August 25, 2025
In previous columns, we have criticized President Trump for abandoning our traditional foreign policy of non-interventionism, despite his campaign promises to reduce our commitments abroad. In this week's column, I'd like to address another mistake Trump has made and continues to make. The mistake is not original to him but begins with Woodrow Wilson. This is the idea that wars can be settled by public meetings of the heads of state; in Trump's language, he is trying to "broker a deal" between the contending parties.
Trump is a foreign-policy activist, but couldn't, hypothetically, a non-interventionist president sponsor such meetings in order to promote peace? Even if we shouldn't enter foreign wars, shouldn't we try to encourage nations engaged in these wars to settle their disputes peacefully?
To my mind, the answer is clearly, "No, we shouldn't." First of all, these meetings invert the normal conduct of diplomacy. As an article in the New York Times on July 19, 2025 points out:
"First, President Trump rolled out the red carpet for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for a high-stakes summit in Alaska. Then he brought the president of Ukraine and seven other European leaders to the White House for an extraordinary gathering to discuss an end to the war.
"Now comes the grunt work.
"Mr. Trump in the past week has effectively flipped the traditional diplomatic process on its head. After two critical meetings in four days aimed at ending the war in Ukraine, American and European diplomats scrambled to come up with detailed proposals for security guarantees and other sticking points that could upend any momentum to secure peace.
"Already, major gaps were becoming evident, including whether Russia would countenance U.S. security guarantees for Ukraine, and whether Mr. Putin was serious about meeting with Mr. Zelensky face to face.
"Ironing out the details typically happens between staffers and diplomats before leaders step in to finalize the agreement. But Mr. Trump, ever one to toss out norms and traditions, went big last week in Alaska with Mr. Putin, then again at the White House on Monday, without any breakthroughs to announce. Now, with Russia continuing to hammer Ukraine and no sign that Mr. Trump or Mr. Putin see a cease-fire as a precondition for a deal, the process could devolve into a diplomatic version of trench warfare."
Secondly, because these meetings are held in the glare of world-wide media coverage, the parties to a dispute will be reluctant to make concessions, since they know that their intransigent followers will be furious unless they maintain the hardest possible line.
Thirdly, suppose that somehow a settlement is successfully negotiated, but later one of the parties violated it. There would be enormous pressure from the other side on the United to enter the conflict. For example, if Zelensky agreed to cede part of the Dombas to Russia but fighting broke out again. The Ukrainian government would very likely claim that it had been betrayed and demand that American troops be sent to the region.
So far, we've covered the fallacies of presidential diplomacy. But we need to dig deeper. The whole notion of "open diplomacy" needs to be challenged. As the great historian Sir Ronald Syme pointed out, "open diplomacy" is a contradiction in terms. To be successful, diplomacy must take place in private, insulated from popular pressure.
It was the monstrous Woodrow Wilson who initiated "open diplomacy." In the First Point of the Fourteen Points (January 8, 1918), Wilson declared: "Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view."
The distinguished diplomat and historian Harold Nicolson aptly notes in his book Diplomacy (Oxford University Press, 1939) that reality was far different. Wilson went to the Paris Peace Conference and did not conduct diplomacy publicly, He negotiated in secret. As Nicolson says: "Less than a year after making this pronouncement, President Wilson was himself called upon to negotiate one of the most important covenants that have ever been concluded, namely the Treaty of Versailles. That treaty was certainly an open covenant since its terms were published before they were submitted to the approval of the sovereign authority in the several signatory States. Yet with equal certainty it was not 'openly arrived at.' In fact few negotiations in history have been so secret, or indeed so occult. Not only were Germany and her allies excluded from any part in the discussion; not only were all the minor Powers kept in the dark regarding the several stages of the negotiations ; not only were the press accorded no information beyond the most meagre of official bulletins ; but in the end President Wilson shut himself up in his own study with Lloyd George and Clemenceau, while an American marine with fixed bayonet marched up and down in order to prevent the intrusion of all experts, diplomatists or plenipotentiaries, including even the President's own colleagues on the American Delegation. I am not contending for the moment that such secrecy was not inevitable, I am merely pointing out that it was unparalleled. It proves that the highest apostle of 'open diplomacy' found, when it came to practice, that open negotiation was totally unworkable. And it shows how false was the position into which President Wilson (a gifted and in many ways a noble man) had placed himself, by having failed, in January 1918, to foresee that there was all the difference in the world between 'open covenants' and 'openly arrived at " - between policy and negotiation." [I definitely don't agree that Wilson was "in many ways a noble man," though he at least had the merit of telling the truth about the evils of Reconstruction after the War Between the States]
George Kennan takes a similar view. In his book American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 1951), Kennan says: "The Allies were fighting to make the world safe for democracy...There would be open diplomacy this time; peoples, not governments would run things. The peace would be just and secure...Under the shadow of this theory Wilson went to Versailles unprepared to face the sordid butall-important details of the day of reckoning...No diplomacy can be effective if everything is said in public. The very possibility of compromise is destroyed if each step of the negotiation is exposed to popular passions."
John J. Mearsheimer elaborated on Kennan's argument in a reissue of Kennan's book. "This state of affairs is compounded by the fact that governments usually have to motivate their publics to make enormous sacrifices to win a great power war. Most importantly, some substantial number of citizens has to be convinced to serve in the military and possibly die for their country. One way that leaders inspire their people to fight modern wars is to portray the adversary as the epitome of evil and a mortal threat to boot. This behavior, it should be noted, is not limited to democracies as Kennan thought. Doing so, however, makes it almost impossible to negotiate an end to a war short of total victory. After all, how can one negotiate with an adversary that is thought to be the devil incarnate? It makes much more sense to pull out every punch to decisively defeat that opponent and get it to surrender unconditionally. Of course, both sides are invariably drawn to this conclusion, which rules out any hope of a negotiated compromise."
Let's do everything we can to end presidential summits and "open diplomacy." Let's instead return to our traditional foreign policy of non-interventionism.