Archetype of the Rule: Trump’s Ukraine-Russia War Flip-Flop-Flippery
Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle, No. 12
We’ll not move on today to the fourth and final part of the Questions essay, which will ponder yet another question few seem to be seriously asking: What if the Trump 2.0 Administration actually does represent the extinction event for the American constitutional order that some predicted as early as November 2016? What if the far more untethered second Trump Administration is the analogic prologue to what happened to the Roman Republic in 27 BCE? What if there is no going back to American political normalcy as it existed before the Trump era? How will differently minded Americans, and others, understand and account for that extinction event, and with what subsequent effects? What will the country, the nation, and the state—three different words with three different meanings, of course….that the vast majority of Americans could not accurately define if their lives depended on it—look like after four years…..after six, eight, after a dozen years? How even to think coherently about questions like these?
No, The Raspberry Patch needs time to get that final, necessarily speculative Questions essay just right, and that time is not yet. Instead, we’ll parse lessons from some interrelated foreign policy matters focusing on how the personality of the President and his bespoke Administration have shaped them. (This essay is an expanded version of “Trump’s Flip-Floppery on the Ukraine-Russia War,” RSIS Commentary, 112/2025, dated 20 May 2025.) It’s not a lesson too late for the learning, made of sand…..because—just look at the calendar—we’ve only just begun, with 1,339 days of Trump 2.0 left to run assuming it runs to its natural end. (One wonders if Tom Paxton and The Carpenters were ever in the same room together….but never mind.)
Foreign Policy: Getting More Foreign All the Time?
The Trump 2.0 Administration’s betrayal of Ukraine and apparent alignment with Russia briefly seemed subject to a reappraisal earlier this month. But that hint vanished almost as soon as it became discernible. The Administration’s attitude has not returned entirely to its acerbically anti-Ukraine, fawningly pro-Russian posture, however. It seems instead aimlessly stranded in between at the moment, but who knows how long that will last? As the breezes blow, or seem to, thither the Trump Administration points…for a while. First a gale blew in January and February as Trump dramatically flipped the Biden policy; then a squall passed through in late April and mid-May as he seemed perhaps to be flopping his own flip. Now the wind has died down as the month’s final week begins, the sails are slack, the ship is drifting, everyone waits….. What will happen next no one can say. Trying to figure out what this guy will do next is a little like guessing which bush a dog out on a sniffari will choose to piss on.
[Update, July 4, 2025: The same thing happened again in June and early this month: Trump returned from the NATO Summit on June 24 with, he said, a different, more positive, view of NATO and a less benign view of Russian motives and methods. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who put on a terrific fawning song-and-dance routine for Trump in The Hague must have been thrilled with his conquest. But before Rutte and the rest of the EU cast could stop smiling Trump (illegally, but what’s new?) ordered critical ammunition for Ukraine, mostly concerning air defense ordnance critical to protecting civilian population, withheld on the mendacious pretext the U.S. stocks of those weapons were running low. This occurred just as the Russians were stepping up their attacks against Ukrainian civilian targets, an adaptation of the state terror policy the Russian military pioneered in Chechnya. This is the same kind of ordnance Trump summarily shut off back in early March, only to resume it some days later. This time, no resumption is likely as the Russians begin their summer offensive. For more detail on recent developments, see Nick Cohen, “The casual cruelty of Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine,” Writing from London (Substack), July 3, 2025, and Michael Andersen, “Trump is now directly helping Russia kill Ukrainians,” Two Grumpy Old Men on Ukraine (Substack), July 3, 2025.
This is no exception to the rule of how the Trump 2.0 Administration operates. It is rather the archetypical exemplar of the rule. The general implications of this pattern of behavior, in which the only consistency is inconsistency, are propitious neither for U.S. policy or global security stability when it manifests abroad, nor for We the People when it manifests in domestic policy. In both cases one is left with the classical conundrum: Is this dangerous but not really serious, or is it serious but not really dangerous? Or is it both dangerous and serious?
It has been atypically difficult for students and analysts of U.S. political behavior outside the Trump 2.0 Administration to understand what has been going on inside of it, and the reason is simple: Those inside, at the highest as well as other levels, don’t know what’s going on either. Like the first Trump Administration in the months after its inception, the second coming of Donald Trump has acquired a much-deserved reputation for flip-flopping whose clear and obvious source is President Trump himself. He doesn’t really understand any of the issues, he doesn’t know how to govern a large going concern like the U.S. Government, and he has the attention span of a goat let loose in a blossoming meadow. No wonder things look not very tightly wrapped, because they aren’t as one man’s stream-of-consciousness has replaced what used to be an actual operating form of governance.
