What We Talk About, When We Talk About Talks.

The End may be further away than you think.

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With impeccable timing, the new American Defence Secretary, Mr Hesgeth, made his announcement about a revision of US policy towards Ukraine, following on the heels of the Trump/Putin telephone conversation, at just about the moment my last Essay was published. I’ve therefore not had a chance to write anything about these developments yet, although if you read the estimable Naked Capitalism site that day (which you should) you will have seen some of my immediate thoughts taken from emails exchanged with Yves Smith. And since Yves gently hinted that I might usefully produce an Essay on the subject, especially the aspect of negotiations, well, I decided to do so.

As I write, the ground in Europe is still vibrating from the shock, and the political and media classes are still trapped between incredulous disbelief and barely-concealed anger that any such thing could have happened. They are still trapped in Cliché Land (“abandoning Ukraine”) and it may be some time before anything resembling reality actually penetrates their skulls. But in the meantime, and while we wait for some kind of rationality to gain a limited purchase, there are a couple of general points to make, and then I will get more deeply into the question of “talks.”

The first is the belief that the apparent disengagement of the US from Ukraine will actually make much difference. The only way in which this would be true is if a Ukrainian victory (generously defined) would be possible with further US assistance, but not without it. But in order for that to be true, it would be necessary to argue that, whereas the Ukrainian Army after eight years of fighting could not retake control of the whole of the breakaway Republics when the UA was at full strength and the rebels were weak, then in some way a massively weaker UA could defeat not only the rebels but the Russian Army as well, with a little more effort and support from Washington. This is clearly delusional.

After all, the basis of the western approach, since the start of the War, was that Russia was weak, its economy was in a bad way, its Army was useless and that after a few defeats Putin would be toppled from power and succeeded by some pro-western clone or other. Apparently rational people do seem to have believed that: a number seem to do so even now. But since a clear military victory by Ukraine was recognised to be impossible essentially from the start, then actually, western policy consisted of holding on, keeping the Kiev regime going, and basically just hoping that something would turn up. Every day without a Ukrainian defeat was another day of survival for the West’s policies, and meanwhile western decision-makers nervously swapped accounts of how their intelligence agencies were predicting that Real Soon Now the Russians would collapse. Now if you think about it, building your entire policy around the hope that by keeping an increasingly weaker state going, you could eventually defeat an increasingly strong one, could be called many things, but not “realistic” or “sensible.” But it was the only policy available, and the usual political rules of Sunk Costs theory applied. The anger now arises from the fact that the pretence and discourse of eventual western victory have been officially undermined by the US, and so cannot be sustained any longer.

The second is that this undermining of the discourse was inevitable at some stage, and so the West’s actions and declarations so far have been essentially intended to delay the inevitable visit to the dentist for as long as possible, by any means. This is understandable politically, the more so because the first nation to actually acknowledge that the game was up (as some of the Eastern EU countries had begun to hint) could expect to be publicly vilified and accused of “treason” “appeasement” and heaven knows what else. Nonetheless, one of the basic rules in politics is that if something can’t go on forever, it will end one day. Clearly, western support for Ukraine could not in fact go on forever (calm down Starmer) and so it would have to stop at some point. Although many of the most aggressively anti-Russian western leaders have now vanished from politics, struck down by the Curse of Zelensky, so long as Biden and his coterie were in control of Ukraine policy, this support was not going to stop from Washington.

So this move by Trump was foreseeable, and the only surprise is that other western leaders did not foresee it. There’s no need to overthink a political move of this kind either: Occam’s First Law of Politics says that if you have an explanation that both respects, and makes sense according to, the basic rules through which Politics works, then it is not necessary to seek more complicated explanations. Here, the explanation is very simple. At some point, Project Ukraine will crash and burn, and depending on how it does, anything from mass evacuations to civil war to international political crises to crowds of refugees or possibly all together and more is on the cards. Whilst there is no way that whichever government is in power in Washington can avoid attracting some of the blame, there’s a good political principle that it’s better to get bad news out, and have bad things happen and be done with, as soon as possible.

