When I taught national security affairs, I had my students memorize a succinct definition of power: Power = capability x will. The world is seeing this maxim play out in real time concerning Ukraine.
The Ukrainian government has a lot of will to fight the Russian invasion, but its capability to do so is perilously dependent on others. The UK and France, at least, have the will to support Ukraine, but precious little capability. Both countries’ ammunition stores would run out within a month of conflict, for example, and the number of field-able troops are in the low five figures. The UK and French nuclear arsenals have only a few hundred weapons in its combined tally, while Russia has over 5,000.
The Americans, on the other side, arguably have the capability (at least in some areas), but under the Trump administration, have decided they no longer have the will to support Ukraine in its continued conflict with Russia. Currently the only party with both capability and will is, frankly, Russia.
This is a hard pill to swallow, most of all for Ukraine. The Ukrainians have fought creatively and valiantly over the past three years against naked Russian aggression. However, in general, they have not regained their land from the Russians, and they have chewed up manpower they could not afford to lose in the process. We are now reaching a stage where Ukraine-the-land and Ukraine-the-people cannot both be saved. For the sake of the people, the war must come to an end.
That Trump saw this clearly does not make him a foreign policy savant, but it does make his instincts sound. The war will never end if the U.S. continues to give military aid to Ukraine to continue the fight. Trump’s pausing of aid tangibly establishes that the Ukrainian fight to regain territory has failed and cannot succeed.
And in such a case, friends don’t let friends destroy themselves. One of the tenets of just war theory is that a state is only justified going to war if the situation is not hopeless. As the BBC explains, “A State should only go to war if it has a reasonable chance of winning. Going to war for a hopeless cause may be a noble act, but it is an unethical one. This comes from the idea that war is a great evil, and that it is wrong to cause suffering, pain, and death with no chance of success. So it would be unethical for a state to sacrifice the lives of its people (and the lives of its enemy’s people) in a futile gesture that would not change anything.”
After three years of unrelenting effort, it is almost impossible to make the case that Ukraine has a reasonable chance of recovering the territory lost to the Russians. It is no longer ethical to feed this conflict, even though the Russians are the clear aggressors. A cold peace is preferable to continued loss of life in a hopeless cause.
But it would be a mistake to disrespect cold peace or see it as some type of failure, for two reasons. The first is that by means of a cold peace, much suffering and death is prevented. We have certainly seen that on the Korean peninsula, where a stalemated cold peace based on an armistice has been in place for more than 70 years, allowing South Korea to flourish. The barren Korean demilitarized zone is an achievement, not a failure.
The second reason is even a hopeful one. Sometimes, over the course of decades, the existence of a cold peace can lay the groundwork for making real peace possible. We saw this in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of East and West Germany, and united Germany’s accession to NATO and the EU. Time can change the facts on the ground in unforeseen ways, rendering cold peace no longer necessary. Consider, for example, that Vladimir Putin is 72 years old. Will Russia remain the same when he passes?
Indeed, strategist Edward Luttwak asserts that Trump not only wants to stop the meat grinder of the Ukraine conflict in the short term, but that he also has his eye on the long term. Luttwak believes Trump is pulling a “reverse Nixon.” This has reference to Richard Nixon’s overtures to China in the early 1970s, attempting to pull Beijing away from its Russian orbit and into a more non-aligned situation, thus weakening the USSR.
The “reverse Nixon” would entail an attempt to pull Moscow away from its dependence on China, and into a more non-aligned situation, thus weakening China. A post-Putin Russia might begin to feel that China, and not the West, was its biggest national security threat, given China’s designs on the Russian Far East. The existence of a cold peace in Ukraine might actually give a post-Putin Russia additional pivot room in the future.
Another benefit of a cold peace in Ukraine has been the salutary effects on Europe, which appears to have finally woken up to the fact that it has been shirking its own obligation to defend itself. It is scandalous what most European nations thought sufficient to skate by on in terms of military capabilities. This is not a new problem but goes back to the early days of NATO, and by the time of Nixon had its own buzzword, “burden-sharing.” European nations were virtual free riders on the U.S. through NATO.
It looks like this may finally be changing: Europe has been galvanized by Trump’s throwing down of the gauntlet concerning Ukraine. If Europe had been strong, Ukraine might have been able to continue its conflict with Russia, but Europe is not strong. The leaders of Europe have chosen military weakness for almost seven decades. Indeed, in 2024, Europe spent more money buying oil and gas from Russia than it spent on aid to Ukraine, raising the uncomfortable question of whose side Europe is actually on in this conflict. But consider: Russia only has 145 million people; Europe has 450 million. Europe produces almost 17% of world GDP; Russia produces less than 5%. If Europe had invested in its military capabilities, including a credible nuclear deterrent, Russia would never have dared to invade Ukraine in the first place.
What modus vivendi or even rapprochement might happen in a future generation when we could potentially see a militarily strong Europe and a weaker post-Putin Russia that might have more cause to fear China than Europe? No one can predict, of course, but a cold peace in Ukraine gives the time needed for significant change to occur over the ensuing decades. Sometimes the world cannot achieve justice in the moment; sometimes it must wait for the march of decades. A cold peace in Ukraine now gives time the chance it needs to work its magic on the international system.