The Weekly Lemur publication aims to inform readers about the most pressing issues domestically, internationally, and on Duke University’s campus through bite-sized and digestible coverage, filtered through the prism of “big ideas.” We like to take readers out of just the headlines and situate ongoing events in a larger intellectual and historical context. Alejandro Nina Duran and Cara Eaton contributed to this week’s edition.
International Politics: Ukraine
On Friday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived in Washington, D.C. for a much-anticipated meeting with President Trump. Symbolically, Zelenskyy was here to sign a rare-earth mineral deal demanded by Trump. The substantive underlying goal of his trip was to elicit a clearer American commitment to his country’s sovereignty and security and to foster a much-needed rapprochement between the two nations after a divisive and uncertain past couple of weeks.
As anyone who watched the scenes from the Oval Office Friday knows, mission accomplished…not. What could have been a cordial, productive meeting quickly devolved into a catty episode of reality TV, starring J.D. Vance. Instead of acquiring the crucial rare-earth mineral deal, Zelenskyy was booted out of the White House. No mineral deal was signed and Zelensky now returns home to a confused and frightened Ukraine (where he faces heightened political pressure: the Ukrainian MP Oleksander Dubinsky has threatened impeachment for Friday’s “diplomatic failure.”) How could everything that could’ve gone wrong go wrong?
President Trump’s one-track, transactional approach to foreign policy deal-making and his personal enmity for Zelensky are to blame. After Trump announced in mid-February that peace negotiations were starting, his administration’s diplomacy appeared to coalesce around appeasing Russia. Trump’s exclusion of Ukraine from the peace negotiations in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the ludicrous charge that Zelenskyy is a “dictator” (he has refused to say the same about Vladimir Putin) has deepened a gulf between Kyiv and Washington that some are coming to fear might be unbridgeable.
Furthermore, the appeasement game of Putin-cajoling that Trump is playing (which includes the United States’ vote against a UN resolution acknowledging Russia as the aggressor in the war) leaves a thick air of uncertainty over the peace process in Europe’s most deadly and destructive war since World War Two.
To play devil’s advocate for a second, it might be worth trying to see how the “Russian appeasement” strategy makes a certain kind of logical sense in Trump’s mind: perhaps Trump believes that bringing Putin to the table will help force a wedge between the growing “no-limits” partnership between Russia and China. Maybe he also sees economic benefits to healing U.S.-Russian relations. But none of this is achievable without punishing costs for Ukraine, the aggressed nation, including pre-negotiation concessions that the Trump administration already handed to Russia: no pathway to NATO membership and no commitment to regaining territory, as outlined by newly-confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a Feb. 12 meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels.
President Trump must understand the failures of previous failed ceasefire agreements between Russia and Ukraine in order to appreciate the dangers of these concessions. A recent Foreign Affairs article by Tetiana Kyselova and Yuna Potomkina posits that the current situation parallels the Minsk process of 2014–2015 in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014. The Minsk agreements ultimately fell apart because of the fragility of the starting negotiating conditions: Putin managed to portray Russia as a mediating force between Ukraine and the annexed states, making negotiations impossible on the nonstarter of disputed sovereignty.
The Minsk Agreements were not successfully enforced (neither country’s parliament even ratified the agreement, delegitimizing the entire process). As Zelenskyy tried to remind Trump in the Oval Office meeting, Putin brazenly violated the prisoner-exchange provisions of those agreements because of how he was able to shape the contours of the negotiating process itself. His argument to Trump that granting Putin pre-signing leverage on critical issues (such as territorial recognition, economic and security concessions, and peacekeeping) would render it impossible for the United States and Europe to help Ukraine achieve a just peace.
To advance toward a successful armistice, Trump must acknowledge Russia’s revanchist intentions. The United States must include Europe in negotiating strategy and insist on strong enforcement mechanisms. Kicking Zelenskyy out of the White House was, it is safe to say, not a good first step towards that outcome. While Trump asserted that Zelenskyy will only be welcomed back to the White House when he is “ready for peace,” the European leaders (led by British prime minister Keir Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron) who have subsequently welcomed Zelenskyy for serious, non-shouty discussions understand how to negotiate with Putin. They learned it the hard way in 2014-2015.
Perhaps this is just a high horse we ride here at The Lemur, but it certainly seems like Trump fails to appreciate the big ideas at play in this process. The institutional memory of centrist western European governments appears to have in the field of view the memory of history: they understand what appeasement of territorial aggression looks like, and they seem to get the overarching lessons from Cold War agreements (both failed and successful) with the Soviet Union. Crucially, they also appreciate Vladimir Putin in his own intellectual and historical context (including his geopolitical musings on the fall of the USSR, his infatuation with reviving Petrine expansionism, and his personal skepticism of rule of law, hence his willingness to violate international agreements): Trump’s narrow-minded deal-making approach makes it impossible to incorporate these vital “big ideas.” In the Oval Office meeting, Zelensky tried to bring up the most basic big idea of the American geopolitical experience in the twentieth century: that the Atlantic Ocean does not immunize the United States from European wars, he was shouted down. He was met with denial and nastiness: “you don’t know that,” Trump retorted. It was, to put it mildly, a bleak day for big ideas.
Duke Life:
Let’s take a step back from the world stage for a moment—it was also an eventful week right here at our beloved university. On Wednesday February 26, around 200 faculty members and Durham residents protested, pressuring Duke to not comply with the Trump administration’s efforts to end diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Here at Duke, protestors also called for Duke to end their Pickets, Protests and Demonstrations (PPD) policy, which they claim restricts free speech. According to the Duke Community Standard, the policy prohibits “disruptive picketing, protesting, or demonstrating on Duke University property or at any place in use for an authorized university purpose.” These demonstrations fittingly indicate our university community’s ever-adjusting response to policy and social changes in the current political climate. In a climate of confusion about changing federal policy, these issues are being felt more clearly at Duke.
Duke also announced its “Made For This” fundraising campaign, which aims to prioritize funding across the pillars of Duke Sciences and Technology, the Duke Climate Commitment, the undergraduate student experience, and Duke Health. For the first time in Duke’s history, the campaign aims to prioritize not only philanthropy but also “volunteerism and expertise.” This reconfiguration of Duke’s fundraising focus is representative of its growing ambitions to look beyond our school and “extend [its] value and impact to the world.” The initiative is proudly and boldly labeled Duke’s “most ambitious campaign in its history.” We all know that Duke loves a snappy-sounding project like this; it’s too early to say if this campaign will genuinely bring transformative money to all the right places at the university, but we’ll be keeping a close eye on it here at The Lemur.
And, of course, the calendar has now flipped to March. Let the Madness begin. The No. 1 overall seed awaits. San Antonio beckons.
We want six.
‘Til next Sunday,
The Weekly Lemur
