Buck Brief - Will Trump Commit U.S. Troops to Guarantee Ukraine Deal?

Is Trump preparing to put U.S. troops in Ukraine as part of a deal with Russia? Buck Sexton breaks down the biggest question coming out of Trump’s latest meeting with President Zelensky. From security guarantees to the possibility of U.S. bases in Ukraine, Buck explains what’s on the table, how it could reshape the war, and why it has MAGA voters divided.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
You're listening to the Buck Sexton Show podcast, make sure
you subscribe to the podcast on the iHeartRadio app or
wherever you get your podcasts. Is Trump going to guarantee
Ukraine's security after a deal with Russia is reached by
putting US troops into Ukraine. This is the single biggest

(00:34):
question that came out of today's meeting at the White House.
President Trump has said, quote, he's going to give a
lot of help, a lot of help to Ukraine when
he had this meeting with Zelensky. A very different tone
from the President as he sat down this time with
Zelenski the last time, six months ago, these two had

(00:54):
a meeting. And I think what it shows is one
how much President Trump is dedicated to the idea of
getting a deal done. I mean, this is an absolute
focus of his administration. He could not have more input
and more drive into this process. And beyond that, he's

(01:18):
willing to take some pretty severe or serious steps depending
on who you ask. We don't know if it means
they'll be troops US troops as part of this guarantee.
Here's the problem, though, If this guarantee is going to
be worthy of the name, it can't just be economic

(01:39):
if Russia and Ukraine put down their weapons, divvy up
the land, and then there's a an agreed upon DMZ
if you will, something like a demilitarized zone, some kind
of a buffer zone between the countries, which won't be
very substantial, but it'll be very heavily armed and mined

(01:59):
and built up. If that's where this is all heading,
there has to be a reasonable belief on the side
of the Ukrainians that Russia's not just going to rearm,
re equip and then just punch through again in a
few years, probably when you don't have Donald Trump as
president in this country, waiting for some wimpy Democrat administration

(02:21):
to come along who won't do anything. But the possibility
even of US troops as part of the guarantee has
a lot of people in MAGA asking questions because certainly
at this stage of the game we've all seen there
are a lot of people who are really pro Trump

(02:42):
and want the Ukraine war to end, but they're single
guiding their single issue vote if you will, on this
that they're guiding principle on. This is no US troops involved,
This is not our fight. Now, we wouldn't be getting
into the fight in the short term. But if we're
going to put ourselves in a place where the United States,

(03:05):
let's say, has a military base in Ukraine, that would
be the most straightforward way of doing this. It would
be something like what we have in South Korea and
what we have in Germany. Now, a lot of MAGA
is going to say absolutely not, this is what we
don't want. Perhaps it doesn't go to this. I'm just
working through what the possibilities are, what a security guarantee

(03:28):
could really look like, because the Ukrainians are smart enough
to know that a security quote guarantee that only involve
sanctions is not worth the paper it's printed on. I
mean the Russians, we can't hit them hard enough economically
to get them to stop doing this. We can't get
putin to turn the tanks around because the ruble is

(03:50):
getting hit too hard. It's not it hasn't happened in years.
It's not going to happen, not while they're a fossil
fuel superpower, which, unfortunately, because of their natural resources, they
still are oil and gas. They got a lot of it,
a lot of fertilizer too, So that means that we
have to see this through beyond just the economic implications.

(04:13):
And this is where Trump is saying, there's going to
be a lot of help. Now there's the US base,
US basing rights, or a basing situation in Ukraine. That's
one way this could go. We could have something like
US promises of military support direct military intervention if Russia invades.

(04:35):
But now either one of these situations that would seem
to be a little bit of a lesser one. Ukrainians
wouldn't want that. I'm sure they want to base a
US base there, although there's some sovereignty issues for them
too with that, but I think they would want it nonetheless.
But the issue then becomes is this just a backdoor
Article five NATO situation? Does this then just turn into

(05:01):
the perhaps biggest redline that Putin has in all of
this is Ukraine cannot be a staging ground. This isn't
his thinking. I know, people say, oh, that's a Russian
talking point. Yeah, well this is what he says, and
I think we can all agree this is what he thinks,
or at least he says out loud. If it's going
to be any attack on Ukraine is triggering a US

(05:26):
military a direct military response like our planes in the sky,
our troops on the ground, even if it's solely defensive
a nature, meaning we're not going to go into Russian territory,
but we're going to try to support Ukraine. That looks
like Article five NATO, doesn't it. So how could Putin
sign off on his side of the deal if he
is giving away what would be the biggest stumbling block

(05:49):
I would assume for the Russians in this whole thing,
which is, No, you can't have a Ford operating base
of NATO, a de facto Ford operating base of NATO
in Ukraine, which is he says, the whole reason for
this war. I think the real reason for this war
is a resource grab. It is Russian expansionism, irridentism, Russian imperialism, Yes,

(06:11):
all of that, but certainly the ostensible reason, or the
you could say the fig leaf, the pretextual reason, is
to prevent the encroachment of NATO right onto Russia's Russia's
borders with Ukraine. And that's where this thing gets really

(06:33):
really messy. We'll come back to it. You know, our
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out today. Okay, so US security guarantee for Russia, you know,

(07:40):
or for Ukraine rather against Russian aggression. This is all
feeling a lot like it is tied into at least
an analogous to what we've seen in World War One
with the style of warfare. It is largely trench warfare
with drones. That's the best way to describe what the
front in Ukraine is based on all the reports you

