Wall Street Journal Delivers Trump A Warning: 'Peace At What Price?'

The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal on Sunday warned President Donald Trump against pushing for an end to the war in Ukraine at any cost.

In an editorial titled “What Kind of Peace in Ukraine?” two days after Trump hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin for bilateral talks in Anchorage, Alaska, the conservative newspaper conceded that it’s too early to know the next steps the U.S. president plans to take as he looks forward to achieving his long-standing goal of bringing the brutal war to a close.

“Whether it’s the start of a road to peace, or to appeasement, is impossible to know,” the editorial reads. “We’re not sure if Mr. Trump knows himself.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, are meeting with Trump at the White House on Monday, hoping to counter Putin’s influence on Trump and try to avoid seeing Kyiv pressured into an unfavorable deal.

“Maybe they can counter Mr. Putin’s lies about who started the war and the security guarantees required to end it,” the board said of the European leaders visiting D.C. “But the reality is that no one knows what the U.S. President will do or say.”

The Journal commended Trump for wanting to end the three-year conflict, calling the effort an “admirable ambition,” while warning the president that U.S. adversaries, like Putin, may try to take advantage of his desire to be seen as a peacemaker as a way to extract a deal on their terms.

“The question is, as always, peace at what price? Cunning adversaries like Mr. Putin and China’s Xi Jinping can sense when the desire for a Nobel Peace Prize can be exploited for far more substantive strategic gains,” the editorial adds.