Although Trump still seems to overestimate US ability to influence the final resolution of the crisis (see later) he does clearly realise that the game is up, and, as a good businessman, wants to get out while he is not too far behind. And as usual, the solipsistic US political system has not spent much time considering how other countries might feel, or react. Likewise, the remarks about China don’t in my view indicate a new policy of increased hostility to that country. After all, the only conceivable scenario of conflict with that country is an essentially maritime one, and maritime forces have little use in Ukraine. Rather, it’s an excuse that there are bigger problems elsewhere. (“Yes, I know the roof needs repairing but the subsidence has to take priority.”)

This leaves European leaders, smarting also from the US Vice-President’s remarks, in an exquisitely painful situation. For several decades, and especially since 2014, they have treated Russia with condescension and hostility. In some cases, as with natural gas, there have been economic relations, and there was even a point under President Hollande when France was supplying two landing ships to the Russia Navy. But there was no warmth in this relationship: Russia, as I have pointed out many times, was the anti-Europe, the country that obstinately clung to concepts of patriotism, history, culture, tradition and even religion, even as the ruling classes of Europe pronounced all these things anathema, and looked forward to a bright new future of de-contextualised European clones, pursuing their respective rational economic advantages to the exclusion of all else.

It followed that Russia was not, and could not be, seen as a real military threat. Its people and institutions had been left behind by the march of history. It might have a few rusting nuclear weapons and still retain an ability to stage human wave attacks, but it could not begin to compete with western military technology and operational capability. This was fortunate, because on the one hand Europe, even more than the United States, had definitively abandoned any recognition of the traditional masculine military virtues of courage, discipline, sacrifice and determination historically associated with military service, and on the other it had lost itself in concepts of the nature and purpose of its national militaries which were too vague and self-contradictory to actually mean anything to potential recruits.

Now I’m not concerned here with whether that was a good or a bad thing, simply with pointing out that you can’t refuse to eat your cake and then complain about being hungry. An aggressive foreign policy based on a flawed assumption about the strength of the nation you have identified as an enemy is only survivable if you actually have a decent military capability to fall back on. If you don’t, it’s likely to be a disaster, and, voilà, a disaster. The ultimate recourse of the Europeans, as it has been since the 1940s, was the hope that the US could be used as a counterweight to Russian power, but this was already shown to be a vain hope by the progress of the Ukraine War, and is now definitively exploded. Thus, European leaders have contrived in a few years, by their own stupidity and lack of foresight, to bring about the exact nightmare of their more competent predecessors: a major crisis with Russia that will effectively be settled by Washington and Moscow without their interests being taken into account.

So that’s where we seem to be this week. And so the focus moves to “talks” as though they were a single thing, as though it was good, bad or neutral to engage in “talks” and if there was a risk that “talks” could mean the end of the world, or something. So once again I’m going to put my public interest hat on, and try to explain what all this fuss about “talks” and “negotiations” actually means.

To begin with, under normal circumstances, governments “talk” to each other all the time, at many different levels. We can distinguish two main types of “talks:” the routine and the aspirational. Routine talks take place at all levels of government, from highly detailed specialists up to Heads of State and Government. They have all sorts of functions, from simple exchanges of information and positions, to coordination, to lobbying, to discussions about cooperation or how cooperation is going, and many more. In most cases, there will be an agenda or a work programme of sorts, and the participants will hope to make progress on specific issues, or even just understand each other’s positions better. Some talks are institutionalised: (the annual NATO Summit for example) others are highly informal and never publicised, such as the deconfliction talks between Russia and the US over Ukraine.

