Reprinted with permission from The Realist Review.
That Robert Kagan is among the most consistent – and consistently wrong – foreign policy analysts in Washington will not come as news. That he continues to command so much attention twenty-odd years since the Iraq debacle which he did so much to promote, is more a commentary about how this town really works (and for whom it really works) than about him.
Who can begrudge him his success? Kagan has built up, over the course of decades, a credulous and deep-pocketed audience by churning out some of the most harebrained opinion pieces in Washington.
His latest for The Atlantic magazine is of a piece with the rest of his oeuvre—yet given the continuing popularity of the arguments he puts forth, to say nothing of the stakes involved, perhaps some attention is due.
What follows are some excerpts from his piece, followed by some comments:
“Vladimir, STOP!” That Truth Social post by President Donald Trump put a fitting capstone on one of the least successful negotiations in recent memory.
As will become clear, it isn’t the fact that the negotiations were unsuccessful that rankles Kagan; it is the fact that there were any negotiations at all. There is no bigger sin in the eyes of Kagan and his fellow neocons than attempts to solve diplomatically what could otherwise be solved by bloodshed.
For the past year or more, the conventional wisdom was that Vladimir Putin needed a deal on Ukraine.
What passes for conventional wisdom depends almost entirely on what one reads, what one listens to, and perhaps, most importantly, on the circles in which one travels. The idea that Putin “needed” a deal on Ukraine was no doubt believed by people who take seriously the risible casualty estimates provided by Ukrainian, Polish and Baltic intelligence agencies which are laundered through the pages of the New York Times in order to lend those numbers a further gloss of authority. That Putin “needed a deal” is certainly not the conventional wisdom among a good number of scholars and former military and intelligence officials who have from the beginning dissented from the Biden administration’s facile ‘David vs. Goliath’ portrayal of the conflict.
Russia’s economy was struggling under the weight of international sanctions, and its military had suffered staggering losses on the battlefield.
Wrong again. If Kagan actually spoke to people who live there (as I have) he would know that the day-to-day Russian economy has not been rattled in the least by the sanctions. Still more, thanks to its deepening trade ties with China; its robust currency and gold reserves; and its expanding defense-industrial base, the Russian economy grew by 3.6 percent in 2023 and 4 percent in 2024 – faster than the economies of the US and the European Union.
How then to explain why Trump, after three months of negotiations, has failed to win a single concession from Putin and now threatens to “walk away” from the whole problem? If Putin is weak and desperate, and Trump holds all the cards, why is Putin getting everything he wants and giving up nothing in return?
Or perhaps the entire premise upon which this flimsy piece of agitprop is based is rather wide of the mark. The fact of the matter is that the US has very few cards to play in this game. That for reasons relating to history, population, industrial capacity, and geography—Russia has and always will have escalation dominance in its “near abroad.” This is something Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump all understood when confronted with various crises involving Russia and its neighbors. Kagan understands none of this.
Trump is not quite the negotiator he thinks he is. Let’s stipulate that Trump was never interested in helping Ukraine.
And later:
Trump and his advisers appear to put great stock in the idea that, as Vance told the Europeans in Munich, there is a “new sheriff in town” and so folks had better get in line. To say that Putin is unimpressed may be the geopolitical understatement of the century.
No argument here.
But Trump passed up any chance of finding out whether he was or not. As National Security Adviser Waltz, Special Envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg, [Washington Post columnist Marc] Thiessen, and even Trump himself understood, Trump had leverage. In the long run, Putin is weak.
The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan once quipped that while people are entitled to their own opinions, they are not entitled to their own facts. If by “over the long run, Putin is weak” Kagan means that one day Putin will die—then, well, yes.
Otherwise, this is another piece of conventional wisdom from Planet Neocon. As of this writing, Putin’s position within Russia is as unassailable as it has ever been. Let’s look at the numbers:
In March 2025, almost nine out of ten percent of Russians approved of the activities of the Russian President Vladimir Putin. The popularity level was 10 percentage points higher than in September 2022, when the figure declined following the announcement of a partial mobilization in the country.
