It was perhaps his most outlandish claim on the campaign trail, yet one Donald Trump repeated as he was seeking to win back his old job as president of the United States: He can resolve the war in Ukraine in a single day.
“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,” Trump asserted over the summer.
Now with Inauguration Day a week away, his ambitions are a lot less grand. And rightly so: Anybody who seriously believed Trump could quickly resolve Europe’s deadliest conflict in nearly eight decades was drinking the Kool-Aid. Trump and his national security advisers are instead looking at a monthslong process to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy to the war, is aiming to get something done in 100 days. Trump, meanwhile, told reporters he’d like to have the war settled in the first six months.
Good luck.
The optimist in me would like to give Trump the benefit of the doubt that he will exhibit the toughness, boldness and creativity required to terminate a war that has resulted in more than 1 million casualties and hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. But the realist in me thinks such a scenario, while not impossible, is unlikely given the stakes involved for both parties, the animus that has grown between them after nearly three full years of combat and the prevailing dogma in Washington that any compromise with Putin will be the modern-day equivalent of pulling a Neville Chamberlain in Munich in 1938.
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