Such talks can also have a symbolic value irrespective of what is discussed, let alone agreed, because they act as an index of the state of relations between governments. Sometimes, when states are feeling each other out, it will take a period of years to convert exploratory talks between working-level officials, through more senior level discussions, finally to a visit by a Minister or even a Prime Minister or President. As the talks progress, there will start to be discussion of possible deliverables at political level, often something to be signed by a visiting Minister and the host government. In certain cases, even agreeing to start talks can be a powerful symbol: it took most western powers a while to agree to talk to the new regime in Tehran after 1979, for example, and the US has still sulked most of the time. Conversely, the mutual visits by East and West at the end of the Cold War did not have much content, but carried enormous political symbolism.

These are essentially the kind of “talks” to which Trump has apparently agreed in the telephone conversation with Putin, in progress between Lavrov and Rubio as this is published, and under normal circumstances, they would indeed be entirely normal. In addition, whilst high-level visits to and from Moscow and meetings in third countries have not been common in recent years, they have not been unknown either. Visits of this sort are not just for show, though, and there will usually be a Declaration of some kind as a minimum outcome. It’s not excluded either that there can be a political breakthrough of some sort on a high-level personal basis, that can unblock disagreements, although this is quite rare and needs anyway to be followed up very quickly by good staff work to make proper use of it. Moreover, high-level visits are carefully prepared: there will be long discussions about the programme and the agenda, and the text of any statements or declarations. In the case of a very senior visit (say President or Prime Minister) the Foreign Minister or equivalent may well visit first to make sure everything is in order. Something like this seems to be happening this week, with preparations for a future Trump-Putin meeting being discussed in Saudi Arabia. (By the way, there were no negotiations.)

But these are not normal circumstances, and it appears to have been decided in some quarters of the West that in the present situation the merest interaction with Russia or the Russians is an act of unforgivable treason. So any visit by Trump to Moscow, or even a bilateral meeting in a third country, will be a highly symbolic political statement. It will be interesting to see how soon thereafter European leaders are prepared to swallow their previous rhetoric and sup with the devil in their turn. After all, the only way that the Europeans can actually have any influence is to talk directly to the Russians, not hector them from a distance. To the extent that they do not do this, they are ceding influence to the US, and cannot subsequently complain if their interests are not taken into account.

These, to repeat, are the kind of “talks” which Trump and Putin seem to be envisaging. That said, it’s not obvious that the two sides have the same expectations of the outcome, and good staff work following this week’s discussions in Saudi Arabia, will be needed to make sure that the initiative towards “talks” is not branded a failure. Trump, stuck in a commercial negotiation mindset and believing the current situation to favour the US far more than it does, probably thinks that he can walk off with the outlines of a “deal,” with the details to be sorted out later. Putin, a careful lawyer and by reputation something of a stickler for detail, will obviously limit himself to setting out the Russian minimum acceptable demands. Now there’s nothing wrong with that divergence, so long as it is expected and allowed for: indeed, it might actually be educational for Trump to understand what the Russian position is and how firmly it is held. The message that Lavrov gives to Rubio is key in this respect.

These are not “talks” that might end the Ukraine War, still less will they deal with the “underlying causes” of that War to which Putin made reference in the telephone call. The most they might do is agree a series of possibilities for actual “talks”—ie negotiations—to be filled out by their respective staffs: the famous “talks about talks.” Here again, though, there’s need for some good advance work, because the two sides’ preconditions for even starting negotiations (the “aspirational” kind of talks I mentioned) are far apart at the moment. The Russians, in particular, have nothing to gain from rushing precipitately into negotiations when the war is going their way.

Moreover, for all the talk about talks to “end the fighting,” there is very little sign that pundits and politicians have any real sense of the complex and interdependent sets of problems that will need to be resolved. And “resolved” is the word here, because negotiations leading to a Treaty are the last stage in the process, when there is underlying agreement about the solutions, and that agreement needs to be put into words. (As I’ve mentioned many times, the world is littered with the debris and the dead of premature or badly-conceived peace treaties.)

