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A New Deal With Moscow?

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WSJ

Mar 11, 2025 11:02 AM IST

Trump’s bid for a pact with Putin recalls the efforts or FDR and other presidents.

President Donald Trump in Washington, Feb. 11, and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Feb. 6.

The true nature and the full price of President Trump’s Russia and Ukraine policies has become clear in recent days. Mr. Trump believes that improved relations with Russia are necessary for the American revival he hopes to lead, and he is willing to pay a high, even stupefying, price in moral authority, alliance relations and Ukrainian territory to get his deal. Vladimir Putin understands this and will charge the U.S. accordingly.

A New Deal With Moscow? PREMIUM

A New Deal With Moscow?

Mr. Trump isn’t the first American president to set aside morality to make a deal with Moscow. Franklin D. Roosevelt, believing he would need Soviet help against Japan if the Manhattan Project failed to deliver a war-ending weapon on time, traveled to Yalta in the closing months of World War II hoping to enlist Joseph Stalin in the Pacific fight. Bogged down in Vietnam and contemplating the collapse of the Bretton Woods financial system, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger reached out to Leonid Brezhnev with an offer of détente.

Whether the rest of us like it or not, Mr. Trump intends to hammer out a third pragmatic compromise between Moscow and Washington. The president’s supporters claim this is nothing new. Both the Yalta agreements and Nixon’s détente sacrificed human rights to cold-blooded realpolitik.

From Team Trump’s perspective, a pragmatic understanding with Russia, even if the handshake takes place over the bleeding corpse of Ukraine, is part of a strategy to reset the balance of power worldwide. It could pull Russia away from China and enlist Russian help in getting Iran to accept a serious nuclear agreement.

It is tempting but wrong to attack this strategy primarily on moral grounds. Curbing Beijing’s rise without risking a war between the U.S. and China is both a great and a deeply moral goal. If Trump policy were to end in a grand bargain with Russia that facilitated a long-term understanding with China, future historians might praise a strategy that contemporary observers largely condemn.

The more relevant question is about effectiveness. How likely are the results of this strategy to justify its extremely high upfront costs? The outlook here is mixed. In offering Mr. Putin explicit recognition of a sphere of interest in portions of the former Soviet Union including Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Armenia, Mr. Trump is making larger and more consequential concessions than his 21st-century predecessors tried in their own failed attempts to reach an understanding with Mr. Putin. And in offering to abandon American support for democracy promotion, Mr. Trump is returning to the studied silence on human rights that characterized Nixon-era détente.

If Mr. Putin is gettable, Mr. Trump has laid out tempting offers. Further, in making his gestures unilateral, with no Russian concessions asked in return, Mr. Trump is minimizing, as far as possible, any distrust on the Russian side about his intentions.

The question isn’t whether Mr. Putin will accept Mr. Trump’s generous opening moves. He will take all he is given. The question is what comes next. Will both Russia and the U.S. honor Mr. Trump’s proposed grand bargain? Will these sweeping concessions produce the results Mr. Trump hopes they will?

Here, the history isn’t encouraging. If one goes back far enough, democratic America and authoritarian Russia managed to coexist peacefully for long stretches of time. Russian expansionism in North America early in the 19th century helped prompt James Monroe to issue his famous doctrine, and the brutal antisemitism that drove hundreds of thousands of desperate Russian Jews into American exile led to more friction as the century neared its end. Even so, the intervening years saw solid bilateral relations, despite Russia’s record of repression at home and abroad. And the U.S. got Alaska out of the deal.

As both sides became global powers in the 20th century, agreement proved more elusive. Harry S. Truman regretted the Yalta agreements as early as the spring of 1945. Both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan built successful campaigns on opposition to the perceived amorality of Nixonian realpolitik and détente.

Given this history, the Kremlin will see any agreements with Mr. Trump as a temporary truce rather than a permanent peace. That limits the value of a deal. Moscow won’t accept permanent restraints on its behavior in exchange for temporary promises from Washington.

Meanwhile, a bargain with Russia may pose more problems than benefits for the MAGA movement in years to come. If Russia fails to honor the bargain scrupulously, as is likely, American opinion is likely to turn against a failed bargain, as happened with the Yalta agreements. And if the deal succeeds in restoring American power as détente did, the political pressure in the U.S. to return to a more ideologically assertive foreign policy will intensify—as happened in the Ford, Carter and Reagan years.

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