By Andreas Kluth / Bloomberg Opinion
When the captain has no compass, the crew starts fighting over nautical charts and the rudder. So it is with the United States, which now has several foreign policies rather than one, as factions inside Donald Trump’s White House wrestle over how to deal with Russia and Ukraine, as well as Venezuela and much else. The primary victim is Ukraine, which must fear for not only its sovereignty but its “dignity.” The collateral damage is the world.
The rudderlessness and infighting became clear again with the emergence last week of what was billed as an American “28-point peace plan” for Ukraine (since reduced to 19 items), but instead became 28 points of embarrassment.
As my colleague Marc Champion pointed out, the plan is “shameless” in regurgitating positions that President Vladimir Putin has peddled all along, parameters that would condemn Kyiv — if it accepted them, which it cannot — to de facto capitulation and Europe to perennial precarity.
That assessment was shared by swathes of America’s Congress on both sides of the aisle. Republicans such as Michael McCaul in the House, a former chair of its foreign-affairs committee, advised Kyiv not to sign the proposal. “In the war between Ukraine and Russia, the first to surrender was America,” posted another Republican Congressman, Don Bacon.
Senior Republicans in the Senate were just as clear: “Ukraine should not be forced to give up its lands to one of the world’s most flagrant war criminals in Vladimir Putin,” said Roger Wicker, chair of the armed-services committee. “Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool,” commented Mitch McConnell, an eminence grise among foreign-policy hawks, strongly implying that Putin had succeeded.
Which may quite literally be the case: By all appearances (including odd language that seems to have been translated directly from Russian), that “American” plan was instead a list of Kremlin talking points leaked by Kirill Dimitriev, a Putin envoy, after talks in Florida with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, two of Trump’s top negotiators.
Also involved was army secretary Dan Driscoll, who is close to Vice President J.D. Vance. Vance is the leading isolationist in the White House, and has been especially condescending toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, from attacking him during that humiliating visit to the Oval Office to patronizing him during another visit: “Mr. President,” he told the Ukrainian, “so long as you behave, I won’t say anything.”
Conspicuously uninvolved, at least until the last minute, was Marco Rubio, in his dual function as national security advisor and secretary of state. As a senator, at least before he courted Trump, he was a traditional Republican hawk, and certainly not a Putin appeaser.
According to several senators, including Mike Rounds, a Republican, Rubio said in a private briefing that the 28-point plan is in fact a Russian proposal and “not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan.” When that became public, it looked awful of course, especially since Trump had already done another U-turn and given Zelensky until Thanksgiving to accept the proposal. So Rubio backpedaled. His State Department spokesman called reports that the Russians had authored the plan “blatantly false,” convincing nobody.
The damage was already done. As Rubio, Witkoff and others jetted to Geneva to get the Ukrainians back into the process, America’s European allies were once again aghast. “Before we start our work, it would be good to know for sure who is the author of the plan and where was it created,” snapped the Polish prime minister.
Rubio, for his part, is doing his best to sound upbeat, as he navigates between the likes of Vance, Witkoff, Kushner, Driscoll and others, while trying not to lose Trump’s favor. “We’ve really moved forward,” he intoned in Geneva, while blurring Trump’s latest ultimatum: “The deadline is we want to get this done as soon as possible”; that is, not necessarily by Thursday after all. All the while, other envoys — including Keith Kellogg (nominally the one in charge of the Ukraine portfolio) — are conducting their own talks who knows where.
This style — the schisms, the confusion, the arbitrariness — extends far beyond the administration’s policy toward Ukraine. It has also been its modus operandi in dealing with other hotspots, including Venezuela.
There, another special envoy, Ric Grenell, spent much of the year practicing discreet but promising diplomacy with Caracas. Then Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser, projected his obsessions with drugs and migrants onto Venezuela, while Rubio added his fixation with regime change. The result: a huge American military build-up in the Caribbean, suggesting an imminent invasion, but without anything resembling a strategy.
Differences in opinion are nothing new in foreign policy, within the White House or any government. Wise leaders, however, resolve these contradictions by providing a moral and strategic compass that eventually causes all the iron filings to align. Trump is proving every day that he lacks this compass, and that the nations adrift include not only Ukraine and all of America’s friends and allies, but the United States itself.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.
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