As I noted on social media yesterday afternoon, the President of the United States is occasionally in the habit of accidentally admitting things that most of us – including I’d wager a fair few of his supporters – assumed to be true anyway:
In this case, the statement couldn’t really be clearer: Without Trump, very bad things would have happened to Putin’s Russia. Ergo, as most of us have known for some time, Donald Trump has actively been looking out for Russian interests. Without him, very bad things would have happened. Those are the words of a protector, or an ally. Not a disinterested peacemaker.
You can feel the frustration in Trump’s words. The American President did not just claim on one occasion that he could end the war between Russia and Ukraine “within 24 hours” – he made the claim 53 times on the campaign trail last year alone. Even allowing for the usual Trumpist hyperbole – most of us I think would have been impressed if he had been able to end the war within 24 days and forgiven him the rhetorical excess – that claim has now definitively been exposed as the verbal equivalent of the material that comes out of the back end of bulls.
In fairness to Trump, it is not as if he has not tried: He began by exhausting almost all of his leverage over Ukraine by suspending military aid to that beleaguered country. He exerted enormous public pressure on President Zelensky to come to the table and negotiate, and succeeded in forcing the Ukrainians to do so. He was openly willing to meet Putin face to face, and dispatched his top diplomats to Moscow to flatter the Kremlin. He also attempted to enforce peace on the most generous possible terms to Russia, reportedly offering a deal that would have seen Putin keep most of his ill-gotten gains. The morality of what Trump tried to do is debatable, but try he certainly did.
It’s also worth noting here that the Ukrainians – perhaps unsurprisingly – have ultimately been amenable to much of what Trump wanted. They freely signed a “minerals deal” that Trump touted as economically great for the United States, and attended every peace conference he proposed. We’ve reached the stage where, despite Trump’s clear and repeated hostility to President Zelensky, even he has been forced to conclude that the problem and the source of the ongoing conflict is the man in Moscow, and not the man in Kiev.
There are a few things we can say now, with some clarity.
First, Trump’s theory of the war in Ukraine and how to solve it has failed, and you can see why: Trump is a man of business and money. So far as he is concerned, Russia has been offered “a good deal” and is turning it down. He seems entirely unable to comprehend that for the Russians, and the Ukrainians, the war is more than about business and deals. For the Russians, it is an existential struggle to prove that they are still a power to be reckoned with, and that NATO and their other imagined enemies can be pushed out of the Russian “sphere”. For Ukraine, it is an existential struggle for survival. I am not sure that Donald Trump has ever related to politics on a genuinely existential level, given that in the case of both Canada and Greenland he appears to be mystified that neither country would “trade” its sovereignty for a better deal under the American flag. For the American President, politics like business is about the bottom line. That is not true of either belligerent in Ukraine.
Second, the Europeans have actually understood Putin’s nature better than Trump has. For a long time now, Trump has been speaking of Putin in glowing terms and touting their relationship as key to his prospects of resolving the war. The Europeans by contrast say Putin cannot be trusted and is irrational, and would not accept a fair deal if one was offered.
On this, the Europeans have been proven right. Not that they will be given any credit for this by Trump.
Third, Putin appears to me – and some of his fans will dispute this – to have miscalculated yet again.
The one constant in the Ukraine/Russia war has been the absolute certainty of Russian sympathisers that Ukraine is constantly on the brink of collapse, and that Russia is holding back and could win the war in a week if it wished to. Yet, against a substantially weakened Ukraine, Russia has still been unable after three years to gain a decisive battlefield advantage. The war of attrition grinds on.
All the while, European resolve to support Ukraine has been stiffened, and Trump himself is now turning on Putin. If those patterns hold, the chances of a sudden Russian decisive advantage opening up on the frontlines recedes even further. All the time, Russia’s young men are being fed into the meat grinder, and Russia’s young women – whose birth rates are already in crisis – face a lifetime of singledom in greater and greater numbers.
What remains to be seen in all of this is to what degree Trump is telling the truth when he says that he has personally protected the Russians from even worse consequences. I suspect much of that is his usual bluster – but some of it is undoubtedly true. Trump does have leverage over Putin in one obvious way: He can at any time of his choosing ramp back up military aid to Ukraine.
If he does so, then Putin’s latest miscalculation may have been his worst yet.