Filenews 7 March 2025 - by Andreas Kluth
We should not be distracted by any "minerals deal" that the U.S. and Ukraine may or may not conclude in the coming weeks, as it will not address the main obstacle to the ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine that U.S. President Donald Trump wants so badly to achieve. The real question is: How can third-party guarantors credibly guarantee Ukraine's security after a ceasefire?
Reliability: All the "thorns" are hidden in this word. The concept has been so murky that it has occupied strategic analysts since at least the American scholar Thomas Schelling (who later won a Nobel Prize for his work in game theory) analyzed the types of deterrence during the initial phase of the Cold War. We cannot ask Schelling to give an opinion on Ukraine today (he died in 2016). But here's what he wrote about the American troops — and indirectly also about their British and French partners — stationed in West Berlin at the time.
"What can 7,000 American soldiers or 12,000 allied soldiers do?" he asked. "To put it bluntly, they can die. They can die heroically, dramatically and in a way that guarantees that the action cannot stop there. They represent the pride, honour, and reputation of the United States government and its armed forces — and they can obviously keep the entire Red Army at bay."
What Schelling was describing is a "tripwire" force. In literal usage, this word – tripwire – means the wire, the thread, which, when an intruder stumbles upon it, triggers an alarm or an explosion or some other consequence that the intruder has reason to fear. Metaphorically, tripwire is a relatively modest deployment of troops that could never stop an invading army, but which, if neutralized by the enemy, would force his country to seek revenge and thus get involved in the war.
Deterrence is considered strong when two conditions are met: First, the country (or coalition) that sent the force must appear willing to take revenge on its troops if they are damaged. Second, the country must also be capable of defeating the aggressor, which in the Ukrainian scenario is Russia under its president, Vladimir Putin.
The Allied tripwire forces in West Berlin and West Germany were an example of successful deterrence: the Cold War, despite various horrific crises, never became a "hot" conflict. Beyond that, however, there haven't been enough reliable tripwire-like strategies in the past, as Dan Reiter at Emory University and Paul Post at the University of Chicago have shown.
In 1949, for example, the Americans maintained enough forces in East Asia to deter a North Korean attack on South Korea, but by 1950 the American presence had shrunk, that force lost credibility, and the North declared war. The U.S. stance in the South from 1953 onwards has regained credibility, but this is no guarantee that it will remain so. In other places—such as Beirut in 1983 and Mogadishu in 1993—American peacekeepers were attacked, but instead of intervening forcefully, the U.S. eventually withdrew.
When the U.S. provides the peacekeepers, the question is not about theoretical capability — the U.S. military could win any battle it chooses. But this is not the case when troops are sent by others. In 1995 Dutch soldiers, deployed under the auspices of the United Nations, were unable to prevent Bosnian Serbs from massacring Muslims in Srebrenica.
In the current Ukrainian context, too, it is uncertain whether, say, a Franco-British force without American support will be capable or credible to deter Putin from invading again. Trump's vice president, J.D. Vance, expressed — somewhat awkwardly — his opinion on the matter when he scoffed at the idea of guarantees that would be backed by "20,000 troops from some random country that hasn't been at war in 30 or 40 years."
Now consider why Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is so disheartened by everything Trump and Vance have said and done over the past month, during which they have adopted the Kremlin's absurd narrative that Ukraine (not Russia) is the aggressor and Zelensky (not Putin) the dictator. During the disastrous clash between Zelensky, Trump and Vance in the Oval Office last week, what the Ukrainian president was trying (and failing) to prove was precisely this need for credible security guarantees, which means being backed by the US.
Ukrainians have a particularly traumatic history. In 1994, they abandoned Soviet-era nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees (without security forces to enforce them) from the US, UK, and Russia. These were obviously useless. After Putin's annexation of Crimea and infiltration of Donbas in 2014, the Ukrainians received new guarantees in two other agreements, dubbed Minsk I and II and mediated by Germany and France. These now seem hollow.
The security guarantee Zelensky wants and Putin fears is Ukraine's NATO membership. For an inexplicable reason, especially for someone who considers himself a negotiator, Trump has already removed this card from the table before negotiations even begin. The next best option is the presence of American troops on the ground. Trump has ruled that out as well.
So European NATO allies and other Western countries are now discussing mounting a tripwire force without American support. But this runs up against the vexing dual issue of capability and credibility – the consequential consequence, after all, is a readiness to go to war against Russia.
Regardless of what Trump and others propose, the following problem cannot be sidestepped: frank ceasefire talks cannot begin without the prospect of credible security guarantees — no guarantee can be credible without the United States — but the U.S. under Trump is moving away from such a commitment.
During the Cold War, U.S. presidents saw the stakes in places like West Berlin as nothing less than what Schelling called "the pride, honur, and reputation of the United States." Trump and Vance are abundantly clear that they define the stakes in Ukraine — which is fighting for its survival as a nation — as nothing more than rare earths on its soil. "I'm not worried about security," Trump told Zelensky in the Oval Office. "I'm worried about whether the deal will be done." As long as Trump repeats this, Zelensky will find it difficult to trust, and thus participate, in talks to end the war.
Performance – Editing: Lydia Roumpopoulou
