There’s been a flurry of activity regarding Ukraine lately: our clashes with the EU, the Trump-Zelensky meeting in the Oval Office, the minerals deal, the pause on military aid to Ukraine, the laughable posturing by British PM Starmer, the backtracking by Zelensky, Trump’s speech to Congress, the wrangling of concessions, and the repeated reiteration of our goal to end the bloodshed and killing.
Everybody’s talking about it and everybody has an opinion about the best path forward — Americans and Europeans, Republicans and Democrats, social media and the MSM Pravda, and neocons and neo-isolationists.
But do you know who we’ve heard very little from regarding all these developments? Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s strength is that he’s up-front and honest, tells you exactly what he’s thinking and his reasoning behind it, and sticks to his word regarding whatever deal he’s able to hash out. Putin’s strength is that he’s the exact opposite.
We have little idea what Putin’s mindset is regarding all this noise about Ukraine because he’s the best poker player at the table. Sorry, he just is. Trump might be holding the best hand, but he’s broadcasting what he has and how he intends to bet before Putin has even thrown his chips in. Putin holds his cards close to his chest, watching the other players’ amateurish tells. It’s not even clear he wants to play this hand.
Too many people on both sides of the political divide are operating on the risky and unsubstantiated assumption that Putin shares the same goal as we do, i.e. an end to the war. WE want an end to the war. Putin wants to reconstruct the Russian Empire. And he wants his empire more than we want an end to the war.
In a speech given this week, Putin stated his position in simple terms. Ukraine must not join NATO, Russia must receive security guarantees, and not only would Russia not withdraw from a single inch of stolen Ukrainian territory, but also Ukraine must surrender more territory in the four regions partially occupied by Russia.
Does that sound like a reasonable, conciliatory guy tired of being on the ropes and looking to make peace as soon as possible?
In all fairness, maybe this is just Putin’s opening bid, made with the expectation that the final deal will involve some eventual concessions. If that’s the case, though, his opening bid is a lot more impressive than Trump’s.
President Trump has repeatedly made the point that the art of the deal involves possessing the will and the ability to say “no” and walk away from the negotiating table. But it’s not clear he’d walk away from this particular table before Putin would beat him to the punch.
Trump is sinking too much political capital into the idea of securing a meaningless piece of paper declaring an end to the Ukraine War, even with lopsidedly horrible terms that reward Russia for its blatant aggression. I had assumed that peace deals like this require a lot of give and take from both sides of the conflict. But right now, Trump is putting all the pressure on Ukraine to accept terms determined by America, terms that we have no idea whether or not Russia will accept.
Let’s say we’re successful in getting Ukraine to capitulate to our terms — and then Russia flat out rejects them. If Trump, the master of the deal, spends all his energy working only on Ukraine to give concessions and, once that painstaking and politically expensive process concludes, the Russians laugh and don’t even bother to return our phone calls, what then? What if Trump gets from Ukraine everything Putin is demanding, and then a smirking Putin responds with, “Nope, I want more. And if you can’t get it for me, well, let’s keep the war going for another year or two and see what you’re willing to concede then.”
Both the optics and the reality will be that Putin ran circles around Trump without even having to do anything. Trump will look like a fool, led around by the shiny laser light of a peace deal, and certainly not like a master dealmaker. And who’s to say that, other than his dream of reconstructing an empire, one of Putin’s side strategies here is not to work with Trump but to embarrass and defang him on the world stage, by either stringing him along or by flat out refusing to even engage?
Related: An Unforced Error On Ukraine?
Now, I realize there is a small sliver of readers for whom Trump can make no mistake, and my mere suggestion to the contrary has already caused their faces to melt off like Major Toht when he looked into the open Ark of the Covenant. Allow me to make, for the umpteenth time in these articles, the tedious and tiresome reassurance that YES, I SUPPORT PRESIDENT TRUMP. Other than the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln, he’s probably the best president we’ve ever had. I want very badly for President Trump to succeed in everything he’s doing or trying to do, and that includes bringing the Ukraine War to an end in a manner that removes the possibility of it reigniting anytime soon.
And I’m glad that Trump has been on a roll and has suffered no serious setback. But his unbroken winning streak might have tempted him, as it would tempt anybody, to start biting off more than he can chew. His defeated adversaries to date include pipsqueak countries wholly dependent on trade with us, as well as grasping, self-defeating Democrat extremists whose only strategy appears to be very publicly tripling down on stupid.
But Russia is not Panama, and Putin is not Al Green. If Putin doesn’t get what he wants, he’s unlikely to respond by throwing tantrums and singing “We Shall Overcome.” He’s likely to respond by continuing the war until he gets the exact terms he wants. Ukraine is just the latest theft in a twenty-five year series of aggressive expansions in which countless lives, both Russian and non-Russian, have been wasted in the acquisition of land whose strategic benefit to Russia is questionable at best (not even Tucker Carlson makes the claim that Putin feared a NATO invasion through South Ossetia). A few more years of bloodshed in Ukraine means nothing to Putin.
Our goals simply don’t align. Our tariffs have been ineffective. And Putin is too single-minded in purpose to let some naïve charm campaign derail him.
My argument here is not for or against our involvement in Ukraine. There are substantive arguments for both cases (Though on a side note, neo-isolationists would do well to recognize the fallacy in their argument. On one hand, they tell us Russia is a third-rate basket case “distraction” which poses no threat to us. But in the next breath, they tell us that just one more penny in additional aid money to Ukraine will unleash World War III and turn your suburb into the playground scene from Terminator 2. It can be one or the other, but it’s not both.)
Rather, my argument is that Trump has already invested too much political capital into a chimerical, down-the-road peace deal that not only has Republicans deeply divided, but that has zero assurances from Russia that they’re even mildly interested in it at all, much less in respecting its terms if one can conceivably be agreed to. Time is not on Ukraine’s side, but neither is it on Trump’s.
I fully concede that I could be wrong, and that Trump might have a plan in place for this contingency, to the existence and details of which none of us is privy. Who knows what backchannel communications are taking place with Putin? Trump might already have all the guarantees he needs from Russia and all the enforcement mechanisms worked out. I have no idea. I can only form an opinion based on all the information they’ve made available.
But with this limited information, it doesn’t appear like we’re making the wisest tactical moves. We’ve laid all our cards on the table and are expecting Putin to jump at the chance to split the pot. What our response would be should Putin simply re-raise is anyone’s guess. Are we prepared to go all in? To fold? To bluff someone who can’t be bluffed?
Any of these options is a loss for Trump. We’ve already thrown in so many chips trying to get Zelensky to fold — the blustering Zelensky who everybody at the table knows has no hand to play — that, if we’re not careful, we will have set ourselves up for an easy ambush from Putin. He very well may be check-raising us this entire time.
President Clinton failed to secure a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and that was a situation in which America and Israel held almost all the leverage, and with a Yasser Arafat who, by comparison, was far more conciliatory and flexible than Putin. Here and now in Ukraine, the positions are almost exactly reversed.
If Trump gets played by Putin, he will lose political capital and credibility, both at home and abroad. That might not be fair, but that’s reality. And the wound would be self-inflicted. For Ukrainians, the ceasefire talks are about Ukraine. For the rest of the world, the ceasefire talks are about Trump. And the world is watching. Especially China.
Again, I want to be wrong about this. If anyone can pull this off, it’s Trump. I’m just not convinced that anyone can pull this off.
