The most famous story about an emperor may be about an emperor obsessed with new clothes. In Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, a vain leader hires a pair of seamsters to make him a suit. Promising that the outfit will be elegant but invisible to the incompetent, the seamsters are frauds. Clad in nothing, the emperor marches before his people. Commanded to admire him, they go along, cheering until a little boy bellows out the obvious truth—that the emperor has no clothes. Even so, the procession continues.
In trying to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, which Donald Trump once promised he could do “within 24 hours,” the U.S. president is presenting himself as a kind of emperor. He has tried to make his administration the conflict’s diplomatic fulcrum. In the course of a single week, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and a host of European leaders all journeyed to the United States. Peace, according to Trump, will not be hammered out in Kyiv or Moscow, or in Geneva or Vienna or Doha. It will be forged by him in the White House.
But the Trump administration has no plan for ending the war. The president vacillates from one position to another, discarding policies like gloves—a cease-fire one day and a comprehensive settlement the next, with threats of disengagement along the way. The United States struggles to find leverage over Russia, not least because it has preemptively rejected any form of escalation, such as additional sanctions or more military aid to Kyiv. It also struggles to find leverage over Ukraine because Ukraine is fighting for its life and has many governments beyond Washington that support it. Yet the U.S. president insists on being the peacemaker, and an international public is asked to admire his nonexistent plan. On and on the procession goes.
Andersen’s story may have prefigured this moment, although no major actor in the war wants to be the boy. So far, no one is willing to call out Emperor Trump. Moscow does not want to upset a president more sympathetic to Russia than any before and likely any in the future. Kyiv does not want to incur Trump’s wrath, given that Trump could set back Ukraine’s war effort by abandoning it. (In a February meeting with Trump, Zelensky came perilously close to telling Trump he was delusional, but this week, he celebrated Trump’s generosity and probity.) And Europe does not want to alienate the leader of a country that underpins its security when the outcome of a major war is unclear and when Russia is its bona fide adversary.
Were the stakes lower, this spectacle of sycophancy might be comic. But the real-world implications are dead serious. Trump’s ongoing diplomatic circus will not only fail to stop Russia’s war. It will complicate the job of sustaining and strengthening Ukraine’s capacity to fight, which is the only way to give Kyiv the upper hand in this conflict and, accordingly, to stymie Putin. Ultimately, the pantomiming of diplomacy will diminish American power, which rests on coherent, disciplined, and believable leadership. Pity the empire whose emperor wears no clothes yet whose visitors are required to rhapsodize about the brilliance and beauty of his hats and gowns.
HELPLESSLY HELPING
There are profound limits to what Trump can do for Russia. Putin is a dictator. He does not need photo-ops with an American president to secure his domestic political position. U.S. aid to Ukraine via intelligence sharing, battlefield targeting, and the provision of hardware (now paid for by Europeans) is militarily quite consequential. But the United States cannot force Ukraine to surrender. Even if Putin could somehow convince Trump to withdraw all support for Kyiv, Ukraine would fight on, backed by its European partners. Lacking a path to victory that runs through Washington, Russia has no incentive to make real concessions. A rushed end to the war, much as it would suit Trump, would make it hard for Moscow to achieve its primary objective: gaining direct or indirect control over Kyiv.
A rudderless American diplomacy is nonetheless helpful to the Kremlin. Conditions are placed on Russia and then suddenly dropped, while Trump’s muddled and inconsistent messaging lets Russia portray its designs on Ukraine as more modest than they truly are, to obscure its intentions, and to play for time. The Trump administration is also, by its own volition, suggesting a reduced American military footprint in Europe—another one of Moscow’s key ambitions. Russia’s task is not to interfere with Trump’s fantasies or his fraught relationship with Europe. It can best do this by flattering the president’s image of himself. Putin does not at all mind pretending, at times, that Trump is the consummate peacemaker.
In Europe, Russia is mostly regarded with fear and suspicion. But elsewhere, Moscow can use its diplomatic theater with the United States to position itself as a country invested in peace. In this sense, the meeting in Alaska last week was a gift to Putin. It implied a last-minute realization on the part of the United States, that Russia understands more than the language of force. Indeed, Trump, who typically blames Ukraine for having been invaded, configures Putin’s Russia as eager for peace, even though Moscow has spent the summer relentlessly attacking civilian targets in Ukraine and pushing to conquer more territory. With Trump’s tacit approval, Russia can call a brutal offensive war cautious and defensive. Trump’s genius for dominating news cycles has thus started to work to Russia’s global advantage.