So let me repeat, once more, that Treaties do not create agreements, they merely register, in mutually-agreed language, that agreement exists. There may remain disagreement over points of detail, but the willingness to arrive at an agreement has been demonstrated —another reason why the advance work is so important. Moreover, no Treaty can be considered inviolable. Some are for limited periods of time, others have explicit clauses setting out how states can denounce the Treaty, others have so many complex subsidiary arrangements that accusations of treaty violation, more or less well-founded, are constantly being made. Treaties that can explicitly never be denounced are extremely rare—the Euro Treaty comes to mind—and it can be assumed in this case that any Treaty on the future of Ukraine would not be negotiable unless it had denunciation clauses in it.

For this reason, mutual accusations of bad faith between Russia and the West are rather beside the point. Any group of treaties, of the type I will describe below, will only function if the will exists that they should do so. Treaties may fall into disuse (as the 1948 Brussels Treaty did, for example) but so long as they exist they are binding. Once the will to abide by a Treaty is gone, though, there’s nothing much that can be done. Moreover, the poisonous mutual distrust between Russia and the West at the moment is such that no clever wording can produce a text that everyone will have confidence in, unless the underlying agreement is in place. In that case, a text is effectively just an executive superstructure.

As I said earlier, there seems to be little understanding of how complex and inter-dependent the various issues directly related to Ukraine actually are. Here are the ones that occur to me, just on the military/security side:

1. An agreement for the principle and the modalities of the surrender of UA forces to the Russians. This will be a technical agreement, entirely between the two countries. It might well include arrangements for the exchange of prisoners of war.

2. An agreement about how to treat foreign personnel, including members of foreign militaries, contractors and mercenaries, on the territory of Ukraine at the time. This would again be a bilateral agreement: the sending states would not have a voice. It could be negotiated as part of (1).

3. An agreement on the political and military conditions that will be necessary before detailed negotiations with Ukraine and other states can begin, towards a final agreement. These will be essentially those set out by the Russians in 2022, and there will be little scope for negotiation (disarmament, neutrality, ejection of nationalists from government.) Whilst these will take some time to complete, they should at least be agreed and under way before the next stage.

4. An agreement (probably in Treaty form) on the end-state of relations between Ukraine and Russia and how they will be conducted. (A Joint Ministerial Committee, a Joint Consultative Committee on Defence, for example.) Right of entry and inspection of Russian forces, and mechanisms for ensuring that the demilitarisation of Ukraine is respected.

5. An Ukraine-Russia agreement on the future presence (or more probably the absence) of non-Russian forces in Ukraine. Defence attaches and perhaps military-to-military visits would presumably be allowed, but that would be about it.

6. A separate Treaty which would commit NATO and EU powers not to station or deploy forces on the territory of Ukraine, as defined in the text, and perhaps not elsewhere, as well. This would have to be a Treaty between the western states concerned, but there might also be Annexes and subordinate agreements involving Russia/Ukraine, or both.

These are the most important issues directly related to Ukraine, and it will be obvious firstly, that they are deeply connected with each other, and secondly that in principle all except the last are bilateral issues between Ukraine and Russia. From the Russian point of view it would be far better to have a bilateral negotiation, conducted in a common language and among people who in many cases will know each other. They will be very aware that if they let NATO and the EU into the discussion as well, or even allow them to hover in the background whispering into the ears of the Ukrainian delegation, then things will become much more complex. And note that, whilst the Treaty at No 6 is helpful, it’s not essential: Ukraine as a sovereign state can simply ask other countries’ militaries to leave and not come back. The same applies to decisions not to join NATO, or any comparable political demand the Russians might make. And NATO states are free to decide to return stationed forces to their own countries in order to salvage something from the wreckage. This is likely to be a major shock for the western powers, who seem to believe that they are entitled to a status in the negotiations, and the more delusional of whom seem to think that they can provide neutral chairmanship. But the fact is that the Russians have the ball, and they will continue their operations until Ukraine capitulates and agrees to what they want. The West has no counter to such tactics and, the longer things go on, the more disunited the West will become.

You will notice that I haven’t said anything about security guarantees so far, because I think this is a red herring. The obvious reason is that guarantees are not guarantees without the means to enforce them, and the West does not have the means to enforce any guarantees it might give. But there are some more fundamental issues, beginning with what we mean by “security guarantee.”

