President Donald Trump has inherited an unstable world from his successor. His administration has the daunting task of simultaneously bringing two wars, one in Ukraine, the other in the Levant, to a close.
On the heels of a Tuesday phone call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, joined “The Signal Sitdown” this week to discuss the latest on the push for peace.
Mills said the three-hour call between Trump and Putin “threw a little bit of cold water” on the prospects for a rapid peace. “The Russians don’t have the most incentive right now for the war to end,” he noted.
What we know of the call offers some evidence to Mills’ claim: While both leaders signaled they want the war to end, the only deliverable from the call was that Putin agreed on a 30-day halt on attacking Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
Mills continued explaining why Russia lacks incentives to come to the table: Ukraine is only getting weaker.
“If you just read the headlines in The New York Times, or Wall Street Journal probably more egregiously, you would think that this has been a massive disaster for the Russians and, indeed, it has been an enormous disappointment. It’s been very costly,” Mills explained. “But the reality is the second derivative of this war, the last 12 to 18 months, has seen steady increases in territorial conquest by the Russians, and the Ukrainians are obviously desperate beyond belief and might just collapse over the years to come if they were to keep the fight going without Washington’s support.”
“So, I think you are going to see Putin play hardball, and I think we saw a little taste of that today,” Mills said of the call. “It’s a high risk moment where, if the Russians don’t come to the table and basically meet Trump where he’s at, the risk of escalation is too high for my blood.”
Nevertheless, Mills said he remains “optimistic” about a deal. “I think It is incumbent upon Washington not to dither around if they actually want to end this war. You end wars by ending them. I think we learned this in Afghanistan. We can quibble about the details. I think we learned this in Iraq. We can, again, quibble about the details. But if you want out, you’ve got to get out.” Trump and his administration has repeatedly said they want out.
Trump, for example, told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the now-infamous Oval Office meeting that “you’re either going to make a deal or we’re out.”
Trump’s threat to get Zelenskyy to the table came after an explosive Oval Office meeting where Trump and Vice President JD Vance smacked down Zelenskyy’s repeated insistence on security guarantees that would prolong the war.
“[Zelenskyy] did not understand where the administration was, and, additionally, the political constituency of the administration,” Mills told The Daily Signal. “The fact that [Zelenskyy] couldn’t check that, emotionally, when all the cameras were on, when his entire nation, in theory or in reality, was on the line, speaks to the level of recklessness and lack of preparedness for this moment.”
The wars must end for the Trump administration to succeed, Mills suggested. Nothing less than the new coalition Trump built for Republicans hangs in the balance.
“These wars take on a psychology and logic that is crazy the longer you stay in there,” he said. “You just got to get out, and if we are having this conversation in a year about Israel, Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, et cetera, et cetera, and Russia, Ukraine, these cease to be Biden’s wars.”
“It’s March,” Mills said semi-ironically, “people aren’t even thinking about Biden anymore. It’s like Trump never left.”
Mills’s point? “It will all blur.”
“And the Democrats,” Mills said, “will have, on a silver platter, the issue to run against Trump if they are smart.”
“A lot of Democrats internally have compared the 2024 election to the 2004 election in the sense of a popular vote sweeping gut punch for what they thought the country believed in,” Mills said. “What rescued the Democrats in the mid 2000s? Needless wars.”
And so began the rise of Barack Obama.
“If he doesn’t want his legacy to be a successor like Mr. Obama, I think he’ll consider some of what we’ve discussed today,” Mills concluded.