Major examples of Trumpian flip-floppery aside from the policy toward the Ukraine-Russia War include the highly crooked path of April 2’s “Liberation Day” tariffs and the start-and-stop military campaign against the Houthis. It behooves us to review these episodes briefly so as to get the larger picture to come into focus.
With the tariffs we were told first that their aim was strategic—to restore U.S. manufacturing to a healthy level of the economy and its attendant labor profile; no they were not tactical feints against which to negotiate better deals for U.S. exports. But then the stock and the bond markets tanked in uncharacteristically parallel fashion, showing that U.S. trading partners possibly held a position of bond-dumping escalation dominance in a U.S. initiated trade war, and the tariffs became just that: negotiating bids for ninety days, and senior Administration economic policy principals were dispatched to lie about the original truth, or to tell the truth about the original lie. This took all of seven days, from April 2 to April 9. Adult professionals, some with Ivy League economics doctorates, degenerated into apparently eager spin whores overnight.
That might have been that, but no, not in this Administration. The President kept on talking about restoring manufacturing, and as is his wont he pulled large numbers directly out of his ass: $7 trillion worth of new investment totaled in just days…. $7 trillion is a nice number, and we wonder in awe how the big-brained genius came up with that perfect number…wow—testifying to how the policy that was no longer the policy was nevertheless working so well. Say what? [Update, May 28: At this point, after Trump made several other incompatible comments about tariff levels and their duration or starting points, no one seems to know what the actual policy plan is!]
We get a hint of how he did it by contemplating Trump’s more recent messages about the tariffs to American retailers—Walmart, for example—and American farmers. To Walmart Trump advised that they eat the tariff tax—that’s what it is—so they would not raise consumer prices, which is of course, as everyone knows, what Trump would do were he in their place. We know this from the unstinting magnanimity Trump has shown toward his business partners over the years. (I know this is not funny if you happen to have been one of those partners, but that’s your well-deserved problem; it is funny, I hope, if you weren’t.)
To American farmers he announced that he wanted them to focus on just feeding Americans. Now this was twice perplexing and not at all funny to most American farmers. First, well, if farmers—who voted for Trump in large percentages, and no, not at all, this is not what Karl Marx meant by his nasty phrase “the idiocy of rural life”—did not know better, they might have wondered if Trump even knew that a major part of U.S. farmers’ markets are, for better or for worse, export markets now for many, many years. Second, since Trump made it clear that his understanding of trade deficits was profoundly simple—you owe us because you’re buying more of our stuff than we’re buying your stuff and so we win, and we owe you since we’re buying more of your stuff than you’re buying of our stuff and so we lose—how did he not see that U.S. agricultural exports were a major factor in U.S. trade surpluses with many countries?
But, well, we voted for the guy, so his big brain must account for these apparent knowledge free-fall zones and logical contradictions. So obviously, then, Trump knows how export-market dependent U.S. farmers have become, and how new retaliatory tariffs touched off by his April 2 announcement make their food exports far more expensive, especially to relatively poor countries—even China, which typically buys huge amounts of U.S. soybeans, pork, and other commodities—so they’ll be able to sell less and earn less. Surely, too, Trump knows that most U.S. agriculture today is far more capital-intensive than even the steel industry was fifty years ago, and so farmers depend on being able to buy tractor and other machine parts at affordable prices from the Far East, Mexico, and from some European machine-toolists. So how come, the American farmer asks himself, Trump is destroying my business model from both ends, making my goods more expensive to buyers and making my capital inputs more expensive for me? Ah-ha! If I grow only for the domestic market, and tariffs re-create a massive industrial U.S. manufacturing sector, everything will somehow turn out fine…..in about, oh, say, eight, ten, maybe twenty years.
Wait….um…..is that also why Trump thinks he can build the Golden Dome missile defense system in just three years for $175 billion?—so he said in televised remarks from the White House on Tuesday. The best experienced professional estimates look more like $830 billion (in constant dollars….ha!) over two decades. It makes one marvel: First out comes $7 trillion in the black, and then just a day or so later comes a mere $175 billion expense….wow, how big could that magical ass of his possibly be?! Who knew that Trump was so big in the fertilizer business?
