Putin Passes on Trump's Cease-Fire
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Donald Trump spent more than an hour on the phone with the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, and the readouts didn't tell us too many details about what the two men discussed. But the bottom line is this. Putin did not accept Trump's 30-day ceasefire. Ukraine and Zelensky did.

So what comes next? Is the president prepared to up the pressure on Putin? Plus later, we'll chat about whether Europe is suddenly waking up from a long slumber and getting serious about its own rearmament. Welcome to Potomac Watch. I'm Kate Batchelder-Odell. I'm filling in as your host today, and I'm joined by my colleagues Bill McGurn and Joe Sternberg. Both are columnists on our page and my co-conspirators on the editorial board.

We're going back to Ukraine today, as we've done on many previous episodes. This podcast and our editorial pages have been advancing the idea that what happens in Ukraine could turn out to be one of the most consequential events of the Trump presidency, even if Trump himself may prefer to focus on deportations or tariffs.

If Trump gets a bad deal in Ukraine, given the Russian imperial appetite, it may be one of the only things anybody remembers about his second term 50 years from now. So let's use that as a launching point to get into the particulars of where we are on 19 March. Putin and Trump had this long phone call.

It appears Putin is demanding major concessions even for a ceasefire for 30 days, a mere pause in the shooting, let alone a broader, more durable peace that Trump says that he wants. Joe, why don't you open us up here and tell us, do you think that the phone call moved us any closer to a durable peace in Ukraine? And how would you be advising the president to proceed from here? No, it didn't.

Look, I think that the sort of Trump administration has come into this situation with the conceit that this is a problem that is amenable to artful dealmaking.

And I think that certainly there are a lot of international problems around the world that might be amenable to artful deal making. It's not obvious to me, and I don't think it's been obvious to a lot of us for a long time, that this is one of those. But, you know, okay, we're going to try, I guess, ahead of this phone call, you could have made an argument that

that maybe there was some deeper well of resolve within the Trump administration that wasn't entirely visible. The negotiation was a thing that they would do so that he could say that he had done it, and then that would open up the door to some pressure on Putin and the Kremlin to try to end the war on the side that actually started it, which is the

Russian side. But in the event, kind of the impression that I'm getting the past couple of days is that actually it isn't clear that there's been a plan. I mean, certainly they came into the negotiations not having really set themselves up for success because the tenor in the weeks leading up to this phone call

was concession after concession to Putin or kind of leaning on the Ukrainian side to make concessions here. So that you were going in without anything that it was really obvious that you could offer Putin at this point in order to get him to make a deal. And certainly the conclusion that the Kremlin seems to have drawn from this is that the Trump administration might be so anxious

for something to happen here, that if the Kremlin strings them out long enough, Russia will be able to get even more concessions. So I think my advice, if they asked, which clearly they haven't, would be that you have to come up with some way of creating leverage on Putin to force him to... I mean, asking him to negotiate in good faith is going to be too much.

but aligning incentives so that he feels that he has an interest in actually making a deal. That seems to be the condition that failed ahead of this phone call, which explains why, you know, look, we didn't even make 30 days or 30 hours. It feels as if it was barely 30 minutes after this deal started that there was shooting again. Right. And now, Bill, let's stipulate here the president, he didn't

For instance, cede to a Russian demand to pause aid or intelligence sharing with Ukraine, which the Kremlin repeated as one of its demands. Let's listen real quick actually to Trump because he says that he and Putin didn't even discuss the cessation of U.S. aid. You have a lot of guns pointing at each other and a ceasefire without going a little bit further would have been tough.

Russia has the advantages, you know. They have encircled about 2,500 soldiers. They are nicely encircled, and that's not good. And we want to get it over with. Look, we're doing this. There are no Americans involved. There could be if we end up in World War III over this, which is so ridiculous. But, you know, strange things happen.

And I think we had a great call. It lasted almost two hours. Talked about a lot of things and toward getting it to peace. And we talked about other things also. Was there non-negotiables mentioned by Putin? It was reported that, I think the Kremlin media actually stated that he...

he demanded an immediate cessation of aid to Ukraine in order to get to this multi-step deal. No, we didn't talk about aid. So again, Bill, stipulating that it's good news that the president didn't cede to demands about cutting off U.S. aid. One thing I find sort of vexing about the Trump administration's approach is they sometimes seem to act like no one has ever tried talking to Putin before and to make him into something else other than he is. And it seems sometimes like the Trump administration is

one, just struggling to understand the ideological nature of Putin. And from Trump's perspective, I think he does sincerely have a desire to stop the awful human costs of the Ukraine war, but he doesn't really understand why for Putin, the cost might be bearable and it might be worth continuing to have...

