Below is only my opinion and not statement of fact.
So what is the realistic option for Trump/the US concerning the war if peace efforts keep near falling through/major parties involved keep dragging their feet like this?
"Realistic option" is a bit vague, but I assume you mean "what are the options for America to pull its dick out of this crazy Slavic mess so we can wipe it off and stick it into Iran or China instead".
Others have already covered the broad strokes. America has no cards left other than putting boots on the ground.
- Threatening Russia with more sanctions will not work. They already learned how to work around more than a decade of sanctions and their Indian/Chinese partners DGAF about American complaints.
- Giving Ukraine more weapons will not work because Ukraine is simply running out of meat to send to the slaughter.
- More extreme actions like actually seizing (or giving back) the 200 billion dollars of Russian of Russian tax payer money held in European clearing houses will not work as Russia has already written it off years ago.
- If Europe or USA try to seize Russian """shadow fleet""" ships without being a first party to the war then that'll be a huge escalation (act of war, technically) no one truly wants and pave the road for some kind of naval confrontation as Russia will then begin to organize shipping convoys protected by their warships.
So the best Trump can hope to do is somehow wash his hands of the whole mess without being blamed for Ukraine loss by slowly cutting back weapons/ammo shipments from the Presidential drawdown authority established under Biden, preventing sale of additional weapons, and scaling back intelligence sharing.
Trump will still be blamed for everything and much more. Biden left him a hell of a poison pill.
Walk away, pull all support for UKR, let them kill each other until one of them comes out on top
IMO there's no doubt at this point who'll end up winning.
Spoiler: the side who had three times less pre-war population is going to lose.
negotiations failed because both parties are crazy
...
The US already elbows deep in conflict, they invested sooo much money and it is something that is difficult to just drop. So imo there is a possibility of US returning to how it was under biden admin - keep supporting uki democracy and sending billions.
Neither party is crazy. See
my post above explaining my view on how Elensky is approaching the war. As for Russia they would have preferred that their 2022 saber rattling was enough to get people to negotiate, but Russo-phobic Europeans thought Putler was weak so now he has to settle things the hard way.
preferably with surprising ru-us friendship
I share this dream, but it will never happen. The interests of the two countries are just too diametrically opposed. Best we an hope for is "peace from strength" where both sides respect each other and do not fuck with each other for fear of the consequences.
Monké tax because I hate posting huge blocks of text without a picture. Blame 4shits.