‘They’re dying, Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying. And I’ll have that done – I’ll have that done in 24 hours.’ Donald Trump first made the claim at a CNN town hall meeting in May 2023 and repeated it all the way to election day. To the extent Trump believed he possessed a magic formula to end the Russo-Ukrainian war by midday on 21 January speaks voluminously of the man’s self-confidence. That said, his Putin problem, I would argue, has less to do with hubris than, paradoxically enough, a failure to adhere to his own credo – the Trump Doctrine.

Trump’s foreign judgement was shown in its best light during the truncated 2025 India-Pakistan conflict. ‘Missiles and drones crisscrossed the night skies of India and Pakistan’, as Hannah Ellis-Petersen wrote for the Guardian, before a ceasefire on 10 May, brokered by the Trump administration, brought the two nuclear-armed adversaries ‘back from brink of all-out war’. Ellis-Petersen, in an earlier report, noted that the 48 hours of negotiations between Islamabad and New Delhi were mediated by Secretary of State Rubio and Vice President Vance, the latter reversing his earlier isolationist posture that a war between India and Pakistan was ‘none of [America’s] business’. Being of an anti-Trump persuasion, Ellis-Petersen was doubtless keen to highlight discord and fickleness within the White House even at a moment of diplomatic triumph.

What Ellis-Petersen inadvertently revealed, nevertheless, is that Trump himself, and the Trump Doctrine as a whole, happens to be neither isolationist nor interventionist. His business-informed worldview involves primarily (but not only) using economic coercion – ubiquitous tariffs, foreign access to the US domestic market, joint investment deals, secure supply chains, and so on – to achieve political ends for America and simultaneously the world. At the farewell press conference for Elon Musk, Trump repeated his assertion that the enticement of future bilateral Indian and Pakistani economic agreements with the United States forestalled a potential ‘nuclear war’ because ‘we talk trade, and we say we can’t trade with people who are shooting missiles at each other and potentially using nuclear weapons’.

The 10 May ceasefire, the critics will note, does not solve the deep religious faultlines between India and Pakistan. The radical Islamic terrorists, calling themselves the Resistance Front, triggered the India-Pakistan conflagration by murdering 26 tourists in India-controlled Kashmir. They are likely to strike again. New Delhi will continue to believe Islamabad is in cahoots irrespective of official denials. What we can say is the Day of Armageddon has been postponed and so maybe in the meantime, (a) Islamabad and New Delhi can arrive at a binding protocol ensuring they never blow each other up; (b) Trump has time to make good his promise to build the Golden Dome.

If the 10 May ceasefire showcased the merits of Trump’s foreign policy prowess, the Russo-Ukrainian war has highlighted his limitations, particularly when a conflict has already become a total war. Mediazona, in collaboration with the BBC, puts the number of deceased Russian military personnel, ‘compiled from verified, publicly available sources, including social media posts by family members, local news reports, and official announcements from regional authorities’, at 109,625. A more likely figure, based on ‘broader demographic analysis’, is closer to 160,000 to 165,000. That excludes non-fatal casualties and non-Russian deaths. Putin is – to paraphrase Macbeth – ‘so far stepped in blood’ that seeing the war to its conclusion makes more sense than acceding to a ceasefire. Trump’s best chance at stopping Putin’s ‘special military operation’ was winning re-election in 2020 and preventing it from starting in the first place – but that is all in the past.

Trump now has to deal with Russia’s emerging ‘summer offensive campaign’ in eastern Ukraine. Putin’s belief – according to the Kremlin itself and the Institute for the Study of War’s reliable sources – is that this grand-scale assault will secure, albeit belatedly, Russia’s original goals: the capitulation of Ukraine; regime change in Kyiv; the annexation of much of eastern Ukraine; and the demilitarisation and Finlandisation of the rump state of Ukraine. Added to the list of demands, apparently, will be a ‘written’ acknowledgement by Nato of its tacit responsibility for provoking the Russo-Ukrainian war. Putin, if we are to believe these reports, remains intent on total victory and total vindication.

Trump, as a consequence, believes Putin has gone ‘crazy’. And yet it is one thing to bludgeon and cajole Kyiv into submission, dependent as it is on US and European economic and military assistance; quite another to bend the Kremlin to his will. The recent unveiling of a monument to Joseph Stalin at one of Moscow’s busiest subway stations, Taganskaya, might suggest that Generalissimo Putin is determined to be a ‘great man’ who returns Russia to its rightful place as a superpower whatever the cost in human lives, Russian, Ukrainian or otherwise.

Trump is left with two options should Putin persist with his summer offensive. He could, firstly, abandon the conflict and leave it to the Europeans to support (or not) the armed forces of Ukraine. In this he would find backing from Vance and other ‘restrainers’ in his administration even if Kyiv were to fall. However, it’s uncertain Trump would risk a repeat of the ignominy that accompanied Biden’s ill-fated withdrawal from Afghanistan. Secondly, and more productively, Trump could (at last) apply one of the key tenets of the Trump Doctrine – maximum pressure to produce compliance, economic preferably but military if required.

Trump’s warning to Putin that he was ‘playing with fire’ by refusing to accept a ceasefire is, I imagine, more in character with his original formulation to have a deal ‘done in 24 hours’. To make that happen, Trump should have begun with the hardest negotiating positions. Alas, Trump departed from his own modus operandi and even pre-emptively assigned the sovereignty of Crimea to Russia and dismissed the possibility of Ukraine joining Nato. As a consequence of this leniency, Generalissimo Putin has gone full maximalist at the very moment Trump wants him to compromise and agree to a peace settlement.

What, then, is the hardest negotiating position? To summarise: if Ukraine won’t comply, American military assistance to be immediately withdrawn; if Russia prevaricates, Ukraine to be supplied with the wherewithal to obliterate encroaching Russian armed forces. As the Roman military writer advised, ‘If you want peace, prepare for war.’