Trump Is Unlikely to Abandon Ukraine—and Might Even Escalate the War
If re-elected, would Donald Trump end U.S. support for Ukraine? He certainly sounds as if he would. On the campaign trail, he routinely describes Ukraine as a burden to the U.S. and declares his eagerness to see the war end, which he promises to achieve through negotiations in a mere 24 hours. Trump has also made clear his admiration for Vladimir Putin and dismissive attitude toward the European Union. Many observers worry that once back in office, he would condone, tacitly or even directly, Russia’s efforts to dominate Ukraine.
But it wouldn’t be an easy move for Trump to make, and there is reason to believe that his rhetoric on Ukraine is more political bluster than plan of action.
Trump’s dislike of Ukraine has many sources. It stems in part from his first impeachment trial in 2019, when he was charged with interfering in the 2020 election by putting pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation of Joe Biden. The subsequent war in Ukraine has provided ammunition for one of Trump’s longstanding foreign policy complaints: that the U.S. does too much and Europe too little for Europe’s security. He has even suggested that the U.S. wouldn’t come to the defense of allies who don’t do their share for NATO. And of course there is the politics of aid to Ukraine: Democrats champion Ukraine and revile Russia, inspiring some in Trump’s orbit to do the opposite—to make Russia a synonym for strong leadership and to decry Ukraine as corrupt and parasitical.
Against this backdrop, it is instructive to scrutinize Trump’s actual record on Russia and Ukraine. Much of what he said about the two countries on the campaign trail in 2016 had little or no bearing on the actions he took as president. Unlike his administration’s stance on China, where he redirected U.S. policy in word and deed, on Russia and Ukraine Trump behaved like a modestly hawkish Republican president.
Between 2017 and 2021, he made no concessions on Ukrainian territory: He didn’t recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea or its military presence in Eastern Ukraine. Trump also broke with Obama administration policy by sending lethal military assistance to Ukraine, including Javelin antitank missiles, which were invaluable to Ukraine in the early stages of Russia’s 2022 invasion. Two new countries, Montenegro and North Macedonia, were admitted to NATO with the Trump administration’s approval. In Syria, the U.S. took military action against Russia in 2018, killing several hundred Russian mercenaries.
Even if Trump were truly intent on abandoning Ukraine, he would have to wrestle with his own party. Though he has certainly redrawn GOP foreign policy over the last eight years, Republicans have often defied him on Russia and Ukraine. In 2017, the GOP-led Congress levied sanctions against Russia that the White House didn’t want, and today, a strong vein of pro-Ukraine sentiment persists among Republican lawmakers and within the Republican electorate.
Highly sensitive to this dynamic, Trump has accommodated it and is aware of how much the pullout from Afghanistan damaged Biden’s popularity. Before Speaker of the House Mike Johnson went ahead with a funding package for Ukraine in April, in defiance of much of the Republican caucus, he made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, where he presumably got a green light from the former president.
For Trump, an additional hurdle to abandoning Ukraine would be the war itself. As president, Trump never had to deal directly with war. Between 2017 and 2021, Russia wasn’t on the march. By early 2025, Ukraine—and with it, the U.S.—could be on the cusp of losing Europe’s first major war since 1945. Defeat would be devastating for the people of Ukraine and for European security and would deal a serious blow to America’s standing in the world. Blaming previous administrations for this calamity would only go so far. If it unfolded with Trump in the White House, it would force him to contend with his cardinal fear in politics and in life: being seen as a loser.
Because of continuing U.S. support for Ukraine and the impossibility of accepting such a humiliating defeat, a second Trump term would likely follow one of two scenarios: The war could simply go on as it did before, or the U.S. could become much more deeply involved.
The first possibility would be continuity. Fearful of defeat, Trump could maintain Biden administration policies on Ukraine, refusing to push Ukraine toward negotiations and continuing to provide various kinds of military aid—weaponry as well as intelligence and targeting information. In a second term, Trump’s relations with Western Europe would surely be as bad as they were in his first, but his antipathy for the continent was never driven by Ukraine or Russia. He tends to be more fond of Eastern Europe and chose Warsaw for his first European speech as president. In 2025, while feuding with risk-averse Germany, Trump might find common ground with anti-Russian Poland.
The second scenario for a Trump presidency is one of steady escalation. Responding to the battlefield, Trump might change the U.S. calculus and furnish Ukraine with weapons systems that the Biden administration was reluctant to allow. He might let Kyiv use U.S.-supplied weapons on Russian territory.
Like Putin, Trump might refuse to declare tactical nuclear weapons off limits in Ukraine. Trump could do this to strengthen his hand at the negotiating table, as a bluff or just to separate himself from his predecessors. He could approach the question of nuclear war not according to the cautious old orthodoxies but according to his own unknowable rules.
Alternately, Trump might escalate without wishing to escalate. His anarchic style of communication creates risks, and he doesn’t work through layers of professional staff, quietly developing strategies and then deploying them with discipline. He shoots from the hip, most often via social media. Unable to end the war in 24 hours, Trump might up the ante, and Putin might respond in kind.
Trump and Putin could become prisoners of their respective appetites for confrontation. World War I wasn’t a world war because any of the great powers wanted it. It was a world war because none of the great powers could control the military actions provoked by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Leaders got drawn into a conflict whose scale none of them could have imagined at its start.
On the war in Ukraine, voters have a choice in 2024 that is not simply binary, between supporting and not supporting Ukraine, staying the course and cutting loose. It is more probably a choice between two different ways of supporting Ukraine: one that is predictable and operates according to careful assumptions and one that is ad hoc and thus dangerously prone to escalation.
Whoever is elected in November, the war stands little chance of ending in the months and years to come. Because of the election, however, an entirely new phase of the war might begin in late January.
Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at Catholic University and held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio on the policy planning staff at the U.S. State Department from 2014 to 2016. His most recent book is “Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability.”