[update, June 3: The ass is capacious indeed! According to the Defense News D-Brief—Audrey Drucker, “Despite Golden Dome, Space Force Budget Would Shrink Again under 2026 Spending Plan— the Administration budget request for the Space Force, of which the Golden Dome is a part, is set to fall by 13 percent in real terms from the last Biden Administration budget. So up, up, up we go only to go down, down, down a few days later. Ha: And it used to be the only the Democrats who were really, really bad at math.]
Tariff acrobatics aside, lesser examples of Trumpian flip-floppery have been abundant, as well. A domestic-only short list would include all of the following: The White House determined to revoke the student visas of more than 1,500 pesky foreign individuals and then a few days later, with no reason given, changed its mind—and then it changed its mind again jus yesterday, but only with respect to Harvard; Trump’s DOGE office on several occasions fired hordes of Federal employees only to hire them back a few days later in a bureaucratic version of catch-and-release fishing technique; Trump ordered military aircraft to carry out high-profile deportations only to quickly change his mind after finding them far too costly to be efficient; he ordered 80 million square feet of Federal real estate to sold only to take down the “for sale” sign days later; he promised not to cut Medicaid benefit levels but then backed a House proposal that would do precisely that, and then all but re-flipped his flop after Laura Loomer—a conspiracy nut with no governmental position—objected to it; and he equivocated for weeks as to whether he wanted his agenda framed in one or two main congressional budget bills, then blindsided the GOP Senate by endorsing a one-bill route favored by House Republicans.
That latter flippity-flop turned out, just bye the bye, to be a stupid and entirely avoidable error from the President’s own perspective, since the omnibus single bill accentuated the natural contradictions in the MAGA 2.0 coalition—say over the Medicaid cuts disagreement just mentioned—whereas separate bills could have muted them. Turns out that Republicans in office are more or less as tactically inept as Democrats consistently have been now for decades running. Alas, to be politically brain-dead, we now need recognize, applies as well and as often to the tactical level as it does to the strategic level. Buoyant news for those who appreciate consistency above effectiveness.
Do We or Do We Not Give a Houthi?
We would be remiss not to mention the Houthis before turning our attention to the Ukraine-Russia war-and-diplomacy front. Why? Because patterns, being patterns, repeat. To see them clearly, however, you have to step back and take in the full panorama of the Trump 2.0 Administration’s full-frontal incompetence.
When the U.S. attacks on the Houthis began on March 15 my general sense was that this was a long overdue effort. I could not readily understand why the Biden Administration had been so timid in responding to clear violations of the freedom of navigation in international waters, in this case the Red Sea route toward the Suez Canal, causing shippers lots of lost time and money in skyrocketed insurance fees, and being an affront to Israel which was the stated target of the Houthi campaign. Freedom of navigation is perhaps the oldest principle of U.S. national security policy as a global maritime power, established beyond doubt during the Jefferson Administration in the Barbary Wars—to quote it again, first from Robert Goodloe Harper during the XYZ Affair and then used by Charles Pinckney during the Barbary Wars: “Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute.” Since then the U.S. Navy has conducted countless FONs operations around the globe in support of that principle, and rightly so, as good for us and good for the global commons, as well.
Part of the reason I could not understand the Biden Administration’s seeming timidity was that, having not really followed the details, I thought we would have the Houthis wildly outgunned and dispatch them well enough without a great deal of muss and fuss. That turned out to be a bit optimistic.
When U.S. operations, dubbed by our genius Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “Operation Rough Rider,” commenced on March 15 things soon got, well, rough. During the first few weeks of the operation U.S. forces experienced some very close calls, almost losing several F-16s and an F-35. U.S. forces did lose multiple attack drones. Worse, on April 28 while trying to evade Houthi missiles and drones aimed at the USS Truman an F/A18-E Super Hornet and its tractor tow slid off the deck into the Red Sea. That’s a roughly $70 million aircraft…. According to Acting Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James Kirby, speaking on May 19 at a CFR public event, the USS Truman engaged more than 160 missiles and drones aimed at Israel and U.S. naval vessels over the past five months.
That’s a lot, particularly for a Navy long used to conducting stand-off operations, so not having to actually experience combat as such—defined as others shooting back at you. Indeed, the October 2016 Houthi attacks on the USS Mason (DDG-87) while operating in the Red Sea north of the Bab el-Mandeb, off the coast of Yemen, was the first time in many years that any U.S. Navy combat crew had experienced anything like combat conditions, and despite those conditions being very mild compared to those of Operation Rough Rider, they still elicited semi-public complaints from active duty enlisted sailors about the lack of realistic combat training they received. Five years after those attacks the sense of unease persisted, and Navy flag officers were well aware of it. They persist still, with the recent experience of the USS Truman battlegroup only accentuating sharply the sense of unease.
