keep trying to postpone.
The question now isn’t whether the war ends—it will. The question is how many more lives and how much more treasure get spent before the people who spent years cheering it on finally let it stop.
In my view, the next few weeks will tell us whether Trump 2.0 really learned the lessons of Trump 1.0, or whether the same old chorus gets to write another verse of the same tired song.
History is watching. And so is an exhausted American public that just voted for something different.