allow thousands of Russians to die on the battlefield if he can accomplish his objectives. So draw on your White House experience and background to help us understand, has this approach been tried and are they expecting different results? Yes, I think they are. I think Donald Trump is putting more faith in his ability to negotiate. Since I don't see any plan for victory,

in Ukraine, I'm kind of the Reagan school. We define the Cold War as we win, they lose. But I don't see that outlined in Ukraine, a realistic path for victory now. I'm not in principle opposed to a deal,

But I think with Putin, the question is, you can stop the killing tomorrow if Ukraine surrenders, right? If they just let the Russians go wherever they want, they can stop the bombings and military action. But we want some deal with justice, and that includes teeth that would bite.

if Putin violated any of the terms. And the record is not very good. I mean, Ukraine alone has given in to so many things. And 30 years ago, it gave away its nuclear weapons on implicit promise that

The West would defend itself if Russians took advantage of it. If they hadn't given up those weapons, they would never have been invaded this way. I remember back, you mentioned the White House, when I just left the White House in 2008, Putin invaded. I can say kind of like Trump, if I had still been in the White House, he never would have done it.

But he invaded Georgia. And many years later, he's still there, has control, I think, about 20% of Georgia's territory and exerts an inordinate amount of influence on the country. I think that's what he's like with Ukraine. And as you say, in history, he would be remembered as a guy who

kind of restored some of the old greatness of the Soviet empire to Russia. And I think that's what he's looking at. And that's the only way he can justify the blood and treasure Russia has already expended in Ukraine.

So what I worry about, again, I'm not in principle opposed to negotiation, and I do think Trump is generally a pretty good negotiator. What kind of shocks me in this case is how many things he's given to Putin even before the negotiations, the NATO membership for Ukraine, the territory, allowing it to keep the territory it occupies. I mean, there was a story the other day, I don't know whether it's true,

where Trump would agree to the Russian control of Crimea. All these things, if you're going to give them, you got to get something. And yet we seem to give them up all before the negotiations. I don't think that's a winning principle. Bottom line, I'm very pessimistic about Ukraine.

The only thing I think we can hope for is that Donald Trump, when they sit down, when they actually present a deal to Putin, if Donald Trump thinks it's good and Putin rejects it, as he likely would if he doesn't like parts of it,

Then Trump gets mad at Putin the way he got mad at Zelensky, and he might change the whole terms. I see that's the only good outcome. Yeah, Bill, I think that's a really salient point. I mean, I think a couple things already should be making Trump mad about what Putin is demanding.

you know, go through some of his demands. Obviously, he wants sanction relief. He wants no continued armed support for Ukraine, which would just be a nonstarter for the United States because Trump, you know, he wants a durable peace, not just something that's going to leave Russia picking up and going right back at it in a few months or a few years. He has been demanding territory that he doesn't even currently occupy, swallowing entire Ukraine provinces and expanding his reach south and making Ukraine a landlocked country.

So he's making these maximalist demands and hasn't seemed to move an inch off them. Joe, over the weekend, Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina, the Republican, said that he was working on a really crushing sanctions package on Russia that might help ratchet up the pressure on Putin to drop some of these demands further.

Do you see that being a realistic route that the president will consider at this point to at least to get to some kind of deal that gets Putin to walk off sort of his ask for the moon approach? Well, I think that sort of the idea of ratcheting up the sanctions pressure, whether from the U.S. or Europe,

solves the fundamental problem with this negotiation with Putin that we have right now, which is that Trump has essentially given away all of the leverage that we had before these talks have even started. So I think from the perspective of trying to shape the outcome of the negotiation, I think that something like what

Lindsey Graham is proposing is probably what you have to do in order to create the situations where Putin is going to think that it is, again, in his best interest to come and negotiate something that he will actually stick to for some discernible amount of time while we all regroup and figure out what comes next. I mean, what I think is also interesting about this, though, is the domestic political implications of the fact that you have a U.S. senator who

waiting in in this way and proposing that actually part of the solution to this conundrum might run through the Congress. Because I think that we have had a problem

up to now, where even those members of the House and Senate and the Republican caucus in both of those chambers who are sympathetic to Ukraine and understand what's at stake here and how dangerous Trump's approach could be, have nonetheless politically been kind of cowed by Trump and the isolationist wing of the party. So the first thing that struck me as interesting about Lindsey Graham's

The intervention here is the suggestion that maybe the alarm over the situation in Ukraine might be reaching a point where they are now more afraid of a bad outcome than they are of some of the domestic political problems. And one of the domestic political issues that they might be starting to be mindful of, first off, the political calendar. A bunch of these guys, all of them in the House, a bunch of them in the Senate, have to run for election in less than two years in the midterm. Trump will not.

