Trump has come under heavy criticism both in the United States and among America’s European allies for being on the verge of brokering a peace deal that will likely reward Russian President Vladimir Putin for his illegal invasion by allowing him to keep the 20% of Ukraine he now occupies. It would also force Ukraine to forfeit its dreams of NATO membership, the only true guard against another Russian invasion in the future.

Trump sees himself in a literal “no-win” situation, where the only other option is continuing to pump billions of dollars into a war where the battlefield may look the same five years from now.

“Do you want to keep it going for another five years?” Trump asked.

There are certain parallels between the war in Ukraine that Trump inherited from former President Joe Biden and the one in Afghanistan that Biden took over from Trump.

In both cases, the seeds of defeat were planted by the previous administration.

In the case of Afghanistan, Trump signed a surrender deal with the Taliban, while cutting the U.S.-supported Afghan government out of negotiations and ending U.S. military support for the Afghan army.

The result was that when Biden came in, the Afghan army was broken in spirit, and the Taliban had brokered surrender deals with local Afghan commanders, and only had to wait for the U.S. to leave.

In Ukraine, the Biden administration’s timid slow rolling of weapons and ammunition deprived Ukraine of its best chance of victory, forcing it for years to fight with one hand behind its back.

Every key weapons request, whether F-16s, Abrams tanks, or long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems, was first denied, then delayed, and then provided with the provision that they not be used against targets in Russia.

The knock against the Biden administration by Ukraine’s supporters in Congress was that Biden was giving Ukraine “just enough to keep from losing, but not enough to win.”

Biden and his national security officials liked to repeat the mantra that the U.S. would support Ukraine “as long as it takes,” which is not the same as “with whatever it takes.”

Cowed by Putin’s nuclear threats and wary of sparking a wider war, the U.S. under Biden forced Ukraine to limit its military operations to its turf, while Russia could strike Ukrainian military and civilian targets with standoff weapons from the safety of their airspace.

It was no way to fight a war of survival.

The disconnect between Washington and Kyiv came to a head in 2023, when Ukraine, flush from impressive victories over Russian forces in the north, planned a major counteroffensive to retake the south and eastern portions of occupied Ukraine and, in the process, break the back of the then-beleaguered Russian army.

But the dithering by Washington in providing tanks and training meant the operation, planned for early spring, would be delayed until the beginning of summer. By then, Russian forces had dug formidable defenses, including trenches, landmines, and tank traps — and the element of surprise, which Ukraine had used to great advantage in the first year of the war, was lost.

The agonizingly slow pace of equipping Ukrainian forces was immensely frustrating, to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, his commanders, and U.S. lawmakers.

“This counteroffensive that everybody is talking about, it’s the longest wind-up for a punch in the history of the world,” Sen. Angus King (I-ME), spouted off at one Senate hearing.

When the counteroffensive finally did begin, it was a disaster.

Ukrainian forces were largely unable to advance in the face of withering artillery fire and drone strikes. Casualties were heavy and gains few.

The plan to employ U.S.- and NATO-style “combined arms” tactics was a failure, in part because it was missing a key element that the U.S. would never go to war without — air superiority.

Ukraine’s aging MiG-29 fighter jets were no match for Russia’s Su-35s, and the F-16s Ukraine so desperately wanted were still more than a year away.

The disheartening summer offensive offered another lesson, namely that maneuver warfare with large tanks and armored vehicles was not the way future wars would be fought.

“They’re building a completely new theory of war,” former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said on CNN after visiting the battlefield that summer.

Instead of more tanks, what Ukraine needed, Schmidt said, was more drones — thousands more.

It’s either a “massive number of drones or a massive number of human casualties on both sides,” he said.

But perhaps the most concrete example of the Biden administration’s failure to give Ukraine what it needed when it needed it is the fact the 12-mile Kerch bridge, a vital Russian supply line to occupied Crimea, is still standing after three years of war.

Nearly every military strategist said before the war began that Ukraine would have to drop the bridge if it was to have a chance at eventually liberating Crimea, and put Russia on the back foot.

“Crimea is the decisive terrain of this war,” retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commanding general of the U.S. Army in Europe, told the Washington Examiner last year.

The No. 1 goal, he said, should have been to “make Crimea untenable for Russian forces,” but limits placed on longer-range weapons provided by the U.S. and Germany made the taking-out-the-bridge mission impossible.

The bitter irony is that the Ukrainian military and its home-grown defense industry have since adapted. Ukraine’s innovative battlefield tactics, including the use of fiber optic drones that don’t need GPS and can’t be jammed, are “inflicting unsustainable losses on Russian forces while holding them to marginal gains,” according to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

The ISW quotes Zelensky as putting his causalities since the start of the war at 46,000 soldiers killed, 390,000 soldiers wounded, and 12,000 civilians killed, heavy losses, but nowhere near the million Trump has claimed.

Ukraine may not be winning, but the war is not lost, the ISW assessed.

“Zelensky does not imminently risk losing all of Ukraine,” according to the think tank. “At the current rate of advance, it would take Russian forces over 83 years to capture the remaining 80 percent of Ukraine, assuming that they can sustain massive personnel losses indefinitely.”

Putin, because his very life may depend on not appearing to be a loser in the reckless war he thought would be a cakewalk, appears to be willing to sacrifice untold numbers of troops, which may be one factor in Trump’s thinking that it’s time to end the human carnage and give Putin what he wants.

“No one wants Ukraine to fall to the Russians,” said CNN contributor Scott Jennings, Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) former political director. “The American people support the Ukrainians. They know who the bad guys are here.

“The reality is there’s never going to be a moment where Vladimir Putin waves the white flag and runs back and says, ‘I lost.’ We don’t want Ukraine to lose, but you have to come up with a solution that they both can live with, and that’s the situation [Trump’s] in.”

Hodges, who is now retired and living in Germany, believes Trump is underestimating the Ukrainian fighting spirit.

“People around [Trump] don’t understand the nature of war or why men fight,” Hodges recently posted on X. “Russia is in trouble. If Europe can deliver its industrial potential, which dwarfs Russia’s, Ukraine wins. Europe will have done it despite us, resulting in lost U.S. influence, to our great regret.”

TRACKING WHAT DOGE IS DOING ACROSS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

“Putin is demanding as the price of a deal Ukrainian territory he doesn’t even occupy,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote after Trump cut military aid and ended intelligence sharing with Ukraine. “If the Russians want a ceasefire, it’s to take a breather, rearm, and await the next invasion opportunity.

“If Ukraine falls to Russia, Mr. Trump will own what would be his version of Joe Biden’s Afghanistan.”

Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense, is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.