After believing in Russian President Vladimir Putin for the last 10 years as trustworthy old Vlad, Donald Trump has now correctly decided that Putin may not be the most honest of interlocutors on the world stage. Trump made this startling discovery — decades after practically everyone else — as Putin continues pummeling Ukraine while supposedly also assuring Trump he’s committed to a peace deal with the country he decided to conquer more than three years ago.
This realization compelled Trump to finally release additional weapons to Ukraine and threaten Russia with steep tariffs if it doesn’t reach a ceasefire within 50 days. Putin, for his part, has reacted just as we’d expect: telling Trump and everyone else to pound sand because he’s going to do just whatever he pleases.
As multiple Kremlin sources told Reuters, the Russian despot not only isn’t planning on backing down from his war of aggression, but wants to further expand Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine, an obvious non-starter for any potential peace plan as negotiations are already been hampered by his inflexibility on questions like preserving Ukrainian territorial integrity. That was clear when the Kremlin launched 400 drones at Ukraine on Tuesday, including targeting the hometown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Kryvyi Rih.
Part of the trouble is that Trump is and has always been way out of his depth. The inheritor of a real estate firm who launched and crashed multiple businesses and before playing a successful businessman as a character on TV is unsurprisingly not particularly prepared for the extraordinarily high stakes of running the globe’s preeminent superpower.
Trump still thinks that contending with a genuine authoritarian like Putin — a former KGB lieutenant colonel obsessed with some bygone vision of glorious imperial Russia or — is the same as striking a deal for a building on Park Ave. with one of his real estate buddies that he would be golfing again with by the weekend.
Whatever he thinks he knew about Putin, it’s because Putin knew how to push his buttons to get what he wanted. If Trump realizes now that Putin is a ruthless despot that will do whatever is necessary to advance his goals with no underlying honor or morality, then welcome to the club, though it’s a bit too little too late. We shouldn’t forget that Trump‘s first impeachment came about because he tried to block weapons assistance to Ukraine at a time when that country had already been invaded by Russia, albeit in a more limited fashion.
Trump has cycled wildly through positions on the conflict and its belligerents, indicating at various times that he admires Putin and disdains Ukraine only to toggle back to chastising Putin and furnishing the arms that Ukraine needs to defend itself. All of this back-and-forth is not the result of some brilliant strategic thinking, but simply the consequence of not having much interest in the particulars of foreign affairs.
Still, better late than never, and we hope that Trump at least sticks to his guns on this one as opposed to once more adopting the position of the person he spoke to last or whatever he thinks will play the best with the base. If he needs to look at it from the lens of avoiding humiliation by Putin, who is showing on the world stage that he couldn’t care less what Trump has to say, then so be it. Show Putin that he’s wrong and that the United States can still be a force for good.
