(It is interesting to note that Zelensky has started referring to Ukraine’s increasingly successful drone attacks on Russian oil refineries as “sanctions”. In other words, Ukrainians simply don’t have the luxury of waiting for Godot/Trump to impose his economic sanctions any more. So they’re doing it themselves, starting at the source. As Zelensky said in his Sunday evening address to the nation: “The most effective sanctions – the ones that work the fastest – are the fires at Russia’s oil refineries, its terminals, oil depots,” because this approach “significantly restricts the war”.)
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I have always avoided the more conspiratorial explanations for Trump’s behaviour. I do not believe the US president is somehow a Putin asset (though he sure knows how to play one on TV). What I believe is that Trump is simply different from any US president since World War II – and not in a good way.
For starters, he does not share the bedrock commitment that the Atlantic alliance is the greatest coalition in history for expanding and defending zones of free people, free markets and the rule of law. At the same time, it is hardly a secret that Trump is a man fuelled by grudges and grievances. I suspect he has never forgiven Zelensky for not giving him the dirt on Joe Biden that Trump sought in his first term – a crazy ask that eventually, through many twists and turns, led to Trump’s first impeachment trial.
Another explanation is that there is no real policymaking process in this administration. There is no sign that any of Trump’s policy declarations conveyed through social media are vetted first by area experts in the State Department or the CIA, no sign that anything is run by the Senate or House foreign affairs committees.
Have you noticed the blank stare on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s face whenever he is at Trump’s side? It seems like the look of a man struggling to mask his bewilderment.
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Here is Rubio on the Russian drone incursion into Poland: “No doubt about it: the drones were intentionally launched. The question is whether the drones were targeted to go into Poland specifically,” Rubio told reporters. He added, “If the evidence leads us there, then obviously that’ll be a highly escalatory move,” but, “there are a number of other possibilities as well.” Without mentioning Rubio by name, Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, referring to the drones Russia sent into Poland, wryly observed at the Yalta conference, “We don’t believe in 20 mistakes at the same time.”
The other explanation I offered to my European and Ukrainian friends went like this: You know how we often say that the Chinese are much more sophisticated players of the game of nations – that while we play checkers, the Chinese play chess, always thinking many moves ahead. Well, it’s sort of like that with Trump. Only Trump is not playing either checkers or chess. He’s playing Monopoly.
He does not judge countries on whether they share our democratic values – or even our interests. He judges them on whether they are Boardwalk or Baltic Avenue, on whether we have a trade surplus or trade deficit with them, on whether they are the site for a future Trump hotel or golf course and on whether their leaders will flatter his ego or not.
If you don’t flatter Trump and you have a trade surplus with us – say India – your democratic system may not save you from Trump’s tariffs. But if you flatter him, as Putin does, and if you offer him investment opportunities, as Putin also does, then Trump may not impose a single new tariff on you even if, like Russia, your economy runs a trade surplus with America.
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Alas, even Trump seems lately to have lost track of all the different conditions that he has set before he will do anything meaningful to punish Russia, which is probably why he let loose on Saturday with what’s really in his heart when it comes to Ukraine. “This is not TRUMP’S WAR,” he wrote on Truth Social. “It is Biden’s and Zelenskyy’s WAR.”
You notice that he doesn’t say it’s Putin’s war – the man who actually started it.
Sorry, Mr President. This is YOUR war now. Because you and you alone have the ability to deliver to Ukraine the military resources to send the message to Putin that time is not on his side, that he will have to accept a deal. Unfortunately, it’s a deal that will allow the Russian president to keep some of the territory in eastern Ukraine that he has seized by force – but the condition for that is that Putin must accept Western security guarantees for Ukraine aimed at ensuring that no Russian leader will ever dare invade again, as well as Ukrainian membership in the European Union.
If you, Mr President, walk away from Ukraine and let it be overrun by the Russian dictatorship, you can post on Truth Social all you want, and you can give as many interviews with Fox News as you please, but your name will forever be spoken in the same breath as Neville Chamberlain – and well it should.
It takes my breath away that only one Republican in Congress has had the guts to tell Trump that. God bless Don Bacon of Nebraska – a former air force brigadier general who responded to Trump’s attempt to weasel out of responsibility with a post of his own on social platform X: “Mr President, Putin is the one who is the invader. And now this war is on your watch, and you’ll be judged in the history books in the decades to come by your actions or lack thereof.”
