Aaron MacLean critiques U.S. Russia-Ukraine war efforts, tracing stalled talks to a leaked 28-point November proposal—seen as near-surrender terms—rejected by Ukraine after mid-October negotiations involving Tomahawk missiles, oil sanctions, and intermediaries Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. He warns Russia’s no-de-escalation signals, like the Pentagon’s NATO ambiguity hints, embolden Putin despite administration divisions: one favoring speed/business deals, another pro-Russia, and a third aligning with traditional GOP Ukraine support. Rejecting Democratic claims of a 2014 U.S.-backed coup, MacLean insists Russia’s Crimea seizure was undemocratic, while Trump-era shifts risk undermining leverage. Comparing Ukraine to Middle East diplomacy’s consistency—successful by pressuring Hamas and backing Israel—he urges patience, dismissing rushed peace talks as naive, and links U.S. alliance debates to a potential violent, morally indifferent great-power order. The episode ends amid concerns over the Navy’s 287-ship count decline, signaling broader defense tensions. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, we seem to be, as of this morning, at the end of a chapter that began back in the middle of October.
If you think back to that moment, and I realize a lot has happened since then.
It seems like every week this year is about a year's worth of news.
The president had just succeeded in getting the living hostages out of Gaza.
He was giving a speech in Israel to the Knesset there.
And at around that same time, the current movement towards the most recent effort at peace in Ukraine was getting underway.
The president was contemplating giving Tomahawk missiles to the Ukrainians, was on the verge of issuing some pretty strong sanctions on some Russian oil companies.
And at around this time, he fields a call from President Putin, and a round of conversations picks up between Americans led by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Russian representatives.
And over the course of October and into November, this proposal, you know, composed in 28 points, comes together.
It leaks towards the end of November, which creates an enormous media and diplomatic firestorm.
And at the same time, it's delivered to the Ukrainians as something close to an ultimatum.
I don't think it turns out not to have been an ultimatum, but at the moment it sort of felt like it.
The Ukrainians politely declined to accept these terms, which were pretty close to a request that they surrender.
That slightly overstates it, but only slightly.
A round of talks came past in Geneva, led by now by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
And then what we've seen this week is the revised proposal, which we don't actually know, it's not been reported precisely what's in the proposal as it currently stands.
That was taken to Moscow by Witkoff and Kushner.
They had long talks there with Putin and have been meeting for the last couple days with the Ukrainians in Florida.
That's where we stand.
We don't know exactly what the content of the new revised proposal is, except I think we can fairly infer that it's less radical than the 28 points that were delivered to the Ukrainians a couple of weeks ago.
It's been a kind of wild ride.
It's not clear to me we're closer to peace than we were six weeks ago.
And I think you see a lot of the tensions that are driving action in this administration sort of evident in the back and forth of the last six weeks.
They're just competing visions of what to do about Ukraine, what to do about this war, really what to do about the question of world order.
You have, most importantly, obviously, the president himself.
His priority is peace, and his priority within that category is speed.
He wants the war to end.
He wants everyone involved doing business.
He especially wants America doing business.
He wants good deals for America, not bad deals.
He doesn't understand in some way.
This is what the vice president said about his views.
He doesn't understand why these two countries keep fighting.
Why can't they stop fighting and do business?
You have parties in and around the administration who are quite hostile to Ukraine, who see Ukraine as part of a complex of liberal powers like some of the European countries that are aligned with liberal forces in America, that in some ways are their enemy, and they would like Russia actually to have the upper hand over Ukraine and a conclusion of the war that's superior to Russia and a kind of vision of world order where the United States and Russia cooperate to set terms in that part of the world.
And then you have parties in and around the administration who have a much more traditional Republican view of this, much more favorable to Ukraine, want terms of the deal that are more favorable to Ukraine, even if they accept that this is also likely to end in some kind of negotiation.
So those are at least three of the forces.
There's more.
And those things are all kind of competing and in tension with one another.
And it explains, I think, some of the back and forth you see.
One of the statements that came out from that shuttle diplomacy that you speak of is with the United States and Ukraine.
They say this.
In recent days, both parties agree that real progress towards any agreement depends on Russia's readiness to show serious commitment to long-term peace, including steps towards de-escalation and cessation of killings.
If that's the linchpin, what's the probability of that happening?
Yeah, the Russians seem to show no interest in that.
And look, I mean, I think that that's a pretty responsible formulation, and that does seem to sum up the pendulum seems to have swung back to a, in my view, slightly more responsible, slightly more pro-Ukraine vision of the situation.
But the problem is, the Russians are getting all kinds of signals that actually we're not really going to demand those things of them.
One, obviously, there's no way they can't have been encouraged by those 28 points, and the fact that we were willing to deliver those 28 points to the Ukrainians.
