The upcoming peace summit between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin could be the last chance for Trump to cement a legacy as a peace president who stopped wars and reduced US involvement in foreign conflicts.
After he made the highly optimistic boast that he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of becoming president, Trump has vacillated from imploring both Russia and Ukraine to agree on conditions for a ceasefire to continuing to ship the arms to Ukraine that ensure the war will continue. In July, Trump initiated a pause on some weapons shipments to Ukraine.
“The highly anticipated meeting between myself, as President of the United States of America, and President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, will take place next Friday, August 15, 2025, in the Great State of Alaska. Further details to follow. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump announced on Truth Social.
One of the reasons MAGA supporters so viscerally supported Trump was his promise to end foreign wars that have sucked up hundreds of billions of dollars in funding while continuing to kill American men and women in uniform. Vice President JD Vance was a vociferous opponent of continued American aid to Ukraine when he was a senator from Ohio. America First is all about formulating foreign policy based on what best serves the interests of the American people and not the arms manufacturers from Raytheon to Boeing who see every overseas conflict as an opportunity to make both a literal and figurative killing while keeping the shareholders content.
And that is why Trump needs to seize the opportunity that this summit holds to end the war in Ukraine and use it as a precedent for US foreign policy throughout the world. Wars have a habit of getting the best of US presidents, even when they had no intention of ever feeding them.
Trump can still reasonably call the catastrophe in Ukraine “Biden’s War” simply because it began on the former president’s watch and was ceaselessly nurtured by his administration.
But President Richard Nixon became president in 1969 when the quagmire in Vietnam was known as “Johnson’s War,” not least because the proxy war had brought down Lyndon Johnson’s presidency and he had become so identified with the carnage that protesters chanted, “Hey, hey LBJ: how many kids did you kill today?”
Nixon had spent eight years as vice president in the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower, honing his foreign policy skills. Eisenhower adroitly avoided wars during his tenure and chose to contain communism through the black ops of the CIA and backdoor diplomacy. Nixon knew how to deal with America’s friends and its enemies and skillfully created detente with the Soviet Union while opening a door to China that had been closed since 1949.
Henry Kissinger was a brilliant diplomat who would serve first as national security advisor and then as Secretary of State. Yet Nixon widened the conflict in Vietnam by invading Cambodia and failing to extricate American forces from the conflict until 1973. By that time, Vietnam had become Nixon’s war.
Trump can take control of history by recognizing two facts. Ukraine cannot be a member of NATO, and it will probably have to cede the Donbass region to Russia. Trump has already affirmed the former policy position. Accepting Russian demands might infuriate the Russophobes in Congress and the Military Industrial Complex. Still, as the war has progressed, it has become increasingly well-known that NATO promised an imploding Soviet Union that it would not expand “one inch eastward” and certainly not to the doorstep of Russia.
Trump also needs to take inspiration from President Ronald Reagan, a fervent anti-communist who decided to negotiate with Mikhail Gorbachev because he realized it was in the best interests of Americans as well as the world to stop the arms race and reduce the threat of nuclear war.
Of course, it is that very threat that is tangibly attendant with the war in Ukraine today. With Ukraine using NATO-supplied weapons to strike sites within Russia, we have been on the brink of a nuclear conflagration for at least a year. It would just take one misstep, one misunderstanding, one confusing order to transform what has always been considered unthinkable into a sudden, inescapable, and catastrophic reality. The infamous “Doomsday Clock” that charts the probability of nuclear war is closer to midnight than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
So, as a peace president, Trump can not only extricate America from foreign wars but find a peaceful solution for those conflicts. In the process, he is also doing what so many other Republican presidents have achieved: making the world safe from nuclear war.
