On The Ruins of Transactionalism: Diplomatic defeat or a game of give-and-take?

The myth of transactionalism

Had Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, been president of the United States in 2022, Putin would still have invaded Ukraine. That is the clear conclusion to be drawn from Trump’s eight months in the White House and his chaotic, contradictory attempts to 'end the war in Ukraine'.

Both his campaign boasts of being able to end the war in a single day and his obsessive incantation that 'under me this war would never have started' rested on two assumptions. The first was that Trump possessed some kind of special relationship with Putin and, more broadly, a distinctive approach to ruthless dictators such as Putin and Xi. The idea was that unlike Biden and the Democrats, he was unencumbered by liberal doctrinaire thinking and therefore able, instead of engaging in futile confrontations over 'values', to speak with them in the language of real 'interests' and to overcome diplomatic deadlocks that Democrats’ 'hypocritical' fixation on 'values' only created and deepened.

The second assumption underpinning the claim ‘If I were in office, there would be no war', was that while Trump was pragmatic enough to deal with anyone at the level of 'interests', he was also capable of demonstrating far greater resolve and toughness than (hypocritical) Democrats when the need to show strength arose. This supposed combination of qualities was meant to impress even the most intransigent strongmen, compelling them to agree to the pragmatic deals that Trump alone knew how to strike.

On these two assumptions rested the myth of Trump’s innovative 'transactionalist' approach to international relations, one that promised peace and prosperity – unlike the liberal 'values-based' approach, which allegedly only multiplied wars and prolonged their duration.

Yet whatever one’s view of Trump’s peacemaking efforts over the past seven months, whatever interpretation one offers of his motives and the twists of his policy, the verdict is clear and impartial: over seven months, no evidence has emerged to substantiate either of those arguments.

A double fiasco

Trump failed to find a magical formula of mutual interests with the Kremlin, despite having decisively discarded the 'hypocritical' prejudice that a major power invading a smaller neighbour to seize its territory counts as an aggressor and a violator of international law. To be fair, given the bloody stalemate in both the war and international relations at large by the end of 2024, even some very astute observers were willing to forgive Trump this moral relativism in the hope that it might deliver results unattainable within the liberal paradigm.

But no such results followed. The Anchorage summit became a true fiasco for the core tenets of transactional mythology. Since his campaign, Trump had constantly invoked his special relationship with Putin, supposedly able to transcend the usual 'red lines' of US-Russian relations. To prove it, he regularly boasted of the hours spent in telephone conversations with Putin, always calling them 'good' and 'productive'.

From at least February, Trump had pinned hopes on a breakthrough from a personal meeting with Putin, displaying impatience to arrange one (initially, hopes were pinned on a meeting in Riyadh, which was supposed to mark Trump's 100th day in the White House). Although Putin shied away from such a meeting, the ‘special relationship’ with him remained Trump's most important foreign policy asset, which was irreparably devalued in Anchorage.

Despite all the honours extended to Putin, the meeting’s agenda was exhausted in an hour and a half instead of the planned six. The press conference was reduced to a brief, scripted lecture by Putin on US-Russian relations, followed by Trump’s awkward thanks to his staff for organising the summit. It matters little who concocted the story of the Kremlin’s supposed willingness to trade territories – Trump’s translator Steve Witkoff, Trump himself, or someone else. What mattered was that Trump achieved no breakthrough, and Putin did not even leave him a chance to save face. The supposed 'special relationship' was, if anything, one-sided: Trump’s warmth towards Putin looked extraordinary, but no reciprocity was in evidence.

However, the collapse of the 'special relationship' myth and of Trump’s supposed ability to deal with dictators was even more striking against the background of the downfall of the second myth – that unlike Democrats, Trump’s threats were consistent, credible and tough, and therefore taken seriously by his interlocutors.

In reality, Trump’s entire record of peacemaking towards Moscow consisted of threats that he then tried to avoid carrying out. He first spoke of harsh measures against the Kremlin on 30 March. Yet within days he had dispatched Witkoff to Moscow and spent April proclaiming an imminent breakthrough. When the proposed compromise was finally rejected by Moscow, Trump, within days, seized upon the Kremlin’s hint of a possible meeting with Putin in Istanbul.

When that too fell through, Trump pretended to believe in progress from low-level Ukrainian and Russian talks. Over the summer he alternated between disappointment in Putin, tentative moves towards increased pressure on Moscow, and hints of an imminent breakthrough. The hastily arranged Alaska summit was to embody that breakthrough, but this ended in diplomatic embarrassment.

