Trump’s Ukraine Policy Is Succeeding While His Iran Policy Flails
Newsletter
Ross Douthat
OPINION
The New York Times, May 5, 2026, 5:00 p.m. ET
Opinion Columnist
One of the many ironies of Donald Trump’s war against Iran is that only a year ago, most of the president’s critics assumed that any second-term crisis for the American empire would be caused not by reckless war-making, but by appeasement and retreat. In particular, the Trumpian push for peace between Russia and Ukraine was cast as the great betrayal, craven and sinister in equal measure, that would yield disaster for Europe and disgrace for the United States.
Yet today, as Trump struggles to find an exit strategy from his Middle Eastern war of choice, his administration’s policy toward Ukraine looks like everything his Iran policy is not: an effective rebalancing for a multipolar world, in which a major rival has been contained and weakened with a reduced American commitment, and our regional allies have actually substituted for our overstretched capacities rather than trying to force us to stretch too far on their behalf.
A lot of Ukraine’s champions would recoil from that description. To the contrary, they would say, our Ukraine policy has been a betrayal, with unjust pressure on Kyiv to make a deal and an unfair retraction of American support. It’s just that Ukrainian heroism and European support have filled the breach, proving along the way that Trump and others were wrong to treat the war effort as foredoomed.
The last part has truth to it. Many observers, myself included, assumed that the failure of the Ukrainian offensive in 2023 portended a future in which Russia would slowly but surely grind Ukrainian forces down. The Trump administration’s push for a negotiated peace reflected, in part, an assumption that Ukraine’s time was running out. Instead, bravery, resilience and the drone war revolution have enabled the Ukrainians to keep the Russians stalemated, to such a degree that the Putin regime looks more unstable and paranoid than at any point since the early days of the war.
But the means of Ukrainian survival, where Europe steps up as the United States steps back, is not a sign of American failure. It’s what successful American adaptation looks like in a world where it’s conspicuously no longer the 1990s. Of all the areas of danger and crisis in the world, Europe’s eastern borderlands are the place where America should be able to rely on our allies as a first line of defense. The fact that Ukraine has held the line with more European support and less direct American aid is proof that this recalibration can succeed — and as such, it’s good news for our empire’s sustainability, not a sign that we’re about to cede global dominance to Brussels or Ottawa or Berlin.
Now, would it have been preferable to reach this point with a less chaotic policy approach, with less moral equivalence in American rhetoric toward Kyiv and Moscow, less bullying rhetoric toward our allies? Of course! Wrestling Trump toward an optimal policy is always an ugly business and often a close-run thing.
But two points are worth making about how the wrestling has worked. The first is that Trump hasn’t simply reduced American commitments while yelling at the Europeans to do more. He has reduced American financial commitments while sustaining or increasing key forms of battlefield support, such that Ukraine now has access to certain advantages it lacked in the Biden era — including longer-range missiles and the intelligence sharing required to strike deeper into Russia. It’s debatable whether this is the perfect balance, but it is a balance rather than just a washing of our hands.
The second is that the case for Trump as a foreign policy president has always been that his harshness toward friends and allergy to idealism sometimes ends up delivering more for the United States than the smoother habits of diplomacy. If you think that we need a rearmed Europe to help police and stabilize its own corner of the world, then Trump’s crude bullying has been a geopolitical accelerant — a non-ideal but nonetheless effective mechanism, as Andrew Sullivan suggests, to force Europe to “break with its passive past.” A maximally adroit and more idealistic president might have done better. But some presidents might have just kept us in a quagmire and let our allies stay asleep.
Which brings us back to the contrast with the Iran conflict, and the role our alliances have played in the Middle Eastern war. Here Trump let himself be talked into a high-risk gambit by one ally, Israel, while initially reassuring our allies in Europe that we wouldn’t need help from them, and then swinging around to rage that they weren’t helping us enough.
Meanwhile, our Persian Gulf allies, who grew rich under our military umbrella, expect us to finish what we started without being able to supply much meaningful military support in their own backyard.
The ultimate outcomes of the Iran war and the Ukrainian war are both still in the fog. But with Ukraine, you can at least glimpse the shape of a security architecture that could outlast Trump and be stabilized by his successors. In the Middle East, by contrast, everything’s still on America’s shoulders, and whether as an overburdened Atlas or a tied-down Gulliver, there’s no clear path to burden sharing and no easy way for us to pivot out.
In a world where the administration’s guiding theory placed the Middle East at the center of American interests, I suppose that seeking a security dividend in the Ukrainian theater and immediately spending in the Persian Gulf would have some consistency.
But in a world where China is clearly the central threat and challenge, it’s a very strange thing to have partially disentangled ourselves from one secondary conflict only to let a different web of allies, clients and enemies immediately tie us down.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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