In its simplest form, such a document is just a political commitment made to another country. The classic modern example is the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which gave security assurances to Ukraine in return for its final agreement to give up the nuclear weapons that had been based in the country when it as part of the Soviet Union, and were still there. In return for that undertaking, the Russians, British and Americans agreed to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine,” and to “reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.”

This is a purely political “guarantee,” a declarative price exacted by the Ukrainians for agreeing to allow the missiles be repatriated. There is virtually no positive obligation on the three guaranteeing states other than to report to the UN Security Council any attack on Ukraine involving the use of nuclear weapons. (Indeed, the whole agreement was negotiated in the context of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.) Significantly, the current government in Kiev has made no mention of these assurances, at least that I can find, since 2022: everyone accepts that circumstances change and declarations lose their relevance. There was no way of enforcing the assurances anyway, and that was not the point.

What about the “security guarantee” in the Washington Treaty, then, the famous Article 5? The Ukraine crisis has obliged a number of people to read this Article for the first time, and they have found, to their surprise, that it isn’t a security guarantee at all. Or rather, whilst it says that an attack on one signatory, in a defined geographical area, will be an attack on all, it doesn’t specify what the “all” should do about it. As with most such treaties there is a history: in this case the Europeans wanted a guarantee of military support which the US was not willing to give, thus the rather contorted language of Art 5. On the other hand, the Europeans consoled themselves with the thought that at least there were political assurances which would no doubt weigh with Moscow. Indeed, “security guarantees” have generally been seen by the participants as stabilising and deterrent: even as late as 1914, the Serbs were comforting themselves with the thought that the Austrians would not act against them because that would bring the Russians in, and the Austrians consoled themselves with the belief that the Russians would not come in because that would immediately involve the Prussians …..

Indeed the Austro-Prussian security guarantee, dating ultimately from the secret treaty of 1879, is a good example of what people usually mean when they talk of a “security guarantee.” Under the treaty, Prussia would come to the aid of the Dual Monarchy if it was attacked by Russia. (Technically the reverse was also true, though this was for show.) Yet this arrangement was not based on altruism. If anything, it was designed to control Austria by developing a droit de regard over its foreign policy, with the threat that in practice Prussia would only fulfil its obligations if the Austrians avoided doing something silly. In the end, these alliances did more to provoke war than to deter it, and it was perhaps an atavistic memory of this that made NATO enlargement such a controversial topic in the 1990s. After all, as I heard people from Washington and elsewhere muse, could you in principle commit NATO to backing heaven-knew what extremist government that might arise in, say, Poland in twenty years’ time, for example? The risk of an open-ended commitment where the guarantor becomes the tail and not the dog is one that must be in the minds of any reasonably thoughtful government official thinking about “security guarantees” for Ukraine.

This section would not be complete, though, without mentioning the only security guarantees that have ever really worked: the informal ones. Although the Europeans could not get a firm military guarantee from the US, they achieved much the same result with US forces deployed in Europe. Whilst these forces were never more than a small part of NATO’s mobilised strength, they did mean that the US could not avoid becoming involved in any future war. (“Make sure the first NATO soldier to die is an American!” was the unofficial European motto of the time.) One unnoticed consequence of the massive drawdown of US forces in Europe is that this possibility no longer exists to anything like the same extent. But other nations can play that game as well: since the 1970s, Saudi Arabia has hosted large numbers of foreign military personnel on its soil, such that an attacker would be forced to reckon with the involvement of the sending states if Saudi Arabia were attacked. More generally, the use of US personnel as effective human shields is current around the world: for a small nation, a US military base is a good investment for its security. We can assume that the Ukrainians will try something similar, and hope to provoke incidents between western “peacekeeping” troops and the Russians, which they can then exploit. I would like to think that western leaders are sufficiently intelligent to see and avoid the trap, but on the other hand …