That's one element of encouragement for them.
There's the national security strategy, which just came out, which has, it's itself a document that I think reflects a lot of these tensions I was talking about.
In its section on the Europeans, it is quite harsh and critical.
That's got to be encouraging to the Russians.
You also saw reports this week that the Pentagon, the Department of War, is communicating to our European allies that in two years essentially they want the United States's role in NATO to be significantly reduced in a variety of important ways.
If you're sitting there in Moscow watching all of this, why would you then conclude from all of these signals, oh gosh, we better come to some kind of deal or otherwise things are going to get worse from us?
I think they think exactly the opposite, and that seems to me to be a key flaw in how the administration is pursuing this.
In terms of shuttle diplomacy, besides the actual going back and forth, when you decide if this effort is really worthwhile, well, I think the view of the president is that any effort for peace is worthwhile so long as it's got a shot.
And so I think you're going to see more of this.
You're going to see more attempts.
What I would advise the administration is they had tremendous success in the Middle East.
Not only are things a little quieter than they were earlier this year in terms of ground combat, but critically, and frankly, I mean, really remarkably, they deserve nothing but praise for this.
They were able to get all the living hostages out of Gaza from Hamas.
That was an extraordinary diplomatic achievement.
They achieved it by largely aligning themselves with America's traditional ally in the region, Israel, keeping the pressure on Hamas and keeping support flowing to Israel.
What you see with regard to Ukraine is much more ambiguous and much more shifting.
And it doesn't seem to me that there's the same consistency or same embrace of the kind of strategy that was successful in the Middle East.
The Hudson Institute believes in American strength.
It believes in the importance of preserving our Republican experiment.
And it believes in understanding the nature of war and international political competition so as to advise administrations and policymakers of both parties about the path ahead, about what will work and what won't work.
It has its roots in thinking about difficult questions during the Cold War, about nuclear strategy and the nature of warfare there.
And those kinds of questions, even though the details have all changed, remain just as relevant today.
The nature of war is changing day by day, week by week, even as human nature and the fundamentals of international competition stay the same.
So we are here to help Washington policymakers understand what it is that they're dealing with and think through the best ways to defend America.
A lot of people are inspired by President Zelensky and the efforts of the Ukrainian people to defend themselves.
I'm inspired by those efforts.
This is one of the problems that this administration has when it prioritizes speed in terms of settling this war one way or the other.
If speed is your priority, at some point it's going to occur to you, as it obviously has to this administration a couple of times this year, that the fastest route in the face of Russian recalcitrance is going to be to put pressure on the party in the war that is dependent on you.
And in that case, that's obviously Ukraine.
So if speed is your priority, faster it's easier to go to the Ukrainians and say, guys, it's time for you to accept a deal that maybe you don't love to bring this to a conclusion.
But the problem is precisely this fact that people are inspired by President Zelensky.
I think a lot of Americans support the Ukrainian cause.
A lot of Republicans, despite all the tensions on the right about this stuff, are still very pro-Ukraine.
And I think on some level, this administration recognizes, the president recognizes, that a world in which some sort of de facto surrender, surrender on terms, is imposed on the Ukrainians, and or, frankly, more likely, we attempt to impose some sort of surrender on terms.
The Ukrainians essentially decline to accept it.
We, in a huff, say, we're out.
You're on your own, which has been threatened a couple of times now.
That's a world in which I think Ukrainian battlefield losses start to accelerate in the absence of our support, where European unity, such as it is, already pretty tenuous, starts to fracture even more dramatically.
It's a world that starts to feel less safe pretty quickly in a world in which it seems, and there are some in the administration who reject, they would reject what I'm about to say as a sort of simplistic moral view of the world, but it seems as though we're on the side of the bad guys as Ukraine falls and Europe falls apart.
That is not a world that feels safe to the average American.
And I think the recognition of that political fact is why every time the administration comes up to this line where it feels like it really is going to pull the trigger this time, it's going to force the Ukrainians to do this or it's out, we actually stop.
We've backed off of that line a couple of times now, very dramatically in the last couple of weeks, because I don't think the political consequence of that is positive for the administration.
Republican line, you're on with the Hudson Institute there.
McLean, good morning.
Go ahead.
unidentified
Good morning.
Thank you so much for taking my call.
I would just like to say that in World War II and excuse me, in World War I and World War II, we backed Europe and we also pushed back on Hitler to the point where he was destroyed.
And Germany, we killed lots and lots of civilians.
And so I don't understand our president.
I support our president mainly, but in this case, I think Putin is just walking away with a sly grin that he's going to go in after the president's out of office.
He's going to take over more of Ukraine if he gets his way now.
I really, really support Ukraine's efforts.
I wish we would back them to the hilt and drive them out like we did in Afghanistan.
