President-elect Donald Trump has said he will end the war in Ukraine when he returns to the Oval Office. Never mind the lack of evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks compromise.
Nonetheless, Trump says he will appoint “a very senior special envoy, someone with a lot of credibility” to negotiate a deal. European leaders may despise Trump, but they appear of like minds on the utility of trading land for peace. “I think everybody has more or less reached this conclusion. It’s hard to say it publicly because it would be a way of saying we are going to reward aggression,” former French Ambassador to the United States Gerard Araud told the Washington Post. Araud is correct. To reward Putin with territorial concessions after he laid waste to Ukraine in a war of aggression will encourage later aggression against Ukraine or new aggression against other Russian neighbors.
Trading territory for security guarantees is meaningless as well, given that the 1994 Budapest Memorandum was itself a security guarantee to keep Ukraine’s territory sacrosanct in exchange for Ukraine’s forfeiture of nuclear weapons. The basic conceit, however, that land-for-peace works is deeply flawed.
Trading land for peace has seldom worked or preserved the interest of the weak against the predations of the strong. U.S. transcontinental expansion occurred against the backdrop of land-for-peace deals with various Native American tribes, few of which Washington respected when its own interests changed. In its Seventeen Point Agreement with Tibet, Chinese Communist authorities promised to leave the political system in Tibet unchanged. Rather than bring peace, the agreement was the prelude to the Communist Party’s wholesale annexation of Tibet and the destruction of its cultural heritage.
History offers a litany of similar examples.
Awarding Germany the Sudetenland did not prevent World War II — quite the contrary, it might have sped it up as Adolf Hitler concluded the West had no backbone. The marquee example of “Land for Peace” diplomacy was the Camp David Accords in which Israel traded back the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for diplomatic recognition. The 1978 agreement won Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat the Nobel Peace Prize. While the land-for-peace formula has become the basis for subsequent diplomacy, the Camp David example may have been the exception that proves the rule for a simple reason: Sadat sought peace not because he received land but because he recognized on his own after he sought to conquer Israel in 1973 that he could not achieve his aims through war.
This factor eluded the U.S. and European diplomats who quickly made land-for-peace the base formula for subsequent Arab-Israel diplomacy. The 1993 Oslo Accords, for example, granted the Palestinian Authority control over much of the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank. The Palestine Liberation Organization turned both into safe havens for terror. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon compounded the problem when he had Israel withdraw fully from Gaza. The following year, Hamas took control of the territory and immediately set out to transform it into a terrorist base in which to continue attacks against the Jewish state.
The same held true with Lebanon. Israel sought to trade its southern Lebanese buffer zone for peace, but what it received instead was more than 100,000 missiles and rockets on the border and Hezbollah tunnels underneath. Simply put, every time Israel ceded land in exchange for peace, it received war and terror. The problem was that, contrary to the simplistic worldview of diplomats, the problem was never a simple land dispute but rather the ideology and rapaciousness of the enemy. That is why a land-for-peace formula for Ukraine will not only fail to win peace but will ultimately promise more war.
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Just as Hamas seeks Israel’s elimination and late Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah promised to eradicate the entire Jewish people wherever they might live, so too does Putin deny any legitimacy to Ukraine’s existence. His pre-war speeches and articles argue that Ukrainians simply cannot exist as a separate entity from Russia.
It is time to put land-for-peace to rest and realize that real peace only comes when military defeats force aggressors to surrender unconditionally.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
