Trump pledges peace through strength. Will he deliver?

Andrew Chakhoyan is an academic director at the University of Amsterdam. He previously served in the U.S. government and oversaw regional government affairs at the World Economic Forum (covering Ukraine and Russia).
“Together, we will secure peace through strength, and make America, and the world, safe again!”
This is the pledge of U.S. President-elect Trump. Not incrementalism, not abandoning Ukraine, not capitulating to the Kremlin’s nuclear blackmail, but strength. And strength, wielded wisely and decisively, is exactly what it will take to pull the world back from the brink, restore deterrence and bring Russia’s criminal war to an end. 
However, strength must have a purpose, a focus. It shouldn’t be wasted on managing symptoms. Yet, for decades, we framed the Kremlin’s actions as aberrations rather than inevitabilities, pinning the country’s unrelenting aggression on one man — wanted war criminal Russian President Vladimir Putin. We were wrong.
Whether in Chechnya, Georgia or Ukraine, Moscow’s wars are the natural product of an empire still clinging to its past. And if Trump’s promise is to mean anything, it must confront this truth: Russia’s war is one of conquest, and it can only end with the defeat of this empire.
We’ve been torn between our fear of both Ukraine’s victory and and its loss for too long. Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. treated Moscow’s revanchism as a crisis to be managed rather than a war to be won, offering support to keep Ukraine in the fight but never enough to drive the invaders out — an approach best encapsulated in the cruelest of phrases: “as long as it takes.”
But Ukraine’s courage and determination aren’t limitless; they are extraordinary, but they are finite. And this freedom-loving nation deserves not a trickle of aid but a torrent — to match what’s at stake.
Meanwhile, during his presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly promised to end the war in 24 hours by making a deal with Putin, sparking concerns that such a swift resolution might come at Ukraine’s expense. And while his rhetoric has shifted since being reelected, the memory of the earlier naivety lingers.
Thankfully, Trump’s appointment of retired Army General Keith Kellogg as special envoy for Russia and Ukraine signals an approach that combines military aid and diplomacy. But even Kellogg’s plan assumes Moscow acts on national interests rather than relying on conquest to sustain its legitimacy.
America’s missteps didn’t begin in 2022 — nor in 2014, when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea. They stretch back decades. More recent examples include Georgia’s invasion in 2008, which went unanswered; the downing of flight MH17, which was was downplayed; and Moscow’s support for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad in 2015, which went unpunished, even as he gassed his own people.
Each of these failures has reinforced Russia’s belief that the West lacks resolve.
Our “escalation management” has essentially provoked the very aggression we sought to avoid. Still, we stubbornly refuse to learn this lesson: Russia, history tells us, is deterred by strength and emboldened by weakness. It feeds on its adversary’s fear and indecision. And while Moscow bears sole responsibility for unleashing this catastrophic war, a pattern of Western policy errors has allowed its ambitions to spiral out of control.
If only we’d understood that when the Soviet Union collapsed, no Russian nation rose from its ashes. Like a matryoshka doll, one empire succeeded another.
There’s a paradoxical duality at the center of Russia’s collective consciousness, a colonized mindset of deference and passivity at home, paired with a colonizer’s aggression toward its neighbors. The Kremlin grants its people neither agency nor accountability, treating them as it does the land’s natural resources — as assets to be exploited. It’s a patchwork society subjugated to sustain Moscow, “the once billionaire capital of the world.”
And this contradiction, arising from an empire pretending to be a nation, is starkly reflected in the results of an opinion poll reported by the Moscow Times: Nearly 40 percent of Russians surveyed deemed a nuclear strike on Ukraine acceptable. Even if one were to halve this figure to account for propaganda and authoritarian distortions, that still leaves one-in-five ready to condone unimaginable atrocity.
This is Russia’s imperialist thinking laid bare: a belief in greatness that demands sacrifice, a messianic purpose untethered from reason and a chilling comfort with violence. No war crime is too heinous, no bomb too big for a system that knows nothing but oppression and subjugation. Many in Russia are even bizarrely convinced they’re liberating Ukraine by invading it.
But let’s not mistake this vox populi to mean that Moscow will resort to nuclear escalation. Doomsday weapons serve Moscow better as tools of blackmail than battlefield instruments. And its reliance on China, which has firmly opposed nuclear escalation, acts as a major restraint in this regard.
However, the Kremlin’s threats are still dangerous, not only for their immediate implications but for the precedent they set. Allowing Russia to intimidate the free world into limiting support, or even abandoning Ukraine, guarantees a future where every rogue regime views nuclear development as ultimate leverage — and that is a path that leads to chaos.
That is why strength is the answer. Not reactive, naive or impulsive strength, rather a clear-eyed resolve that understands the depth of Russia’s motives. Putin may have given the order to invade, but this war isn’t about just one man.
To that point, in his latest remarks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy outlined a pragmatic yet ambitious plan to end the “hot stage of the war.” The cease-fire deal would include NATO membership for the parts of Ukraine currently under Kyiv’s control, with the alliance’s invitation recognizing the country’s 1991 borders. Zelenskyy emphasized maintaining the legal and moral claim to all Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, as the country’s constitution prohibits ceding land without the consent of its people.
Dismissing such a proposal as unrealistic is easy, but the truth is that failing to stand up for Ukraine would make the world a far more dangerous place. Russia chose war — we didn’t. And we’ve seen the consequences of not confronting Moscow decisively. The world has witnessed the horrors of Russian occupation. And if a cease-fire scenario comes to pass, we must ensure that those enduring this occupation are neither abandoned nor forgotten.
The aggressor must lose — not just for Ukraine’s survival but to end Russia’s imperial ambitions. As Zelenskyy’s plan makes clear, and as we should have learned by now, the free world’s duty isn’t merely to stop the bloodshed but to secure a just and lasting peace. Anything less is an open invitation to an even larger war.