During Trump’s instantly infamous Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week, the Ukrainian president was determined to make one point above all: that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not to be trusted. Again and again, Zelenskyy noted that Putin has a long record of breaking promises. “Twenty-five times he broken his own signature,” Zelenskyy explained in clunky English. “Twenty-five times he broken cease-fire.”

Zelenskyy kept returning to this point because he knows Putin’s paper promises are worthless. Putin has made it very clear that he wants to reclaim as much of the old Soviet empire as he can get away with, which is why he invaded Georgia in 2008, turned Belarus into a vassal state, refused to remove troops from Moldova, annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched a full-blown invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As Putin once put it, “Russia’s borders do not end anywhere.”

Trump’s response to Zelenskyy? Putin didn’t break any promises while Trump was president.

This is the key to Trump’s entire understanding of the war. If he were president, he always says, the war never would have happened.

So let’s give Trump the benefit of the doubt and assume Putin would never violate an agreement brokered by Trump while Trump is in office.

So what? National security operates on a longer timeline than a single presidency.

One reason Germany was incorporated into NATO and the European Union was to ensure that it would never again threaten the continent or the world.

Another was to ensure that the Soviet empire would not expand further into Europe, beyond the Eastern European states it occupied at the end of World War II. And the time frame of this alliance wasn’t just as long as Harry Truman or German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer remained in office. The time frame was as long as necessary.

Similarly, our European allies are scrambling to adapt to an international order in which America can no longer be relied on not because they fear an imminent invasion of Poland or the Baltic states. What they’re concerned about is the long run.

Indeed, Putin might love a deal allowing him to keep much of what he’s stolen – and the Trump administration has already said it’s fine with that — and prepare for another stab at taking all of Ukraine and maybe more a few years down the road.

Trump doesn’t care about down the road. He wants to be able to claim he achieved peace in the short term. If Putin invades Ukraine again on Jan. 20, 2029, that’s not his problem. In fact, he might even like it: He could point to it as more evidence that Putin would never invade the country while Trump was president.