And you also have the political reality that although American voters tend to not have an enormous amount of patience for foreign entanglements and faraway places that we don't really understand, the one thing that we hate more than that is the sense that we've kind of dragged ourselves out dishonorably and have gotten snookered on the way out.

I think that that was the political problem that engulfed the Biden administration after that botched Afghanistan withdrawal. And I think that Republicans in Congress should be concerned about whether Trump is setting them up for a similar problem here if whatever the strategy is, to the extent that there is a negotiating strategy, if that goes badly, some of these Republicans in Congress are going to be the first people that voters are going to have an opportunity to punish for it.

Hang tight. We'll be right back with more Potomac Watch.

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Welcome back. I'm chatting with my colleagues Joe Sternberg and Bill McGurn about the war in Ukraine. Bill, I'd love to get your thoughts on the politics here, too. You know, when you look at actually the way polling on Ukraine is moving and look, every poll is just a snapshot in time. But if you look at the general direction, you do see the public moving toward saying that we're doing not enough for Ukraine. And you do have a recent poll this month saying that we're doing not enough for Ukraine.

More than 75 percent of voters said that they were concerned that Russia wouldn't honor the terms of a peace deal. So you do have, in addition to, as Joe describes, this very dedicated base on the right that supports Trump and really wants the war in Ukraine to end and maybe is less concerned about how that happens.

I think you do have a public that more generally is open to a case being made that, for instance, we need to continue to support Ukraine so we don't lose this war. So I guess my question to you is also, is Trump underrating the risks? Seven in 10 Americans wanted out of Afghanistan in 2021. That was a very popular statement.

position. And Biden thought, hey, I'm going to be a hero. I'm going to wrap up this long war. Americans are tired of it. No president has made the case of why U.S. troops are in Afghanistan or what we're doing. And I would argue it was the beginning of the end of his presidency. So what are the risks here for Trump in that regard? Yeah, I think there are a lot of risks. Look, go back to Vietnam, the 72 peace negotiations that Kissinger engineered with Nixon, like at the time, it's very popular. People were really sick of

of the war in Vietnam and our troops over there. We had many more deaths than we had, for example, in Iraq and Afghanistan. So the deal was kind of hailed as a success. I think Kissinger and Lee Duc To, both his counterpart on the Vietnamese side, they both were named Nobel laureate winners. And in a year or so, the North invaded the South.

And Kissinger called the day after the invasion and tried to return its peace prize. So public opinion can turn. You're right. Joe Biden was riding high in the polls until Afghanistan. And when people saw how he got out, his humiliation, all they were concerned with, the Biden people, was not getting a photo of a helicopter leaving from a rooftop. But

It actually was the same sort of thing. We had 13 people killed. And I remember President Biden was asked like a few days later, and he goes, come on, man, that was a while ago about these guys falling off planes and so forth. It was a catastrophe. We're still paying for it.

I think if Trump, if something like that happened to Ukraine, it would go down as Trump's catastrophe. So the downside is very real. Public opinion will turn on a dime if the United States is humiliated in Ukraine. Yeah, and I think the nonpolitical point on top of that

on the substance is that the withdrawal from Afghanistan, I think very clearly influenced Putin's thinking that he wouldn't face much resistance if he rolled into Ukraine. So it could not only haunt Trump in the polls, but it could set off a cascade of events elsewhere in the world that he gets dragged into even if he doesn't want to be. That's one reason I think it's important to underscore just how connected many of these conflicts are around the world.

You know, Trump, in his statement, he wants better relations with Russia and he says they're going to cooperate with us in the Middle East. Well, the Russians have been, for instance, just to take one example, giving intelligence help to the Houthis in Yemen, the terrorist organization that Trump is bombing right now because they have taken global shipping hostage. The Iranians, which Trump wants to prevent from getting a nuclear weapon, are supplying drones to Putin's front lines.

So there's no real washing your hands of this conflict in Ukraine. We'll take a quick pause and we'll be right back with more Potomac Watch.

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Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker. Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast. From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Welcome back.