Throughout the summer, Trump did make some moves to increase pressure. He agreed to the delivery of US weapons to Ukraine through European intermediaries and at their expense, though how effective this scheme was remains unclear. He imposed extra tariffs on Indian purchases of Russian oil. And, in one form or another, security guarantees for Ukraine became a subject of discussion in the final rounds of consultations his administration held with European leaders and Kyiv.

At the same time, Trump again avoided deploying a broader arsenal of pressure tools, suddenly blaming NATO countries for buying Russian energy and demanding they stop. The problem is real and does require a coordinated US-EU strategy. Time is a key factor: rejection of Russian supplies becomes feasible only as oil market surpluses grow. Until then, more realistic options are to increase pressure via secondary sanctions and price caps. By contrast, Trump’s formula looked unworkable – more like a ploy than a genuine attempt to solve the problem. In the end, his record of threats to Moscow became a textbook example of the ‘TACO factor’ ('Trump Always Chickens Out') – empty, baseless bravado giving way to inevitable retreat.

Versions and consequences

There are three main interpretations of Trump's behaviour on the track of Russia-Ukraine settlement. The first, most hostile to him, draws on rumours dating back to the mid-2010s, suggesting the Kremlin may have leverage over Trump because of his visits to Moscow, the involvement of Russian money in his businesses, and so forth. Under this reading, Trump avoided serious pressure on Putin for fear of exposure.

The second version assumes Trump had limited obligations towards Putin, perhaps linked to Moscow’s role in his first campaign or, for instance, to an understanding that the Kremlin would not assist Iran during the joint US-Israeli operation against Tehran. Within this framework, Trump minimised pressure on Moscow and aid to Kyiv in order to give Putin the best possible conditions for his 2025 offensive.

The third, most favourable to Trump, is that he simply lacked sufficient leverage over Putin. He was constrained by the same considerations and circumstances that had limited the previous administration, in terms of providing arms to Kyiv, in expanding aid, and in applying economic pressure. Under this version, Trump genuinely believed in the 'chemistry' of his relations with Putin and in his own genius for 'transactionalism', which would not only stop the war but also shift Putin’s orientation away from China – if not towards America, then at least towards Trump himself.

Although the latter version appears the least conspiratorial and the most sympathetic to Trump, it nevertheless puts a heavy cross through the legacy he seemingly intended to leave to history as the outcome of his second presidency. While Trump occasionally strikes the pose of a 'detached observer', once again stressing that he has nothing to do with the Russia-Ukraine war, that war remains the central military conflict of our time. And so long as it continues, the lovingly constructed dome of Trump’s hall of peacemaking glory gapes with a huge hole that robs of credibility the trophies displayed within it, including the Abraham Accords.

In any case, the past eight months have most likely consigned transactionalism for a long time to the shelf of myths in the practice of international relations. It is not Trump’s transactional mastery but Putin’s intransigence, that is his refusal to respond to courtship and his lack of fear in the face of threats, that remains as the diplomatic residue of this eight-month marathon. The paradoxical lesson is that Trump’s counterparts turned out to be far more value-driven than transactional doctrine had assumed. In institutional terms they were much more personalist dictators than Trump himself, yet they presented their political choices as long-term strategies they intended to bequeath to their countries. By contrast, Trump – with far less actual control over the political field – was bound by the short horizon of his time in the White House, in need of rapid results, and in reality lacking sufficient means to achieve them. As a result, his counterparts had little interest in the proposals he was able to make, knowing that he could not guarantee their long-term credibility.

The past year, however, has been marked not only by the failure of Trump’s peacemaking manoeuvres. It also showed that, at least so far, Ukraine has neither capitulated nor suffered a serious defeat despite Washington’s drastic curtailment of aid, while Europe has continued its support and today perhaps sees the confrontation with Russia even more clearly than a year ago as an existential challenge. Against the backdrop of a mounting military threat from the east and the shattered vase of 'special relations', Trump’s relativism seems to stand no chance of becoming the European mainstream.

The fiasco of transactionalism alters the historical perspective on Trump’s actions over these eight months. Should Ukraine eventually be forced into signing an unfavourable peace and later become the target of renewed Russian aggression, that defeat will inevitably be seen as the consequence of Trump’s transactional strategy, which was detrimental to Ukraine and at the same time fruitless, giving Putin greater opportunities to advance. The triumph of transactionalism never came, and even the American president himself now seems to acknowledge that fact. What matters now is to avoid disgrace. The mantra 'This is not my war' – after a year of fruitless peacemaking efforts, the cessation of aid to Ukraine, pressure on Zelensky, quarrels with European allies, and unfulfilled threats against Moscow – rings hollow and helpless.