Do not be distracted by whatever “minerals deal” the US and Ukraine may or may not hash out in the coming weeks, for it would not address the main obstacle to the kind of ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine that US President Donald Trump so badly wants to broker. That question is: How can third-party guarantors credibly assure the security of Ukraine after an armistice?
Credibility: Every devil in every detail is wrapped up in that one word. The concept is so slippery that it has kept strategists busy at least since US academic Thomas Schelling (who later won a Nobel Prize for his work in game theory) analyzed types of deterrence during the early Cold War. We cannot ask Schelling to weigh in on Ukraine today (he died in 2016), but here is what he wrote about US troops — and obliquely about their British and French partners as well — stationed in West Berlin at the time.
“What can 7,000 American troops do, or 12,000 Allied troops?” he asked. “Bluntly, they can die. They can die heroically, dramatically, and in a manner that guarantees that the action cannot stop there. They represent the pride, the honor, and the reputation of the United States government and its armed forces; and they can apparently hold the entire Red Army at bay.”
What Schelling was describing is a tripwire force. A literal tripwire is a thread that, when a trespasser stumbles over it, triggers an alarm or a detonation or some other consequence that the intruder has reason to fear. A metaphorical tripwire is a relatively modest deployment of troops that could never stop an invading army, but that would, if eliminated by the enemy, compel the home nation to seek revenge and enter the war.
Deterrence is said to be strong when two conditions are met: First, the country (or coalition) that sent the tripwire force must seem committed to avenging its troops if they are harmed. Second, the country must also be capable of defeating the aggressor, which in the Ukrainian scenario is Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Allied tripwire forces in West Berlin and West Germany were an example of successful deterrence: the Cold War, despite several hair-raising crises, never turned hot. Beyond that case, though, precedents of credible tripwire strategies are rare, as Emory University professor Dan Reiter and University of Chicago associate professor Paul Poast have shown.
In 1949, for example, the US kept enough forces in East Asia to deter a North Korean attack on South Korea, but by 1950 the US presence shrank, the tripwire lost credibility and North Korea went to war. The US posture in South Korea since 1953 has been more credible again, but that is no guarantee that it would remain so. In other places — such as Beirut in 1983 and Mogadishu in 1993 — US peacekeepers did come under attack, but the US, instead of intervening with overwhelming force, eventually withdrew.
When the US provides the peacekeepers, the question at least is not about theoretical capability — the US military could win any single fight it chooses. Not so when others send the troops. In 1995, Dutch soldiers, deployed under the aegis of the UN, could not prevent Bosnian Serbs from massacring Muslims in Srebrenica, and there is little that the Netherlands could have done in the aftermath.
In today’s Ukrainian context, too, it is moot whether, say, a Franco-British tripwire force without US backing would be either capable or credible in deterring Putin from invading again. US Vice President JD Vance clumsily betrayed his own verdict on the matter when he mocked the idea of guarantees backed by “20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.”
Now consider why Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is so disheartened by everything Trump and Vance have said and done for the past month, during which they have taken up the Kremlin’s absurd narrative that Ukraine (rather than Russia) is the aggressor and Zelenskiy (rather than Putin) the dictator. During the disastrous bust-up between Zelenskiy, Trump and Vance in the Oval Office last week, the point the Ukrainian was trying (and failing) to make was precisely the need for security guarantees to be credible, meaning US-backed.
Ukrainians have a particular history of trauma. In 1994, they gave up their Soviet-era nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees (without tripwire forces to enforce them) from the US, the UK and Russia. Those were worthless, obviously. Following Putin’s annexation of Crimea and infiltration of Donbas in 2014, the Ukrainians were given new guarantees in two other agreements, called Minsk I and II, and brokered by Germany and France. Those now look cynically vacuous.
The security guarantee that Zelenskiy understandably wants, and Putin fears, is Ukraine’s accession to NATO. Inexplicably for somebody who fancies himself a dealmaker, Trump has already taken that chip off the table before negotiations have even begun. The next best option is US boots on the ground. Trump has ruled that out, too.
So European NATO allies and other Western nations are now discussing laying a tripwire without US support, but that runs into the vexed twin question of capability and credibility — the implied consequence, after all, is a readiness to go to war against Russia.
No matter what else Trump and others propose, there is no skirting the dilemma: Earnest ceasefire talks cannot begin without the prospect of credible security guarantees. No guarantee can be credible without the US, but the US under Trump is moving away from such a commitment.
During the Cold War, US presidents of both parties saw the stakes in hotspots such as West Berlin as nothing less than what Schelling called “the pride, the honor, and the reputation of the United States.”
Trump and Vance are quite clear that they define the stakes in Ukraine, which is fighting for its survival as a nation, as little more than the rare earths in its ground.
“I’m not worried about security,” Trump told Zelenskiy in the Oval Office. “I’m worried about getting the deal done.”
The more Trump says that, the less Zelenskiy can trust, and thus enter, talks to end the war.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for The Economist.
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