“Details, details. Things to do. Things to get done. Don’t bother me with details, just tell me when they’re done.”
That’s Jimmy Price, a cocaine baron in the 2004 U.K. movie “Layer Cake.” But the mobster’s instructions to underlings, delivered in his Mar-a-Lago equivalent of a country club in the leafy outskirts of London, eventually shape the circumstances for his undoing.
Donald Trump also isn’t a details man — except perhaps when it comes to fashioning his luxury brand with a reported obsessiveness about the flashy décor of his hotels, golf clubs and casinos. While Trump may fidget about which curtains to hang in his hotel rooms, when it comes to diplomacy upon which tens of thousands of lives may hang, he has less interest in details, focusing instead on the personal interactions of leaders.
Details are for subordinates, like his Secretary of State “Little Marco” and his golfing pal and envoy-to-everywhere Steve Witkoff, who unfortunately also has a shaky grasp of details and displays a tendency to hear what he wants to hear. Trump is just waiting for them to tell him when peace is oven-ready.
Whether he knows it or not, Trump is a practitioner of the “great man theory,” an idea popularized by Victorian essayist and hero-worshipper Thomas Carlyle that sees history as driven by exceptional leaders. This eschews the more complicated dynamics of culture and history, politics and economics.
And for Trump, everything is individualized — and it’s all about personal chemistry.
During his meeting last week with half a dozen European leaders and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump was caught on a hot mic explaining to France’s Emmanuel Macron that Putin wants to “make a deal for me.”
“I think he wants to make a deal with me. Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds,” Trump said.
Hence his remark this week about the difficulties in arranging a bilateral summit between Vladimir Putin and Zelenskyy. Again, this is all about personal chemistry. His take is that Putin is averse to meeting his Ukrainian counterpart because he “doesn’t like him,” adding, “They don’t like each other, really.” Last week, Trump talked about them being like the immiscible liquids oil and vinegar.
No doubt the pair don’t like each other. Zelenskyy has every right to despise Putin, the imperial czar responsible for an invasion of his country that’s featured war crimes and seen tens of thousands of Ukrainian combatants and civilians killed and injured, as well as around 20,000 children spirited off to Russia to be indoctrinated.
Likely, too, Putin isn’t enthusiastic about Zelenskyy. After all, he’s the annoying leader of a country that refuses to give in, has defied mighty imperial Russia and whose spirit of resistance has so far been unbreakable. But that isn’t why Putin isn’t ready to meet Zelenskyy.
For one thing, a summit meeting with the Ukrainian would confer political legitimacy to Zelenskyy when the Kremlin has long argued he has none — Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had a flourish of that in his recent interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” suggesting Putin would not be able to strike a deal with him as Moscow considers him “illegitimate.”
But there’s also another reason. Piling up obstacles to a summit is part and parcel of the Kremlin’s strategy of stringing Trump along while avoiding — or at least reducing, it hopes — sparking Trump’s wrath and possibly prompting him to follow through on his threat of “severe consequences” unless Russia is serious about ending Europe’s biggest war since 1945.
Trump hasn’t laid out what those consequences would be — “I don’t have to say,” he sniffed at a press conference on Aug. 13. Likely, if Trump ever intended to do anything, the consequences would entail secondary sanctions on countries trading with Russia in a bid to choke off the purchasing of Russian fossil fuels. That wouldn’t bring Russia to its knees — the effectiveness of sanctions is generally overestimated — but it would be highly inconvenient, with Russia’s economy heading into a recession and already having overshot its budget deficit target for the year.
Short of something Putin could call a victory, continuing with the war on Ukraine is useful for the Russian president. To end the conflict abruptly could imperil his regime, as a rapid shift out of a war economy would raise the prospect of some dangerous sociopolitical infighting. And, according to Ella Paneyakh, a sociologist and research fellow at the New Eurasian Strategies Centre think tank, this would trigger “cruel and vicious competition for diminishing resources at every level of society.” War is also helpful in justifying political repression — patriotism can be a helpful tool.
Prolonging the conflict also has the benefit of further straining cash-strapped European nations, and risks fracturing an already brittle transatlantic alliance. A weakened, distracted and divided West also serves the purposes of Putin’s ally Xi Jinping as he ponders how and when to swallow Taiwan.
And with Ukraine’s severe manpower shortage, there’s always the chance there could be a frontline breakthrough that Ukraine is unable to reverse. In short, Putin could get more by persisting — more land, Western security guarantees so watered down they’re worthless, and a cap on the size of a postwar Ukrainian army. That would handily set the stage for a later resumption of Russian hostilities at a time of Moscow’s choosing. As Trump’s former Russia czar Fiona Hill argued, the Russian leader “wants a neutered Ukraine, not one that is able to withstand military pressure. Everybody sees this, apart from Trump.”
So how best to play Trump along without stoking his anger while keeping him onside? You’ve guessed it: Entangle Rubio and Witkoff in details and never-ending complications — talk about the “root causes” of the war, pile on deflections and digressions and trot America’s interlocutors down rabbit holes in a drawn-out exercise of skillful manipulation that lugubrious Lavrov is masterful at accomplishing.
All the while framing Zelenskyy and Kyiv for the failure of any progress toward ending the war. That was what Lavrov was doing in his “Meet the Press” interview — pointing the finger of blame at Zelenskyy and banking that the charge will stick with Trump, a man impatient of details.
Recall that it was Lavrov who soon after the invasion recited on Russian television “To the Slanderers of Russia” by Pushkin, a poet beloved by Russian nationalists, who wrote about how conflict between Slavic nations was a family matter and no one else’s concern.
“T’is but Slavonic kin among themselves contending, An ancient household strife, oft judged but still unending, A question which, be sure, ye never can decide.”
The post Putin is unlikely to agree to a summit because he doesn’t want the war to end appeared first on Politico.