We drove the Russians out of Afghanistan with the help of the Taliban.
And that didn't end too well in the end because of our weak President Biden, the way that that was a disaster, how that ended.
And look, I think you could debate the extent to which we're backing Ukraine to the hill, but we are back in Ukraine.
This administration is back in Ukraine.
We are supplying support.
We are in a variety of contexts.
And again, every time we sort of walk up to this line where it seems like that's going to be over, we've not actually crossed the line.
You know, this question of what are the parallels between the present moment and World War II, that's a sort of debate that's alive and well on the right.
You may have noticed, Pedro, there's a segment of what I like to call the podcast right that is sort of relitigating the Second World War right now in ways that I personally find quite alarming.
I mean, there's a long-standing trend in sort of right or far-right conversation about whether or not World War II was actually properly decided, whether or not the United States actually navigated that correctly.
That element of the conversation on the right has largely been shunted off into kind of a corner that nobody really wants to go to for some decades now, but it's sort of resurged in the last couple of years.
And in that vision, where the United States was sort of entangled in European affairs in the 1940s in ways that it shouldn't have been, it's funny.
If you go back actually to the rhetoric of the original America First movement, not President Trump's conception of America First, but the 1930s conception of America First, their rhetoric about Britain in 1939 and 1940 at the start of World War II sounds very, very similar to the critical rhetoric about Ukraine today.
It's the same sort of ideas, it's the same arguments, sort of like my point about the Hudson Institute earlier.
As much as change in terms of technology and details, some of the fundamental aspects of these political questions actually never change.
I would like to remind everybody how we got into the Ukraine-Russia war.
There was a democratically elected government some years ago in the Ukraine, and we overthrew it.
At that time, the president of Ukraine wanted to develop closer economic ties to Russia, which we disapproved of.
He didn't want to turn his back on us, but he wanted to develop closer ties economically to Russia.
There was an election coming up, and he offered to move the date of the election up so it would be sooner.
That was not acceptable to us.
We overthrew that democratically elected government, and those that we put in power there were photographed, and these pictures were cast broadcast worldwide of them running through the streets carrying American Confederate flags and Nazi flags.
Then we were told that Russia moved their tanks into Crimea and took it over.
No, Crimea voted in a referendum to join Russia because they watched us in Ukraine and they were afraid of us.
They were afraid they might be next.
And so that referendum, that vote that took place in Crimea, was covered by international poll watchers and observers from 12 different countries.
And every one of them concluded that it was a fair, honest vote.
We're not on the right side of anything in history.
We weren't right in Vietnam.
We were not right in Iraq.
And I'm just going to wrap this up with one thing.
After we got done in Iraq, I was online and I read an editorial that compared what George W. Bush did in Iraq to what Hitler did in Poland.
No, useful that call is a useful reminder that there's a lot of hostility to the Ukrainian call in parts of the left as well.
So, you know, it's a bipartisan affair.
Look, I reject a fair amount of the characterizations of the fact from the caller.
To the extent that there was an upheaval in Ukrainian politics a decade ago regarding whether that country was going to trend westward or trend in the direction of Russia, and regardless of whatever the Obama administration felt about it at the time, there were a lot of Ukrainians involved.
The United States didn't overthrow anything.
There's Ukrainian politics, and Ukrainians were masters of their own fate there.
The characterization of Crimea is, I think, completely off.
In fact, the caller sort of reverses, I think, the situation.
Nothing was overthrown by the United States in Ukraine prior to the 2014 seizure of Crimea.
The Russians absolutely seized Crimea in 2014.
And any referenda or political actions occurred downstream of that and under their control.
So I guess that's my best swing at that one, Pedro.
And Mr. McLean, it was Vladimir Putin himself saying in recent days when it comes to this idea of land, saying either, and Donbas, the region there, saying either we will liberate these territories by force or Ukrainian troops will leave these territories.
And I'll just say this about what Putin's objectives are.
I remember a conversation with friends of mine on Capitol Hill early in 2022, just before the Russians went back in in force into Ukraine.
And some of the members of our conversation were skeptical about whether or not this was even going to happen.
They couldn't understand why Putin would do this.
What does he want?
It's obviously going to be a quagmire.
The Russian economy doesn't need this.
The Biden administration was, by the way, saying sort of similar things at the time.
What could he possibly want?
What could possibly be his objective?
And a colleague of mine deathlessly offered in that moment.
Guys, his objective is Ukraine.
He wants Ukraine.
In some ways, it's no more complicated than that.
In other ways, it's a little more complicated than that.
But this is, by the way, I think this fact that that's the Russian objective is in fact kind of the core problem with this effort to rush to some kind of peace agreement.
The president, President Trump, clearly sees the world in terms where peace is better than war.
We ought to stop fighting.
We ought to do business.
