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Bannon, Mearsheimer: Trump’s Ukraine Plan Won’t End the War
Foreign Affairs
Bannon, Mearsheimer: Trump’s Ukraine Plan Won’t End the War
Establishment Ukraine hawking has largely drowned out restraint-oriented criticisms of the 28-point plan.
Russia hawks in Congress and their allies in corporate media have been on the warpath against the Trump administration’s 28-point peace plan for ending the Ukraine war, dubbing the plan a “Russian wish-list.” The MSNBC host Rachel Maddow went so far as to hold it up as proof that “the Kremlin runs U.S. foreign policy.” Those cable news narratives have proceeded almost entirely without reference to the actual text of the plan, which—as noted in TAC—is hardly a one-sided victory for Moscow.
Yet there are also criticisms of the plan from the other end of the ideological spectrum. Among the most prominent voices who argued from the start that the United States should never have been drawn into the Ukraine conflict are the War Room host and former White House advisor Steve Bannon and the University of Chicago’s Professor John Mearsheimer. They now warn that far from being a “Russian wish list,” the Trump administration’s plan may not actually address the underlying political problems that ultimately caused the Ukraine proxy war. The American Conservative asked both which aspects of the 28-point plan concern them the most.
“The very concept of it,” Bannon said. “America First [broke] the globalist mindset that we have the capacity financially, economically, militarily, culturally to govern everywhere and everything. Both plans—20-point in the Middle East and 28-point in the Bloodlands are ENORMOUSLY complex and mind boggling on their execution. We don’t have the capacity to take on—particularly because these are side shows to our vital national security interests.”
Mearsheimer likewise argues that there are “three major sticking points in the original 28-point plan that simply cannot be resolved to the satisfaction of both sides, guaranteeing that the war will ultimately be resolved on the battlefield, likely with a Russian victory.
“First, the Ukrainians want a meaningful security guarantee from the U.S. if they cannot be in NATO. The Russians will not let that happen,” Mearsheimer said. “Second, the Russians demand that Ukraine and the West accept the fact that Moscow has annexed Crimea and the four eastern-most oblasts of Ukraine. Ukraine and Europe refuse to do so.”
But Mearsheimer suggests there’s an even more fundamental issue. “Finally, Russia wants Ukraine to permanently disarm to the point where it is not an offensive threat to Russia,” he said. “The Ukrainians and the West refuse this demand, because they say it will leave Ukraine vulnerable to a future Russian attack. There is no middle ground regarding these three issues, which the Russians and the Ukrainians—as well as their European allies—see as non-negotiable.”
Among the questions raised by the 28-point plan is whether any settlement reached now would survive beyond a single administration. Even if Trump were to secure an agreement from Moscow and Kiev, nothing stops the permanent foreign-policy apparatus in Washington from treating it exactly as it treated Minsk: not as a genuine political settlement, but as “an attempt to give Ukraine time,” as Angela Merkel famously described it.
“There is nothing Trump can do to assuage Russian fears that any agreement Moscow reaches with Ukraine and the West will stick over time,” Mearsheimer said. “How can any Russian leader trust the West given what has happened since 2014? More generally, how can any state know for sure that another state won’t renege on a deal in the future. In fact, it can’t.”
Bannon and Mearsheimer agree that the 28-point plan cannot work while the United States continues to arm Ukraine through NATO, but they diverge sharply on what that failure implies. Bannon argues the U.S. can still walk away, while Mearsheimer maintains that Washington will remain deeply involved regardless.
Even as the Trump administration engages in negotiations to end the Ukraine proxy war, the U.S. simultaneously continues to funnel weapons to that war through the arms pipeline we established with NATO. NATO Secretary General Rutte is constantly celebrating U.S. assistance. The weapons that Ukraine uses to kill Russian soldiers and increasingly to strike inside Russia itself are marked “Made in the USA.”
Asked about the Trump administration’s current arms pipeline with NATO, which is fueling the Ukraine proxy war, Bannon told TAC that “[We] need to cut it all off. All of it. Money. Arms. Intelligence Support.”
Mearsheimer, on the other hand, argues that this is unlikely to happen. “Trump does not simply want to cut off the flow of arms to Ukraine and accelerate the end of this conflict, because he knows that Ukraine is going to lose and he does not want to be blamed,” he said. “He wants to be able to say that the West—including the U.S.—supported Ukraine to the bitter end and it was Ukraine’s fault it lost.”
As Trump pursues the negotiations he promised on the campaign trail, he simultaneously engages in congressional politics that appear to sit in open tension with the America First logic the administration says guides those talks. Perhaps the leading opponent of Ukraine spending in the House has been Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who will retire early from Congress after extended conflict with the president. Conversely, a leading supporter of arms and money for Ukraine in the Senate—South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham—received a Trump endorsement. (Trump will reportedly campaign for him in 2026).
Bannon rejects the idea that those moves signal that President Trump is abandoning the America First base. “Remember he is commander-in-chief and trying to stop, then wind down the kinetic part of the Third World War,” Bannon said.
Mearsheimer partially agrees. “I don’t think Trump is abandoning his America First base, but I think lots of people in his base are abandoning him, simply because they don’t think he is pursuing America First policies. This is certainly true with regard to Israel, where he clearly puts Israel’s interest above America’s interests.”
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