Chaotic, unprincipled and dangerously effective, Donald Trump’s latest foreign policy move in Ukraine may provide a brief respite from Russian bombing in plunging temperatures that have left civilians freezing in their homes.
The danger lies in what he expects to get in return for securing a week-long agreement from Vladimir Putin to hold off on tormenting Ukraine. The concession he will, no doubt, demand is that Kyiv give in to the Kremlin’s demands to hand over his most potent defensive lines and fortress cities without a shot being fired in return for a longer “ceasefire”.
Trump has been backing the wrong side in Ukraine, and may soon launch a war in Iran that he cannot control.
US negotiators have been trying to get Volodymyr Zelensky to agree to cede all of Donetsk and most of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces as a reward for Russia’s bloody invasion that has, by many estimates, cost the country 1.2 million casualties.
The US administration has cut all military aid for Ukraine and allows only an intelligence feed to Kyiv’s forces, leaving its energy system so vulnerable to air attacks by Russia that most Ukrainians have no power in their homes.
Support from America for a Western democracy has collapsed under Trump.
But he has what he calls an “armada”, led by the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, that is threatening Iran.
That’s a staggering amount of firepower to back his demands that Tehran give up its shattered nuclear programme, its potent missile forces, and end support for proxy groups like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iraq.
He has abandoned all talk of intervening in Iran for the reason of protecting protestors who are demanding an end to the regime that has ruled since 1979 – even though he encouraged them to take to the streets and promised that “help is coming”.
Bombing a country’s apparatus of oppression might have given him a principled edge. The US and its allies have intervened, sometimes with UN backing, in the past; notably in Somalia, the former Yugoslavia and even in Libya in the name of saving populations from extremism, warlords, or genocide.
That moment has passed in Iran. Yet he persists in his threat to attack a sovereign nation that, by any metric, is a force for bad across the Middle East, but with no plan for the day after.
The attraction for Trump is, perhaps, the hope that US oil companies can roll into the country once its theocracy has collapsed and exploit its fossil fuel reserves in the way that he hopes to see in Venezuela – where he decapitated the regime in Caracas but left its administration intact.
And he clearly believes that he would be doing Israel a favour since it has plenty to fear from the ideology of the ayatollahs, who’d like to see the Jewish state erased.
Iran poses almost no threat to the US.