It is hard for an outsider to estimate what concoction of events, estimations, and sentiments led the President to call off the operation on May 5. At the time, just to help round out the picture, the New York Times reported that the Houthis were “still firing at ships and shooting down drones, while U.S. forces were burning through munitions.” Was that why Trump decided that “he had had enough,” or was it because of morale problems welling up from Navy crews, or because of the loss of a $70 million airplane? Whatever the reasons, President Trump followed his decision with his usual modus operandi: The next day, on May 6, he lied. “We will stop the bombings and they have capitulated,” Trump claimed. “But more importantly, we will take their word: they say they will not be blowing up ships anymore.”
Pure horseflop: The Houthis did not capitulate, and as for us “taking their word,” I confess to having searched high and low for the right adjective to describe this remark, but alas, I have failed to find anything suitable for polite company. The Houthis agreed to cease targeting U.S. ships in the Red Sea, but not, the NYT reported, “to stop disrupting shipping that the group deemed helpful to Israel” or to stop attacking Israel itself. That’s why the top five international shipping firms told the Wall Street Journal later that day that they were in no hurry to return their vessels to the Red Sea. The U.S. FONs operation failed and, historically speaking, that is both uncommon and unfortunate.
It was coincidental, probably, that Trump made his surrender announcement—that’s actually what it was—the day after the Houthis managed to land a missile near Ben-Gurion airport. But it was neither coincidental nor accidental that Trump did not inform Prime Minister Netanyahu, nor did any U.S. officials inform their Israeli counterparts, that the operation would stop before they heard it on the news, the same way and at the same time the rest of us heard it. Not unusual, not an accident, but part of a pattern: U.S. officials did not provide prior notice to Israel of direct U.S.-Qatari talks on the Gaza War, nor any notice about U.S. negotiations with Iran, being hosted in Oman, about a follow-on nuclear program “deal.” The Trump White House has thus treated the Israelis pretty much the same way it has treated the Ukrainians and U.S. NATO allies: Blindsiding is the Administration’s norm. Whether this is done with malice aforethought or just from sheer process incompetence is not entirely clear from case to case. Does that make it better or worse? Just to be able to ask that question is very nearly to answer it.
You will recall, please, that “Operation Rough Rider” was the main topic of the infamous Signal leak via the Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg, made public on March 24. You will recall Vice-President Vance’s bitter resentment that the United States was again “bailing out” the Europeans, suggesting that some way should be found to get the Israelis and the Europeans to pay the costs of the U.S. military operation. (It seemed not to occur to Vance that the U.S. military has traditionally viewed FONs operations as being inherently in U.S. interests, but his view is natural to an attitude that sees allies only as customers and never as friends with whom we share values affinities….which is just so much “moralistic garbage,” in his words…) Well, I hate to tell you uber-realist guys: You can’t demand payment for a service that failed to deliver the goods. Trump the risk-averse bully picked a fight, and then backed down when things got a little rough. This behavior pattern has recently acquired an apt neologistic abbreviation: TACO, as in Trump Always Backs Down.
So now imagine how the mullahs in Tehran interpreted Trump’s behavior toward one their proxies, less than three weeks after U.S.-Iranian negotiations began in Oman on April 12. Please don’t make me spell it out. Let me instead again quote Robert S. Vansittart from his memoir The Mist Procession, this time in tandem fashion. First: “In diplomacy you can ‘solve’ anything by giving way.” Second, the Iranians need to be carefully shrewd not to overplay their hand, for, wrote Vansittart: “Men are least easy to deal with when they look silly.” Of course Trump does look silly to the Iranians now, to the inheritors of a diplomatic tradition dating back millennia to Safavid, Sassanid, and all the way to Achaemenid times. All they need do is not let on, for Trump himself is perfectly unable to see himself as others see him. It is an unwitting mercy he showers on himself.
So who else do you suppose took the measure of “Operation Rough Rider”? Vladimir Putin, perhaps? And so on, finally, to today’s main event.
A Ukraine Re-Reversal?