The final strand in this argument is the place of Ukraine in international structures, and the future adaptation of those structures themselves. Let’s take NATO first. It seems fairly clear that there is a blocking minority against full membership in any reasonable political timescale. (Though as I have suggested there are Machiavellian reasons why the Russians might actually want to encourage it.) This doesn’t mean the Ukrainians won’t waste negotiating capital by continuing to push, nor that part of the transatlantic ruling elite won’t encourage them, but that’s only half the issue. The most likely western proposal would be some kind of “special status” for Ukraine, with regular talks, visits and joint exercises. Quite what this status would be would be fiercely controversial within NATO itself, and clearly unacceptable to the Russians in almost all cases. But NATO would no doubt reply that its relations with non-members were none of Russia’s business, so it’s doubtful whether Russia would be directly involved in any negotiations. That said, they do of course have many ways of making their opinions known, especially if they are highly influential in Kiev, as is likely to be the case.

The EU is a different case and involves so many assumptions (not least about the future of the Union) that there’s little that can be said without heavy qualification. But in some ways the most interesting question is the political orientation of a postwar Ukraine. The facile assumption that whatever political forces come to power in Kiev will simply carry on where Zelensky left off seems to me very dubious. Under ideal circumstances, EU accession negotiations would take years, and everybody knows that Ukraine is really just after money: the EU’s cohesion funds. This means everybody dipping into their pockets once more, just as all the revelations about large-scale corruption will be coming out. But in any event, it’s not clear that the pro-westerners in Kiev will still have the upper hand politically. In the end, Europe turned out not to be worth much, and there are those who will say it is time to make peace with Moscow. Kiss the hand you cannot bite.

The last point is obviously how the “root causes” of the conflict identified by Putin in the now-famous telephone call are to be addressed. I’m not sure that they will be, or ever can be. To begin with, there is no consensus on what these “root causes” even are, since western states consider the eastward expansion of NATO an internal affair which does not threaten Russia, whilst the Russians consider it the very origin of the conflict. Western states consider that the crisis was caused by Russian expansionism and a desire to recreate the Soviet Union, whilst the Russians consider that they have been responding to the aggressive enlargement of the western bloc.

It’s not obvious how any kind of negotiation can even be started here, or on what basis. Of course a largely symbolic deal (the US pulling some of its remaining troops out of Europe, the Russians making a reciprocal gesture in Ukraine) is always possible, and maybe this is what Trump has in mind. But it clearly will not address any “root causes” as perceived by either side, and it would be quite possible to waste entire years arguing about the subject matter of the negotiations, and even more who would attend, without making any progress at all.

We can assume that the opening proposals of the Russians would be based on their draft treaty texts of December 2021, which NATO rejected without making counter-proposals. At the time, it was fairly obvious that the Russians did not expect NATO to agree to the texts; the idea was presumably to test how far the West was interested in the principle of negotiating on the “root causes” at all. The western response indicated that they were not. Whilst the West is in a much weaker position today, it still seems unlikely that they will agree to negotiate on, or even talk about, the proposals in the December 2021 texts.

For their part, the West will have to struggle to find any common negotiating position at all, not least because both NATO and the EU have become so large and unwieldy that it is almost impossible to identify a collective strategic interest in either organisation. So far, the Russians do not seem to be interested in negotiating with the EU, but by contrast they previously proposed parallel but separate talks with the US and NATO. This delineation has the potential to split the alliance badly (presumably one of the Russian objectives) irrespective of the subject matter, although I suppose you could argue that the alliance has been doing a good job of that anyway, without the need for outside assistance.

But in the end, this may not matter so much. It’s tidier to have a Treaty, but a Treaty is only a document, and if the underlying will to cooperate is not there, it can be more trouble than it’s worth. By contrast, the underlying situation—a stronger Russia, a radically weakened Europe and a weaker and largely absent US— will be an undeniable reality, and that is the context in which politics in Europe will have to take place, irrespective of what “talks” lead to, or what any Treaty might say.