Our President has proposed a shameful give-away of Crimea and an additional chunk of Ukraine to Vladimir Putin. This compounds President Obama’s shameful acquiescence in Putin’s seizing Crimea, and President Biden’s also failing to live up to the security assurances that the United States and Russia gave Ukraine in 1994 when Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear arsenal in the Budapest Memorandum.
From my experience as a litigation attorney who participated in numerous mediations before retiring, I have found that successful mediations require a realistic assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, wants, and needs of the parties, including their willingness to take a calculated risk. In court, one never knows what a judge or jury will do. The outcome of war is likewise uncertain. In negotiations, wants should not obscure a realistic assessment of one’s needs. A party’s unmet true nonnegotiable needs can justify the risk. What are the needs of Ukraine, Russia, and the West?
Ukraine’s nonnegotiable needs are its survival, sovereignty, and statehood.
Russia’s purported “core” needs are a hodgepodge of propaganda. Surprisingly, Putin has not cited the history of Napoleon’s and Hitler’s invasions of Russia to assert that Russia needs Ukraine as a buffer against Europe. Instead, he has claimed Russia needs to destroy neo-Nazis and drug addicts in Ukraine who somehow threaten Russia. His real motivation is his belief that the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union insulted 1,000 years of Russian history. In the tradition of past Soviet dictators and early Russian empire builders, he wants a new Russian Empire that reclaims Ukraine and the nations of Eastern Europe that were once under Soviet domination. These are not “needs” but “wants” of a megalomaniac. Putin’s hodgepodge of propaganda obscures his fear that Western democratic values in Ukraine will undermine his regime and his personal quest to reestablish a glorious Russian Empire.
Russia’s real needs are to prevent its economy from collapsing, rid itself of its latest dictatorship, and obtain firm security guarantees from the West and Ukraine. Putin’s Soviet-style dictatorship is likely vulnerable to the same internal rot that collapsed the Soviet Union. Russia is sapped after three years of heavy war losses and increasingly severe economic weakness under Western sanctions. Despite Putin’s bluster, Russia is at serious risk for, if not on the cusp of, economic collapse. Rot in its military manifests in its shooting surrendering Ukrainians, repeatedly bombing innocent civilians, and needing troops from North Korea. Russian soldiers are wasted in waves against stout Ukrainian defenses.
The West’s need is to end Putin’s threat to world peace. His demands for a cease-fire would neuter Ukraine for Russia’s eventual takeover, allow Russia to dig out of its predicament, and allow Russia to rebuild itself to continue Putin’s quest. Ukraine and the West should firmly oppose Putin so that the Russian forces can be removed from Ukraine, the threat to Europe can end, America’s mineral investment in Ukraine can be protected, Putin can fall, and democracy can develop in Russia.
Here is how: (1) Impose the heaviest sanctions possible; (2) Adopt and supplement retired Admiral James Stavridis’ concept of a renewed Reforger by also threatening to, and being prepared to move American and European combat soldiers into Ukraine; (3) Ensure that these troops and the Ukrainians are well-supplied and armed for conventional war, and protected by air support and defenses; and (4) Forcefully meet Putin’s anticipated threat to use nuclear weapons with our own threat to do the same. This should bring a cease-fire, meaningful negotiations, and tend to Putin’s demise.
Putin masks his weakness by threatening the use of nuclear weapons. So far, he has cowed three presidents with these threats. The risk that Russia would start a nuclear war is no greater than the risk that we would. China and other Russian leaders will not let Putin and his circle go that far. Recent history demonstrates that Russia will back down when faced with a credible counter-threat of nuclear destruction. On October 25, 1973, the Soviet Union was about to intervene militarily on the side of the Arabs in the Yom Kippur War between Israel and a coalition of Arab states. America initiated Defense Condition (DefCon) III, putting our nuclear-armed forces on high alert, just short of getting them ready for imminent use under DefCon II. Troops of the 82nd Airborne Division readied to board aircraft for deployment. U.S. aircraft carriers moved toward the Eastern Mediterranean. The Soviets stood down.
World peace requires that the full force of American and European power be brought against Putin.
Daniel O. Jamison is a retired attorney.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.