Trump’s Ukraine policy has been emblematic of the incoherent mess of impulsive bluster and amateurish zigzagging that the Administration evinces as a whole. It has been such a mess that even remembering how it developed as the policy’s main features spun off this way and that challenges our Trump-era coping mechanisms. A brief review is thus necessary for us to get our bearings and erect a proper perspective.
First Trump vowed absurdly during the 2024 campaign that he would drive a deal to end the war in a single day. Given Trump’s sycophantic admiration for Vladimir Putin and his grudge against Volodymyr Zelensky over Trump’s Ukraine-related 2020 impeachment, his boast was widely interpreted as prologue to his forcing Ukraine into a settlement that met Russian demands.
A cluster of events in mid-to-late February deepened this expectation. Public remarks by Secretary Hegseth in Brussels, by Vice President Vance at the Munich Security Conference, and a phone call with Putin initiated by President Trump—followed by U.S.-Russia meetings in Qatar from which Ukraine was excluded—strongly suggested a major flip in U.S. foreign policy into virtual alliance with Russia at the expense of America’s oldest and closest democratic allies in NATO. U.S. officials refused to affirm NATO’s Article V pledge not just as related to Ukraine defense scenarios but in general, conditionalizing its applicability on levels of European defense spending and related infrastructure investment (that is so fungible as to be impossible to measure) the White House knew would not be met, and that at 5 percent of GDP were higher even than U.S. defense spending levels.
To entice Russian accession to U.S. ceasefire proposals, U.S. officials soon dropped out of the Ukraine defense contact group and the President ordered government agencies to stop tracking the Russian kidnapping of nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children and to eliminate all offensive cyber operations planning viz Russia. More broadly telling of the Administration’s deeper political orientation, U.S. officials pleased the Kremlin by publicly identifying with some of its donees: the Alternativ fur Deutschland (AFD) Party in Germany, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party in the UK, and other rightwing anti-immigrant parties throughout Europe. Thus did a revanchist in-your-face foreign policy posture join similar political body language in the Trump 2.0 Administration’s domestic political posture.
Trump soon curtailed the ambit of his envoy to the ceasefire talks, General Keith Kellogg, when the Russians complained of his being too pro-Kyiv. This left Trump’s New York City real estate developer associate Steve Witkoff—a man without diplomatic experience but rich with ongoing conflict-of-interest business ties to at least two major Russian oligarchs—as his sole envoy to Russia. The experienced Russians played Witkoff like a fiddle, stringing him along on a road to nowhere with ease. In a March 21 interview on the “Tucker Carlson Show” the witless Witkoff, eagerly proffering his (mis)understandings about Russia, expressed puzzlement that arranging a ceasefire should be proving so difficult.
Specifically with respect to those negotiations, the initial U.S. public position aligned sharply with Russian desiderata: no NATO membership for Ukraine, and Ukraine would formally cede land Russian forces occupied militarily, including Crimea, both in return for zero concessions from the Russian side. Trump further demanded that Ukraine repay the United States for military aid previously provided in the context of an essentially colonial arrangement in which the United States would control and benefit from Ukraine’s rare-earth mineral mining—that in return for no explicit U.S. pledge of support for Ukrainian security and sovereignty.
Then on February 24 the United States joined only 17 other countries in voting against a UN General Assembly resolution condemning the Russian invasion, calling for the withdrawal of Russian troops, and demanding that Russia be held accountable for war crimes. It then abstained from its own weak resolution when language was added identifying Russia as the war’s aggressor.
The month ended in truly stunning fashion when Trump and Vance essentially mugged Zelensky in a broadcast Oval Office meeting staged with a Russian audience in mind. In what looked like classic anti-Semitic baiting behavior, Vice-President Vance demanded that Zelensky express gratitude to the United States even as Trump asserted that Ukraine started the war, that Russians were the war’s chief victims, and that Zelensky, not Putin, was a dictator.
After Zelensky abruptly left the White House without signing the minerals agreement the Trump Administration suspended both delivery of weapons shipments and critical intelligence data-sharing via Starlink. Instead of leading to Russian endorsement of U.S.-proffered ceasefire terms, the histrionic Oval Office display of February 28 led to the Russians almost immediately rocketing newly defenseless civilian targets and, in due course, to Ukraine losing most of its foothold in Russia’s Kursk region.
At this point, if not a week or two sooner, European leaders had concluded that NATO was dead in all but name, and that the United States had aligned itself with Russia for both commercial reasons and in conformance with its uber-realist, amoral great power spheres-of-influence conception of international politics. Meanwhile, the Administration avidly shed every “soft power” appendage it had earned during the foregoing seventy years, including all but destroying USAID, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the National Endowment for Democracy, and each and every one of the U.S. Agency for Global Media radios.