DANGEROUS DISTRACTIONS
Zelensky and his European counterparts are not naive about Trump. They know that his furious diplomatic efforts are hollow, as is his commitment to European security overall. As a result, European leaders are laying the foundation for a post-American Europe. The key to this transition is Germany, which has twice transformed its political economy because of the war. First, Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor when the war broke out, cut Germany off from Russian energy. Then, Friedrich Merz, who became chancellor a few months ago, was able to transcend his country’s love affair with austerity and begin reconstituting Germany as a military power. As much as Putin, Trump has been the prime mover behind these changes, which might prompt Europe to fully break with Washington.
For now, however, European leaders are in the humiliating position of relying on the United States. Awkwardly, they must defer to Trump, who relishes their deference. The more European leaders adopt Trump’s framework and echo his claim that peace is at hand, the less they are able to explain the war to their own populations. In this conflict, Europeans will need to be patient. Building up European defense industrial capacity will take years and aligning Ukraine with European institutions will take decades. Europeans must learn to live with the pressures and difficulties of having a major ground war on their doorsteps. Trump’s rapid-fire, improvisational, and utopian diplomacy complicate this process. It invites the continent’s people to believe the conflict might go away with the wave of an emperor’s scepter—especially when, to avoid antagonizing the president, their leaders adopt bits and pieces of Trump’s wishful thinking.
The ultimate beneficiary here is, again, the Kremlin. Any time spent speculating about land swaps to which Ukraine cannot agree, or parsing security guarantees that the Trump administration will only vaguely and fitfully underwrite, is time not spent on the logistics of helping Kyiv. Today’s war may at some stage be wound down by diplomats elaborating confidence-building measures, outlining ten-point plans, and drafting treaties. At the moment, however, the essential conversation is about helping Ukraine with its drones, manpower needs, and air defenses. If Washington is going to continue to pull back, as seems likely, Europe will have to focus intently and productively on these details. Just five days before Trump and Putin met in Alaska, U.S. President JD Vance declared that his country is “done with the funding of the Ukraine war business.” That is the chilling reality.
WASTING AWAY
The final cost to Trump’s diplomatic charade will be measured in the currency of American power. Washington has a rich history of peacemaking in Europe. President Woodrow Wilson’s journey to Versailles in 1918 to help broker the end of World War I may not have made the world safe for democracy, but his proposal for a world based on deliberation rather than war came to inform the European Union, the United Nations, and the best of intentions of twentieth-century American foreign policy. In the final months of World War II, Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman did not get everything they wanted at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, but they did erect the NATO alliance, ensuring a Western Europe at peace with itself. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush pursued artful diplomacy with the Soviet Union and, along with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, they found a peaceful end to the Cold War. Postwar Europe is the crown of American foreign policy, and Trump is tarnishing it.
Even if the president can maneuver Russia and Ukraine toward a temporary cease-fire, which he would surely label as the achievement of perpetual peace, Trump’s efforts will cost Washington influence. Methods and manners matter in international relations. Trump’s processes are too chaotic, his speech too riddled with falsehoods, and his policy shifts too abrupt for foreign leaders to trust him. Without trust, there is no persuasion and no genuine cooperation; without trust, alliances lose their validity. If its trustworthiness is a fully spent commodity, all Washington will have left is the limited tool of hard power.
None of this means that Trump’s madcap style of diplomacy is categorically unworkable. It can embody the virtue of flexibility and a salutary indifference to dogma. The president’s disregard for the status quo, for example, helped him facilitate a creative peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan. But in Ukraine, where many powers intersect and some collide, Trump’s limitations as a statesman are all too apparent. His convening power may be formidable—at a moment’s notice, he can bring the world to him—but his problem-solving power isn’t. His hunger for praise is a vulnerability, highlighting rather than hiding the space between rhetoric and reality. This was precisely the space occupied by Andersen’s emperor, whose solipsism and stubborn self-regard were visible, even if his clothes were not.
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