(08:02):
can read, and it's pretty stunning how deep the fortifications,
the ground fortifications are. They've referred to it well. They
want to avoid calling an imagine no line for Ukraine
because of what happened to the French Magino line, but
that is probably the closest historical analogy, and when you

(08:25):
see what the plan is here, it's going to be
to make it impossible for Russia to advance further in
its territorial ambitions and to strengthen the defensive perimeter of Ukraine.
But there's no future in which anyone sees Ukraine punching
across that no man's land, if you will, and taking

(08:46):
the fight to the Russians in territory they currently truly
control and expelling them all from Ukraine. So that means
you're going to have territorial concessions. That part of it,
I think is unavoidable. And that part of it is
I think where you're going to see a lot of
pushback from our press because they're going to say Trump,

(09:06):
if we do get to a deal, first of all,
no matter what the deal is, there are going to
be the Trump haters out there who say the deal
is not good enough. He pushed them into this, he
sold out Ukraine, because the one thing they cannot accept,
they will not accept, is that Trump has done anything
good here, that Trump has done something perhaps even worthy

(09:29):
of a Nobel prize if we get there right now.
That's not the case right now, it's a best effort,
but we have to be very honest about what the
implications are here. If he gets this through, and it
will be the most impressive win on the world stage
by a president I really think since Reagan and the

(09:49):
fall of the Berlin Wall. I don't know what else
could be equivalent to this, because Trump will have brought
together this negotiation and ended a massive conflict between advanced
military's advanced economies. This isn't, you know, some third world
counterinsurgency campaign somewhere. This is Russia with a lot of nukes.
This is a big deal, and up is doing everything

(10:11):
he can to bring this thing to a conclusion. It's
so bloody and it's such a horrific loss of life
on both sides. So on a humanitarian front, you would
just want this to end as quickly as possible because
of the horrendous casualties that are mounting and a generation
of Russians, a generation of Ukrainians lost. And I understand

(10:32):
we're to think that the Russians are the bad guys,
and certainly Putin is the aggressor here. I'm very clear
on that. I understand, and we've been able to see
this all along. Putin is not a good person. He's
not an ethical person the way we think of ethics.
But a lot of these Russian conscripts, you know, they
just think they're fighting for their country. They're fighting because
they have no choice. They don't want to go to

(10:53):
prison or they don't want to be you know, beaten
by the FSB and conscripted anyway. So they're in a
tough situation. You know, the average Russian who's being thrown
onto the front lines here doesn't really have a choice,
and a lot of Ukrainians are also in that situation
where they don't have much of a choice, if at all.
And I know there's been very aggressive conscription on the

(11:14):
Ukrainian side of things too, So I feel bad. These
are human beings. These are human beings who are living
in trenches, who are hoping that they don't have a
drone flown right at them, that explodes right next to them,
and if it doesn't just kill them outright, horrifically maims them,
you know, takes their arm, maybe half their face. I mean,

(11:35):
it's awful, awful stuff that's going on here, and so
we can know who's in charge of pieces of territory
that most Americans honestly still and this isn't a knock
on Americans who can't but most Americans still can't find
this stuff on a map. And why should they. It's
very far away. It's not you know, it's not their thing.
It's not our problem. You know, this isn't a territorial

(11:58):
dispute between Mexico and Arizona. This isn't really our problem
in that sense. But because where America, I guess anything
becomes our problem if it's big enough anywhere in the world,
and this is certainly big enough. So I'm very hopeful
that Trump will be able to move this to a
better place and get the bloodshed to stop, and it
will be remarkable if that is in fact the case.

(12:20):
We're also seeing here a preview I think of what
warfare in the future is going to look like, particularly
with the drones, but also increasingly with a combination of
technology and manufacturing. It's not just going to be who
has the most advanced stuff. It's going to be who
can make this stuff at scale? That and a whole

(12:41):
bunch of different things, different kinds of drone, different kinds
of munitions. So the the industrial backbone, you know, the US,
once it got going in World War Two, the US
industrial and economic might was just so incredible that we
were able to eventually just steamroll the bad guys, particularly

(13:02):
in the Pacific theater. We just could make more planes,
better planes, more, you know, we had more and better everything,
and we yeah, it was our brave on the front lines,
but it was also the machinery back home that was
making all this stuff. And that's what warfare in the
future is gonna We're gonna it's gonna look like we're
gonna get away from the continued Third World counterinsurgency operations

(13:25):
of the anti g hottest GWAT campaigns and move toward
what kind of drones can you fly that can take
out a tank? What kind of drones do you have
or missiles do you have that can take out major
naval surface ships? I mean this is these are the
calculations going forward. I think they're going to be dominating

(13:47):
warfare and our focus of it. So there's gonna there's
a lot that's being learned because there's no laboratory of
warfare quite like a war. As all history shows us.
There's a lot that's being learned on the front lines
in Ukraine that will be applicable for our own defense
as well as other countries, other allies of ours defense
going forward. I'm thinking about Taiwan and China obviously in
a big way. Uh you know, the time ease. I'm

(14:10):
sure I have a lot that they are learning from
being able to stop a power that is superior in
materiel and manpower overall. But with the right techno, with
the right technology and the right interlocking fields of fire
if you will, from the whether it's anti aircraft, anti

(14:34):
personnel trenches, all these things brought together a much smaller
but technologically advanced power can be formidable on the defensive.
So that may be very good news for Taiwan. But
it's something that we're seeing play out now. You know.
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