As the initial shock of the U.S. policy somersault subsided, a perturbed reality drove the Europeans to new conclusions and determinations based on the singular premise that their security now depended exclusively on their own coordinated efforts. (Angela Merkel had said as much after first encountering Trump in Italy in April 2017, but none of her EU counterparts took her seriously at the time.) Meanwhile, President Zelensky, having few options and needing to buy time for European efforts to mature, sought to smooth things over in Washington even as Trump continued to spout nonsense about Ukraine starting the war and Zelensky being an unelected dictator.
Nonetheless, hints of frustration entered the President’s vocabulary over Putin’s escalated bombings of Ukrainian cities and his raising of ever-new, seemingly artificial conditions for Russia’s agreement to U.S. truce terms. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was urging Trump privately to apply greater pressure on the Russians. On March 11, in a sign of ambivalence if not whole-hearted reconsideration, Ukraine’s Starlink connection was restored and its owner, Elon Musk, promised more satellites and equipment of use to Ukraine.
For whatever reasons, it seemed finally to dawn on Trump that Putin lacked interest in peace, or even in a truce. After a private April 26 chat with Zelensky at the Vatican, the President responded to Russia’s latest missile attack on Ukrainian civilians with an acerbic Truth Social comment, concluding of Putin:
It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently, through “Banking” or “Secondary Sanctions?” Too many people are dying!!!
Soon thereafter the Administration joined Ukraine in calling for an unconditional 30-day ceasefire to begin May 12, and demanded an answer within 48 hours: the Ukrainians of course agreed but the Russians said nyet.
Then on April 30, Zelensky finally signed a thrice-proposed but now much softened rare-minerals deal with the United States. The deal is still fairly vague and still lacks explicit U.S. security guarantees for Ukraine, but it implicitly commits Trump to Ukraine’s future as a sovereign state. It also provides for continued U.S. military assistance to Ukraine so long as the arrangements are described as business rather than as aid; modest new weapons shipments were approved only hours after the ink dried.
As for Trump, well, he signed a deal, which in his mind means he’s by definition a winner and can now move on, come what may. Any “deal,” he thinks, strengthens his “brand” in what is a made-for-TV presidency that is all about appearances and nothing about policy substance except at the margins. Indeed, just a couple days ago he said as much: “Ukraine is not my business.” Implicitly: Business is my business, which we know to be exactly true. Trump has gone Silent Cal one better, or maybe one worse is the right way to describe it. President Coolidge said, “The business of America is business.” A century later President Trump understands that as, “The business of the American government is business,” and the President’s business, this President anyway, is the Self-dealer-in-Chief. Not the same thing, but Trump never was a man to parse details and, as usual, Coolidge hasn’t got much to say.
The diplomatic efflorescence of the mineral deal seems to have led to the Russians offering direct peace talks with Ukraine on May 15 in Istanbul. It took no proverbial rocket scientist to see this offer for what it was: eyewash meant to soften the Russian nyet and distract the gullible international press. But Zelensky was ready to show up anyway to call Putin’s bluff. He got as far as Ankara; Putin never left the Kremlin, sending instead to Turkey a low-level delegation whose members lacked the authority even to change their own underwear without permission from Moscow.
If all the world’s a stage and Donald Trump right now is the relevant audience, Zelensky starred and Putin bombed in Turkey. When Zelensky met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vance in Rome shortly afterwards, his Academy Award-worthy act continued. The star of the acclaimed “Servant of the People” never missed a line or skipped a beat. The man knows how to perform when he puts his mind to it.
Czar Vlad, on the other hand, has a problem: He’s pretty close to running out of cute dance steps, his smoke supply is low and his mirrors are cracked. He must fear that sanctions, secondary and otherwise, loom if he botches his act one too many more times.
That is not his only concern. Off stage, behind the curtains, “Russian forces are sustaining significant battlefield losses at rates that are likely unsustainable in the medium- to long-term,” according to analysis from the DC-based Institute for the Study of War, and Putin “has mismanaged Russia's economy, which is suffering from unsustainable war spending, growing inflation, significant labor shortages, and reductions in Russia's sovereign wealth fund.” All true.
