Filenews 5 December 2025 - by Steve Forbes
Negotiating a peace deal with Vladimir Putin is not the same as negotiating a real estate deal in Manhattan.
Governments, especially democratic ones, are prone to two major foreign policy mistakes: misjudging the motives of opposing sides in negotiations and overestimating the economy as a modus operandi by which states determine their diplomatic and military strategies. This can also happen - in a catastrophic way - in talks to end the Russia-Ukraine war.
President Trump and U.S. officials hope that the Russian president will be enticed to sign an agreement with the prospect of making multibillion-dollar deals for oil and gas extraction, mineral extraction, and the construction of hotels, complex buildings, resorts, high-tech parks, etc. They believe that such prospects will also "soften" Ukraine into making compromises.
They dream that the great commercial activity will guarantee a lasting peace between the two states. No one knows what may come of these efforts. But no one should have any illusions about Putin. He will only sign an agreement that he considers allows him to quickly occupy Ukraine. The prospect of a nice tower that Trump will build in Red Square and bear the name of the Russian "dictator" – perhaps "Putin Place" – will not deter him from his ultimate goals.
Certainly, Putin would like to conclude agreements that will help the troubled Russian economy. But immediate economic issues are of no importance in the face of his imperial ambitions. And these ambitions do not stop in Ukraine, as Russia's neighbours can attest: Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Norway and Sweden. Germany has been alarmed and has undertaken to implement a large, multi-year rearmament program.
The truth is that the only way for the Kremlin to move forward with an agreement that will truly guarantee Ukraine's independence is to give Kiev the necessary weapons and freedom of action to repel the Russian invaders. Otherwise, Putin will remain convinced that he will win this war, either on the battlefield through his horrific exhaustion tactics, or at the negotiating table with the US betraying Ukraine, just as Britain and France betrayed Czechoslovakia to Hitler in Munich in 1938.
However, the illusion that the economy can replace power is difficult to dispel. Before World War II, for example, Britain and France reassured themselves that Nazi Germany's serious economic problems would prevent conflict. What they didn't understand was that the German economy may have been in bad shape by traditional political standards, but the Nazi regime was preparing a war economy: a very different model. Of course, the expectation of Germany's economic collapse was never fulfilled.
Before World War I, many believed that no military conflict would break out – or if it did, it would be very short-lived – because Europe's economies were so closely intertwined that a general collapse would follow if trade stopped. When the war broke out, there were very serious upheavals, but the states adapted and four years of bloodshed followed.
The other illusion, which is closely linked to the economic one, is the wrong assessment of the other side's motives. President Obama and his staff mistakenly believed that Iran's mullahs were genuinely interested in the good of their people, that they could be persuaded to abandon their terrorist, "revolutionary" goals and nuclear ambitions through the lifting of sanctions and the prospect of prosperity from trade and foreign investment.
Iran's mullahs are "revolutionaries". Hitler was a "revolutionary". Putin is a "revolutionary". Such leaders do not operate by traditional standards.
