Trump’s Negotiating Strategy and the 28-Point Peace Proposal for Ukraine
Neither Russia nor Ukraine can win outright. But Ukraine can lose everything without a durable peace. Here's how Trump means to get there.
by Rod D. Martin
November 25, 2025
Trump’s 28-point peace plan, tentatively agreed to by Moscow, has set off howls in the American media, Europe, and Ukraine. Which is exactly what it was intended to do.
Donald Trump has been telling the world how he negotiates for forty years, starting with his bestselling The Art of the Deal. What never ceases to amaze me is how many people bought it but never read it. Even a cursory examination tells you most of what you need to know about whatever he’s doing most of the time. (His 1997 The Art of the Comeback is even more useful).
Yet after all these years, the pundit class still hasn’t bothered to do the homework.
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Wars rarely end when anyone is satisfied. They end when everyone is exhausted and afraid of what happens if they keep going. That is where Russia and Ukraine now find themselves, and it is the point from which any serious analysis of Trump’s 28-point peace proposal has to begin.
Start with the two facts no one in polite company wants to say out loud.
First, Russia is never going to be able to conquer, occupy, and pacify Ukraine. That dream died in the first weeks of the war. The Russians have bled out men and armor on a scale that would have toppled lesser regimes, and may yet topple theirs. They have managed, at best, to fortify territory they mostly controlled before the war, and to turn wide swaths of eastern Ukraine into a moonscape.
Second, Ukraine is never going to be able to drive Russia back to the 2014 borders by force of arms alone. The only way they could requires something that is never, ever going to happen: large NATO formations fighting and dying on Ukrainian and Russian soil, complete with the nuclear exchange that would likely entail. Western weapons and money can stiffen Ukraine’s line. They cannot conjure infinite manpower, nor can they erase the basic reality that Russia, for all its failures, still has escalation options Ukraine does not.
Both those statements get pushback. We are constantly told that Russia is about to break out and overrun large parts of Ukraine. We are similarly told that Ukraine is about to break out and take back every square inch of its territory.
Well…maybe. But neither side has been able to move the front lines meaningfully in nearly four years, so odds are that next week won’t be different. The only certainty is that these risks exist, however improbable they might be, which is nothing if not an incentive to end the war at the negotiating table: quit while you’re ahead (or at least not terribly behind).
As I have been telling you for a very long time now, the endgame is not in serious doubt. This war will not end in a parade in Red Square or a triumphal entry in Sevastopol. It will end in a negotiated settlement that leaves neither side happy, that compromises both sides’ stated war aims, and that will be denounced by purists in every capital as a “betrayal.”
Trump’s 28-point peace plan tacitly acknowledges all these things. But its details are not its aims. The crowd that expects the White House to telegraph those aims, etch them in granite, and then be inflexible to the point of war — by which I mean the Bush and Obama crowd — cannot comprehend an actual negotiation. From a neocon perspective, they see chaos and surrender. And as usual, they’re wrong.
The Unacceptable First Draft of a Durable Peace
In The Art of the Deal, Trump lays out the pattern.