The ISW report did not mention how the Kremlin is recruiting fresh flesh to send into combat when it can’t get its hands on North Koreans. It sends its agents out into the boonies and pays families huge cash bounties—1.2 million rubles, and much more is promised if the recruit dies in combat—for an able-bodied young son. That is a huge amount of money for poor rural Russian families, and where does the Russian government get its hands on that kind of money? From selling hydrocarbons to Westerners, Indians, and others. This is where Putin’s fear of effective sanctions comes to play, and why their absence counts as license for the Russians to be able to continue the war by feeding their young men into its maw. What is morally just plain wrong, on many sides and from several angles, with this picture? Maybe better to ask: What isn’t?
Whenever I ponder all this, about what the Russian leadership is doing not just to Ukrainians but to the Russians it misrules, I cannot help recalling a verse from the Book of Exodus, Chapter 10, verse 7 to be specific: “And Pharaoh’s servants said to him, ‘How long will you let this man be a snare to us? Send the men that they may worship the Eternal their God; do you not yet know that Egypt is destroyed?’”
Like Pharaoh, Putin is a very stubborn man. He hardens his heart, time and time again, and digs himself deeper into ruination for himself and, ultimately, his country and people along with him. But still he will not relent. And one sign of it is that even amid all the ceasefire and “peace” diplomatic pantomime going on no Kremlin effort whatsoever has begun to prepare the Russian people or the military for any limitations, less alone for the cessation, of the war. Putin knows some Russian history that most Westerners have either forgotten or never learned in the first place: Russians will put up with tyrants of all kinds except one, namely, the kind that fails in war and humiliates the nation in front of foreigners. Putin will fight to the last Russian farm boy before relenting in a war that falls so far short of its proclaimed aims. The only potential casualty he really cares about is himself.
[update, June 2: And Putin has got to be worrying more about his becoming a war casualty after the Ukrainians made military history by cleverly taking out a huge chunk of the Russian bomber force, attacking five military airfields deep in Russian territory with drones on June 1. What happens on the battlefield does, of course, matter to the eventual resolution of the war, and yes, all wars do eventually end. The Russians slogging it out in positional warfare are getting next to nowhere with huge loses of men and equipment. Meanwhile, more and more effective Ukrainian deep strikes into Russian territory are now made more likely by the recision of limiting U.S. influence (and liability) over Ukrainian tactics and the imminent supply of deep-strike enabling German ordnance to Ukraine. Russia could soon be manifestly losing the war, which raises two main scenarios: Russian capitulation via diplomacy, very dangerous to Putin and all his associates; or a major Russian escalation, even to the nuclear level—somewhat safer for Russia now that the United States now no longer claims to have or want to take Europe’s back—but still very dangerous for everyone.]
What Does It All Mean?
So it was, then, that clutch of intriguing but unanswerable questions begged attention for a week or two. Was U.S. policy pivoting back toward Ukraine, just as Trump had persuaded nearly everyone that it never would?
Was and is NATO with its Article V core not really dead after all? Might it even revive in some new twisted form if anti-liberal, democracy-attenuated regimes eventually establish themselves in Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Romania, and elsewhere?
Has Putin miscalculated, thinking erroneously that Trump’s fawning lacked any bottom? If so, given Trump’s outsized sense of amour propre, might his wounded ego soon put Ukraine in an even better spot than it enjoyed as the Biden Administration ended?
Just to be clear here: The Biden Administration did the right thing in the way it reacted to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It resolved to increase Russia’s costs and hinder its success by shoring up the NATO response and helping the Ukrainians resist the assault, but without risking major escalation that would have required a direct U.S. military response, with all the attendant morbid possibilities pertaining thereto. The basic model was the successful U.S. reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 25, 1979.
Many have complained that President Biden was too slow and timid in executing the basic policy. Perhaps; but most such critical voices came from outside the government, so from those bearing no responsibility for the consequences of erring on the side of excess. Quibbles over details aside, Biden made the right call—the call President Obama should have made with the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014, but didn’t. And it was that same basic approach that Mike Waltz carefully urged on President Trump ultimately without success. Since no good deed indeed goes unpunished, Waltz has been shipped off to Turtle Bay in advance of Trump’s probable announcement of U.S. withdrawal from the UN in early September, when UNGA’s 80th Session commences, and with it the abolition of the position of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. What will Waltz do then? Write an honest book about his experiences, I hope.