If Kagan means that Putin’s Russia is militarily weak, then allow me to quote no less an authority than General Christopher Cavoli who serves as Supreme Allied Commander Europe. Cavoli, who, as it happens, is a Russian speaker and an expert in the region, told Congress last year that the Russian army was 15 percent larger than it was at the beginning of the war.
Cavoli’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in April 2025 is worth quoting a length:
Russia is not just reconstituting service members but is also replacing combat vehicles and munitions at an unprecedented pace. Russian ground forces in Ukraine have lost an estimated 3,000 tanks, 9,000 armored vehicles, 13,000 artillery systems, and over 400 air defense systems in the past year – but is on pace to replace them all. Russia has expanded its industrial production, opened new manufacturing facilities, and converted commercial production lines for military purposes. As a result, the Russian defense industrial base is expected to roll out 1,500 tanks, 3,000 armored vehicles, and 200 Iskander ballistic and cruise missiles this year. (Comparatively, the United States only produces about 135 tanks per year and no longer produces new Bradley Fighting Vehicles.) Additionally, we anticipate Russia to produce 250,000 artillery shells per month, which puts it on track to build a stockpile three times greater than the United States and Europe combined.
Putin is counting on Ukraine collapsing before his own forces do. He has all along believed that the war’s timelines favor him. To change that assessment, Putin would have to believe that Trump was committed to Ukraine for the long term and would provide it aid for as long as necessary.
And later…
Trump would have had to bluff convincingly that he was willing to help Ukraine if Putin balked. That was the biggest card Trump had to play, but he never played it.
The problem, again, is that the premise does not line up with any extant reality outside of the four walls of the Brookings Institution.
“Putin would have to believe that Trump was committed to…”
Why would Putin ever believe such a thing?
Even if Trump wanted to, we simply do not have the resources to provide Kiev “aid for as long as necessary.” Putin knows this—still more, the Pentagon and our vaunted European “allies” know this. German media reported last year that, “The Ukrainian army is already running out of German weapons, and Germany’s reserves are almost exhausted.” [Emphasis mine].
Kagan may not know it, but we are far beyond the point of: If only Trump would bluff Putin, everything will be alright.
[Trump] is asking the Ukrainian leader to give away huge swaths of his country to a conquering army for nothing.
That is going to happen whether Trump “asks” or not. This is not a matter of creating a permission structure for Zelensky to give way to the Russians. The land is gone. The land is not coming back. And, importantly, the land, while under Ukrainian sovereignty for only the past thirty years, was historically Russian and was only folded into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic thanks to the machinations Vladimir Lenin (for more on this, see: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Russian Question At The End of the Twentieth Century, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1995). The return of Donbas to Russia is not – let me repeat – not the equivalent, no matter how many times Kagan and the gang say so – of Russia rolling into Warsaw and planting the Russian tricolor atop the Sejm.
Trump seems to want to get the Ukraine issue out of the way so that he can move on with the normalization of relations with Russia, but how normal can those relations be?
Well, Bob, pretty normal actually. Anyone who has the memory span of, say, a dog, would be able recall that even after the 2008 war in Georgia, Russia and the US engaged in dozens of bilateral projects – even some important ones like preventing nuclear war – admittedly something that’s never been high on the Likudnik-Neocon list of “important things to prevent.”
To sum up, Kagan wants Trump to:
- Continue Biden’s policy of endless support for Kiev all the while prolonging the misery of Ukrainian soldiers (many of them teenagers) while keeping us on as co-belligerents in a war with nuclear-armed Russia.
- Absent that, for Trump to at least pretend he will.
In either case, Kagan’s preferred policies will amount to the same thing: More bloodshed, more refugees, more loss of territory, more geopolitical risk and uncertainty, and more dead people – the specter of which, let’s be frank, has never much bothered Kagan.
James W. Carden is the editor of The Realist Review. He is a columnist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs.
