As I prepare to give a talk on Ukraine (my first after my recent visit there), I’m also preparing some simple answers to two questions that I expect to get.
Since the talk is in the United States, the question “What should the U.S. do?” will likely come up, even if the questioner knows it’s a virtually inoperable question in the context of a Trump presidency. The second question, about NATO, is really just rhetorical, but I can be virtually guaranteed that someone will raise something about it. I answer both below.
What should the U.S. do?
We should begin with what it should not do, and that’s to withdraw support from Ukraine. As we’ve already seen, that only encourages Putin to think he can “win” this war and achieve his goals. He’s made clear repeatedly that his main goal is to subordinate as much of Ukraine as possible to Russian control. Achieving that will not be possible without sending more Russian men to their deaths in the effort to kill more Ukrainians, resulting in more bloodshed, more bombing, more trauma all around, and ultimately more police-state machinations once the goal would be (hypothetically) attained. This should therefore be a non-starter (though we know it’s exactly what Trump has been doing).
As for what it should do:
- The U.S. should support Ukraine both rhetorically and militarily, for reasons that include its obligations to guarantee Ukrainian security under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. (That the Trump administration recently “disappeared” the Budapest Memorandum from U.S. government web sites is a telling indicator that it never plans to do this.)
- The U.S. should work with other countries to apply greater economic pressure not only on Russia, but also on countries that do business with Russia. Economic sanctions by the EU have turned Russia — quite successfully — to other countries (China, India, Iran, et al.) for the oil and gas revenues that sustain it. If business with Russia were turned into an instrument of negotiation with other countries (as Trump’s infamous tariffs are intended to do), then this could become useful leverage.
- Economic pressure should also make more use of the Russian financial assets — numbering in the hundreds of billions of dollars — that have been temporarily “frozen” as part of the sanctions regime. How to make use of these is complicated, but any genuine leverage requires the possibility of directing these funds toward the defense and post-war reconstruction of Ukraine.
- The U.S. should apply diplomatic pressure toward a resolution that respects international agreements, and it should do this in the context of a foreign policy that does that everywhere. (That means in Israel and Gaza, in Iran, and elsewhere around the world.) While the Biden administration fell rather short of this goal, the Trump administration is falling far, far shorter.
What about NATO?
I phrase this indirectly, since the question is almost always a rhetorical one. But answering it requires identifying first principles, which for me are two:
- NATO should be expected to fulfill its mission as a defense alliance protecting its members and devoted to safeguarding “the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” To the extent that its member countries remain democratic, their voice in NATO should be respected. If some fall away from those principles (I’m looking at Hungary, Slovakia, and a few others), their role should be diminished or they should be pressured to withdraw from the alliance. Of course, that’s complicated, but remembering the organization’s founding principles is important.
- NATO should not be guided by the self-serving goals of the military-industrial complex. (That’s where I agree with many others on the political left.) Defense should be defense for the sake of democracy, rule of law, etc., and not for the sake of the defense industry. That said, keeping in mind the neo-imperializing state of the world means that the path toward peace is more complicated today than it might have appeared a few decades ago. If it were still the early 1990s, we could dream of a world without military alliances like NATO. It no longer is that time.
Further reading:
- International Crisis Group, “A Frozen Conflict: The Dilemmas of Seizing Russia’s Money for Ukraine,” 17 June 2025, https://www.crisisgroup.org/europe-central-asia/caucasus/russia-internal-ukraine/frozen-conflict-dilemmas-seizing-russias-money-ukraine
- International Lawyers Project/Spotlight on Corruption, “Frozen Russian Assets and the Reconstruction of Ukraine,” July 2022, https://wrmcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Frozen-Russian-Assets-Ukraine-Legal-Options-Report-WRMC-July2022.pdf
- Sara Z. Kutchesfahani, “How the Budapest Memorandum paved the way for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Outrider, 29 June 2022, https://outrider.org/nuclear-weapons/articles/how-budapest-memorandum-paved-way-russias-invasion-ukraine
- Immanence, “End of the Interregnum, or just the beginning of its end?” 6 March 2025, https://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2025/03/06/end-of-the-interregnum-or-just-the-beginning-of-its-end/
Leave a Reply