Now, as suddenly as they arose, the winds of diplomacy have slackened and new questions have arisen: Will Trump ever support new sanctions against Russia, no matter what Putin does or refuses to do, even as the EU piles on more? How much rope does Putin think he has to play with? How much rope does Zelensky think Putin thinks he has to play with, and how will that affect his performance? So goes the desultory diplomatic triangle hatched somewhere in hell. The whole thing has come in a way to resemble a too-long worn pair of dirty socks: unpleasant to sniff, but you do it anyway just out of lurid curiosity.
Bad shows don’t last long on Broadway, but this act is off-Broadway—far, far off. Nothing can beat yesterday’s Wall Street Journal headline/sub-headline couplet, leading off the article by Bojan Pancevski and Laurence Norman, for capturing the complete disarray and credulous ambiguity of what now passes for U.S. diplomacy toward the Ukraine-Russia War: “European Officials Say Trump Tells Their Leaders Putin Isn’t Ready to End War: White House disputes the account, saying Trump believes Russia is winning in Ukraine but still wants peace.” Wow: They said that he said but we say that he thinks that we…..oh, forget the aspirin and just quick grab the tequila bottle.
So the war that Russia isn’t winning but that Ukraine can’t lose goes distressingly and inconclusively on. But Trump, his Nobel Peace Prize ever elusive, has already moved on. He got his Ukraine “deal,” so he relocated his reality-TV-brained business show to the Arab Gulf, and is now back in Washington mugging, on Wednesday, a new visitor to the Oval Office: South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
What have we learned from all this huff-puffing meandering sleaze pretending to be statecraft? Nothing new: The Trump 2.0 Administration is, as it has been from the start, one in which fantasy displaces reality, nativist ideology displaces evidence and facts—which is how we get baseless accusations of anti-white genocide hurled at the South African President—demagoguery displaces decency, and targeted cruelty displaces respect, law, and whatever remains in this world of human solidarity. What next? Who knows? Who can know—even the sages of the Wall Street Journal—if Trump himself doesn’t yet know?
As for President Zelensky, he’s been reading the tea leaves fluently since the events of February 28. He saw Trump leaning ever so slightly away from Russia and tried, but failed, to get Trump truly on his side, even as the May 19 Trump-Putin phone call fell completely flat. Trump lied about that, too. Thus was confirmed what Zelensky said earlier this week: “We need to know who we can count on, and who we can’t. A support package from Europe is coming, and it will be a strong one. As for the package from the United States—that’s a different story.” A very sad story, too.
[Update, May 28: This story never ends and it never goes very far at the same time. It makes one regret ever having written about it, almost…..it’s like the dirty socks….I just have to….. So on May 25, a few days after I wrote this post, Trump wrote on Truth Social after another major Russian attack on Ukraine that Putin “. . .had gone absolutely CRAZY.” This time he mooted new sanctions, again….but of course has done nothing. And he likely won’t. As an interesting feature essay on/interview of Fiona Hill in The Telegraph on May 27 by Cameron Henderson made clear, Trump fears Putin and his nuclear rocket rattle, and so being preternaturally risk-averse, will do nothing he thinks might annoy him. Fiona is right on this.
Meanwhile, it turns out that Zelensky will be in The Hague for next month’s NATO Summit after all, but according to an excellent Steve Erlanger analysis in the May 26 New York Times, the Trump White House is still trying to keep Zelensky on the margins. One of Erlanger’s sources for his analysis is the current U.S. Ambassador to NATO, Matthew G. Whitaker. Whitaker, who has as much business being U.S. Ambassador to NATO as Tulsi Gabbard has being DNI, just flat out lied to Erlanger about the U.S. devotion to its NATO allies and the Article V pledge that defines the alliance. Of course, sometimes diplomats are paid to lie. But as President Eisenhower showed in the U-2 Gary Powers incident, it is foolish to waste a lie. That’s what Whitaker did, since no one in his or her right mind today believes that Donald Trump will have the back of any NATO ally if it means even a small risk of a direct conflict with Russia. Certainly no European leader believes it.]
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Three basic conclusions follow from the so-far four-month-plus record of Trump 2.0 foreign policy: The President’s flip-floppery will likely remain alive and well for the foreseeable future; the President’s focus on his reality-TV performance “ratings” and his instincts to follow other peoples’ money will shape whatever policy substance emerges from the Administration’s surrealist imagination; and no one in a position of political authority outside the United States can reasonably vouchsafe trust in anything the President says, for it can change in a trice, like the springtime weather on the Chesapeake Bay. Bottom line: This is not normal. Not yet anyway, this side of a definitive extinction event….