We, the Americans, ought to do well in that business.
The deals ought to favor us.
And let's just stop all the nonsense and get to the kind of work that's mutually beneficial to all parties.
And the Russians sort of lean into that with some of their diplomatic outreach.
They dangle sort of attractive business deals that are going to be available to Americans in the aftermath of a peace agreement.
You saw the lead Russian negotiator, this guy Kirill Dmitriev, who's the head of the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund, post this video on X this week, a sort of AI-generated video of a tunnel that's going to be dug between Alaska and Siberia, sort of of all the ridiculous ideas.
This is a flashy video.
This is the kind of stuff they're dangling.
And by the way, I think to a receptive audience in some level with the administration.
But then, you know, they get in the room with Putin.
We don't actually know what was said earlier this week with Witkoff and Kushner in the room with Putin.
We do have some reporting out of the Alaska summit earlier this year, which in a way was sort of a similar round with a similar conclusion.
Putin gets in the room and he starts talking about Novo Versia and the Russian right to Ukraine and this and that duke from the 18th century and what they agreed to.
And it's a completely different conversation coming from a completely different place.
This is a man who is deeply, ideologically committed to having Ukraine.
And other stuff too, the restoration of the Russian Empire, which would be facilitated by the splitting of NATO.
There's other stuff.
But the man wants Ukraine, and deals that don't give him Ukraine are not very attractive to him right now.
You mentioned the national security strategy earlier.
It was published, and it had this section which mentions Ukraine, saying the Ukraine war has had perverse effect on increasing Europe's, especially Germany's external dependencies.
Today, German chemical companies are building some of the world's largest processing plants in China using Russian gas that they cannot obtain at home.
The Trump administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectation for the war purchased in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy and suppress oppression.
The message, I guess, overall, but particularly to those countries he calls out.
Yeah, no, the national security strategy did not go lightly on the Europeans.
It also did not go lightly on quote-unquote American elites.
Those are some of the enemies out there as far as the authors of the National Security Strategy are concerned.
And again, I mean, to my point, look, I don't agree with everything that you just outlined there in that quote.
There are some elements of it that I think are probably undeniably true and other elements that I think are a mischaracterization.
That said, if your goal is to get to a negotiated settlement of the war with the Russians that are going to definitionally need to be on terms acceptable to the Ukrainians, so it's going to have to be a compromise that the Russians feel some level of pain in.
Why would you signal over and over again that actually the Russians' enemies in Europe are, if not our enemies exactly, people we are exasperated with?
Why would you signal that you're willing to force down the Ukrainian throats or at least attempt to force down their throats terms that are unacceptable to them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?
It doesn't put you in a position of great leverage over the Russians, which is precisely what you, we already have leverage over the Ukrainians.
We need leverage over the Russians if you want to bring a deal to pass.
In my mind, I just see a little bit of an analogy.
Maybe the guests who have the expertise could touch upon this.
But in my mind, NATO was a response to the Warsaw Pact or Warsaw Pact response to NATO.
When Joseph Stalin built the wall and enslaved half of Europe for almost 50 years, America, United States, Western Europe did what they could, but also it served their purposes in a twisted way economically.
I have to ask why the focus on Ukraine.
I support the noble Ukrainian people.
My heart is with them.
However, there were European nations for 50 years that had to resist on their own, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia.
When you had a Soviet socialist republic and communism, it was a different story.
I'm just kind of curious.
I'm not a scholar.
Maybe you could explain why this is so critical today.
Yeah, I actually think this is an excellent question.
It's kind of the key question on the right.
What are we doing here?
What is our ultimate purpose or vision of world order that leads us to be supporting the Ukrainians?
Look, there are some on the right, just sort of spooling out the logic of that question, who would like to abandon the sort of post-1945, post-Cold War American network of alliances, which of course NATO is one of the cornerstones, perhaps the cornerstone of that system, and switch it out for a world in which world order is determined by great powers, perhaps operating within spheres of influence, the United States and Russia.
Obviously, two candidates for that.
You might even add China in somehow.
And in that world where great powers sit together and determine the course of events, countries like Ukraine just kind of have to suck it up and settle with what we decide amongst ourselves.
That's a revolutionary change with how the United States has done business, really, since 1945.
Among the problems, so that's, I think, in a way the question.
The main problem with that vision is, one, there has to be a kind of revolution in affairs before you could even get to that kind of world order.
I predict that that is going to be a very messy and violent revolution.
Two, this kind of balance of power politics where the great powers settle things and the little powers just have to figure it out.
Setting aside all moral questions and just speaking in terms of the American interest purely, it's premised on the notion that these other powers want a balance of power, that they actually are happy to just draw lines and let the United States have its place and they're going to have their place.
And when our interests are colliding, we're just going to settle it peacefully.