We're going to switch gears a little bit here and talk briefly about a related subject and whether the U.S.'s changing posture in Europe is starting to terrify the Europeans into fielding substantive military. Joe, why don't you give us a quick update in particular on the negotiations in Germany over increasing their defense spending this year and whether those are going to be substantive or not?

particularly for those of us Americans who need the parochial parliamentarian politics broken down? Well, actually, I mean, Germany is a big part of the story that's going on in Europe. But I want to point out right at the outset that it's not the only part of the story. And so surprisingly for this podcast, when we talk about foreign affairs, there are actually several good news items that we can shoehorn in here, Kate. So, I mean, probably one of the most consequential things that is going to happen in Europe

this year is the vote in the German parliament, the Bundestag, on Tuesday to approve a constitutional amendment, which basically takes any limits off of their defense spending. So Germany, for about 15 or so years, has had a balanced budget amendment written into their constitution. It dated from a more peaceable end of history era. And the effect is that it had always set up

this problem where if you wanted to free up money for military spending, you were going to have to come up with money, savings from somewhere else in the budget. In Europe, quote unquote, somewhere else in the budget is always Europe speak for social welfare.

So this was the political bind that they had put themselves in. That started loosening in Germany back in 2022, immediately after the Russian invasion of Ukraine started, where they created a 100 billion euro special procurement fund. Again, they wrote that into the constitution, which would allow them to borrow that

amount of money for military procurement outside of the confines of this balanced budget amendment. The innovation this week is that they have amended the Constitution again so that any military spending above 1% of GDP is completely exempt from, they call it the debt break in the Constitution, and that exemption is permanent.

So this solves the political problem that they still had left over after 2022, where periodically you were going to have to do these really bruising debates about whether there would be more borrowing authority for defense spending. And I think that the fact that you got

The center-right Christian Democratic Party, their leader Friedrich Merz, who is about to become the new chancellor after their election last month. They're a fiscal hawkish party, but they agreed to this. You've got the Social Democrats on the center-left, who traditionally were kind of a pacifist pro-social welfare party. They have agreed to this.

You've got the Green Party, who historically tended to be pretty pacifist. They have agreed to this. And I think that that's all a sign that Germany is taking this very seriously. And on top of that, just today, you have the European Union itself and Brussels putting some more meat on the bones of the special military

defense funds that they have been talking about. So that's an extra 150 billion euros from Brussels to fund military procurement across the 27 countries that are in the European Union, plus some changes to their fiscal rules for the 27 member states that make it possible for all of those governments to increase their defense spending without having to have an immediate fight about social welfare. And I think that this is all happening

because they understood that the Trump administration doesn't care about Europe's concerns in Ukraine. You know, these governments are much more supportive of Ukraine. And they also are very worried about whether the Trump administration is committed

to the transatlantic alliance. And so I think that this is stimulating at long last a lot of these arguments about defense spending in Europe, and it is now unleashing real cash. We are out of the talking phase and rapidly transitioning into the spending phase. Right. Yeah. And one other, to your point about good news stories, I mean, Estonia announced

this week that they're going to hit at least 5% of GDP on defense within the next year, I believe. So Bill, we're going to give you a quick last word on this. But look, the frontline countries in NATO seem to understand the threat that Russia poses. They're spending on their defense like we want allies to do, meeting that target on their defense spending. Trump wants to raise that target. But I'd argue maybe we should move some of our forces in Europe into these countries that take their commitments seriously, as opposed to just threatening not to defend members, which I think is destructive for the alliance.

How would you advise Trump, take him at his word that he wants to make NATO stronger? How would you advise him to navigate this European rearmament? Well, I think it's a good thing that they're increasing the defense spending. That's been a perennial problem. Even during the Cold War, I was living in Brussels toward the very end of the Cold War, and Britain

our greatest ally, was not meeting, I think it was a 3% requirement, was not meeting it. And the others were worse. So the danger is getting them to act. I don't know whether it'd be enough. The problem, I think, though Donald Trump says he's pro-NATO, he does worry about the provision in the NATO charter that if one is attacked, the others have to go to his rescue. But I think the alliance...

can do what he really wants, which is to burden share. And I think the stronger the alliances, the less pressure there is on the United States. So I would build up NATO. In fact, I don't like what's likely to happen in Ukraine with the non-NATO force. You know, we have less control over non-NATO European troops that are there for some NATO works with American leadership. And I think without it, it's kind of rudderless.

So I think the implications of what's being done may have far-reaching unintended consequences. Amen, Bill. Thank you, Joe. Thank you, Bill, for joining me. We'll be back tomorrow with more Potomac Watch. Discover the business school of the future at purdue.university.com.