\n<\/p>\n
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/p>\n
On the surface, yesterday\u2019s White House summit on Ukraine showed an impressively unified front among President Donald Trump, major European leaders, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The participants all smiled and expressed optimism. Zelensky donned a suit, avoiding harangues like those he received over his military attire during his previous visit.<\/p>\n
Yes, the leaders offered sometimes exaggerated praise for Trump, but the president also praised each of them in hyperbolic terms, and he had a few good lines, even if NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte laughed a little too hard at some of them.<\/p>\n
The biggest division during the meeting was not about whether Trump is more sympathetic to Russia or Ukraine, the central question in the past. Instead, the disunity was over substance versus process. Trump appeared to treat the peace negotiation as basically a series of steps to be completed, while his counterparts were more focused on questions of cease-fires and security guarantees. This cleavage suggests that although European leaders appear to have succeeded\u2014at least for now\u2014in persuading Trump to move somewhat toward them and away from Russian President Vladimir Putin, turning that into a real peace will still be challenging.<\/p>\n
For Trump, the answer to stopping the war appears to be getting the right sequence of meetings: First, he met with Putin; then he met with Zelensky; next, he will meet with both men and, he says, hammer out a deal. \u201cWe\u2019re going to try and work out a [trilateral meeting] after that and see if we can get it finished, put this to sleep,\u201d he said yesterday. (Zelensky was open to such a meeting yesterday. The White House said today that Putin has agreed as well, but the Kremlin has been publicly noncommittal.)<\/p>\n
Zelensky and the other Europeans, meanwhile, were much more concerned about the details of what might come up at this eventual trilateral meeting, or along the way. For the pro-Ukraine bloc, the big victory from yesterday was a discussion of security guarantees for Ukraine\u2014basically, assurances that once a peace deal is in place, allies will assist Ukraine if Russia restarts hostilities. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, discussed creating something similar to NATO\u2019s Article 5 mutual-defense agreement. But Trump was notably vague about what sort of commitments he might make.<\/p>\n
Trump also wavered on the importance of a cease-fire. Prior to his summit with Putin in Alaska last week, Trump had insisted on a cessation of hostilities, which Putin flatly rejected. Now Trump seems to have given up on that. \u201cAll of us would obviously prefer an immediate cease-fire while we work on a lasting peace,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd maybe something like that could happen. As of this moment, it\u2019s not happening.\u201d (As if to underscore the point, Russian drones struck Ukraine yesterday\u2014though this sort of provocation also seems to be one reason for Trump\u2019s new openness to Ukraine.)<\/p>\n
Some observers were appalled by Trump\u2019s meeting with Putin on American soil, noting that the Russian president is a butcher, an autocrat, and a war criminal wanted on international warrants. All of this is true, and nauseating, but as National Review\u2019s Rich Lowry notes, achieving peace will require dealing with Putin. (When President Barack Obama tried diplomacy with Iran, Republicans were outraged; now the roles are reversed.) Peace deals are judged on results, not always the character of those making them. Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger were Nobel Peace laureates, after all.<\/p>\n
Sitting down, however, is not enough on its own, and if treated that way, it can simply encourage bad actors such as Putin by giving them status and recognition without requiring any or many concessions. Trump sees himself as a dealmaker, and he\u2019s often described\u2014sometimes, though not always, positively\u2014as transactional. But he is so personally motivated by deals per se that he doesn\u2019t always appear to grasp that others are not, or why they\u2019re not. Trump\u2019s approach to this negotiation has ignored the fact that Putin doesn\u2019t seem interested in a deal at all: He appears content to drag the war out as long as possible. Nor does Trump\u2019s method account for the fact that some terms of a peace deal would be so onerous as to make it unacceptable to Zelensky on patriotic and political grounds. Dealing with the messy details is hard work, and Trump has never shown much interest in, or patience for, policy minutiae.<\/p>\n
This fetishization of process over substance has previously led Trump into the same diplomatic cul-de-sacs. In 2018\u2014despite the skepticism of some of his own aides\u2014he met with North Korea\u2019s Kim Jong Un in Singapore. The summit produced all the pageantry and pomp that Trump adores, and it led to a pen-pal relationship between the men, but in part because that was his focus, the gambit has not produced any breakthroughs on North Korea opening up, reducing nefarious activities overseas, or relinquishing nuclear weapons. Trump has held multiple meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to try to move toward a peace deal in Gaza, but his inability to get much traction there has led him to lash out at his ally.<\/p>\n
Other perils still dog the Ukraine peace process. Trump continues to speak about Russia\u2019s illegal invasion of Ukraine as though Ukraine had some choice or culpability in the matter. (\u201cRussia is a powerful military nation, you know, whether people like it or not,\u201d he said on Fox & Friends this morning. \u201cIt\u2019s a much bigger nation. It\u2019s not a war that should have been started; you don\u2019t do that. You don\u2019t take\u2014you don\u2019t take on a nation that\u2019s 10 times your size.\u201d) Trump also has a tendency to latch on to whatever he heard from the last person he spoke with, which explains his vacillation between Friday\u2019s friendliness to Putin and yesterday\u2019s chumminess with Zelensky, and makes it hard to know where he might settle.<\/p>\n
But the biggest challenge at this moment is the nitty-gritty. Process is important and shouldn\u2019t be written off, but it\u2019s important because it provides a framework for resolving the substance. No peace deal can be achieved without accepting that.<\/p>\n
Related:<\/p>\n
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n Today\u2019s News<\/strong><\/p>\n More From The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n Illustration by Jonelle Afurong \/ The Atlantic. Source: Source: Oscar Wong \/ Getty.<\/p>\n The Growing Cohort of Single Dads by Choice<\/p>\n By Faith Hill<\/p>\n Charlie Calkins grew up in a big extended family. We\u2019re talking about nearly 30 cousins\u2014some of whom had their own kids. When he was in high school, he spent a lot of time with those young children: a position that some surly teens might resent but that Calkins adored. The idea that someday he would be a father himself seemed, to him, only natural.<\/p>\n He just needed to wait for the right partner to show up. So he did: He waited and waited. He went to business school. He built a career in tech. He traveled. And he went on dates. When a relationship didn\u2019t work out, he\u2019d return to \u201cprofessional mode\u201d\u2014bouncing between \u201cintermittent surges\u201d of dating and work. \u201cI spent a lot of my early adulthood going, When everything\u2019s right, it will happen,\u201d he told me. \u201cI\u2019m definitely a The stars will align kind of person. And then one day it hit me: They were not aligning.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s how Calkins ended up, in his 40s, making an appointment with a fertility clinic.<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n Culture Break<\/p>\n Illustration by Hayley Wall for The Atlantic<\/p>\n Read. A new generation of disabled writers isn\u2019t interested in inspiring readers, Sophia Stewart writes.<\/p>\n Watch. Remaking an Akira Kurosawa masterpiece is no small task, but Highest 2 Lowest (out now in theaters) is a worthy attempt, David Sims writes.<\/p>\n Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.<\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. On the surface, yesterday\u2019s White House summit on Ukraine showed an impressively unified front among President Donald Trump, major<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16731,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[7498,10016,10017,71],"class_list":{"0":"post-16730","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-approach","9":"tag-halfbaked","10":"tag-negotiation","11":"tag-trumps"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16730\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n