Today, President Donald Trump threw one of the most important tenets of own foreign policy into a 180-degree turn, reversing course without even slowing down. Trump has always been overly deferential to Vladimir Putin, including enabling the Russian president’s war in Ukraine. Now Trump appears to be signaling that he’s fed up with the Kremlin. But is he?
Trump’s latest policy reversal came after he spoke to the United Nations General Assembly for nearly an hour today. His speech was classic Trump: Full of grievance, inappropriate references to American political feuds, embarrassing moments of self-promotion, detours into odd tangents, and claims that everyone in the world but him is stupid. Trump seemed irritated with everyone, including Putin, for depriving him of the Nobel Peace Prize he thinks he deserves—an oversight he whined about to the UN audience. The diplomats in the attendance could be forgiven if they didn’t take any of it seriously.
After his address, however, Trump met with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and France’s President Emmanuel Macron. And then he said something genuinely startling. Should NATO shoot down Russian aircraft if they cross the alliance’s borders? Yes, he said, sounding like a born-again Cold Warrior. Russia, Trump later explained on his social media site, Truth Social, is just a “paper tiger,” a feckless nation that “has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win.”
Ukraine, Trump now says, can win the war. “With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option.” I assumed he meant the 2022 starting position of the Russian invasion, not the 2014 borders that Russia violated when it seized Crimea, but maybe not: With Western help, Trump wrote, “Ukraine would be able to take back their Country in its original form and, who knows, maybe even go further than that!”
The president has come a long way since he berated Zelensky in the White House last winter. Back then, Trump wanted Ukraine to fold because it doesn’t “have the cards.” And after the disastrous Anchorage summit last month, Trump was still telling Ukraine it was going to have to accept some territorial exchanges. (Translation: Russia would get to keep some of the land it stole.) Now, Trump seems to be saying that Ukraine could win back all its conquered territory and then some.
One explanation is that Trump just doesn’t like being humiliated. Trump made it clear at the UN today that he thought his relationship with the Russian president would make Ukraine the easiest of the world’s many conflicts he intended to solve. But Putin has merely taken advantage of Trump to continue his war effort and has signaled no willingness to make concessions in the name of peace. Perhaps Trump is sending a message—finally—that there are limits to the amount of abuse and embarrassment the president of the United States is willing to take from the Kremlin.
Possible, but unlikely. Trump has always had a high endurance for Putin’s abuse. Besides, this isn’t the first time he’s lashed out at Moscow. Unless Zelensky and Macron told Trump of some amazing plan to win the war, the president has no reason to have changed his mind about Ukraine’s ability to win. Note, too, that Trump’s messages include no action items to beef up the Ukrainian war effort: No weapons, no money, no increased U.S. intelligence or technological support. Even Trump’s call for sanctions on Russia is an empty threat, because it relies on conditions—such as a requirement that NATO nations impose massive tariffs on China, rather than Russia—that other countries are unlikely to fulfill.
Instead, Trump seems to be going through one of his tantrums where he threatens just to walk away from the conflict. In the past, that presented more of a danger to Ukraine than to Russia: Trump always implied that without a peace deal, he’d cut Kyiv loose and let Putin do whatever the hell he wants. Now, the president seems to be implying that he’ll walk away and let Europe do whatever the hell it wants, including sending more weapons to Ukraine and shooting down Russian military aircraft (and the pilots in them) instead of merely shooing them away from NATO airspace.
Indeed, Trump even added an implied threat to engage in some kind of propaganda or information operations against Russia. His Truth Social post mentioned how Ukraine could make a decisive move when “the people living in Moscow, and all of the Great Cities, Towns, and Districts all throughout Russia, find out what is really going on with this War, the fact that it’s almost impossible for them to get Gasoline through the long lines that are being formed, and all of the other things that are taking place in their War Economy.”
The Russians already know this, but if Trump is going to order U.S. intelligence agencies to drive that message home, such a move would be a welcome change for Ukraine and the rest of the free world. At the least, it would signal the beginning of the end of Trump’s policy of appeasing the Kremlin.
Unfortunately, David Sanger of The New York Times is probably correct in his evaluation that Trump, rather than increasing pressure on Russia, is “washing his hands of the conflict.” Putin, who like other world leaders, shows little inclination to take Trump seriously , has no intention of stopping his daily murder of innocent Ukrainians, and so Trump cannot gain any public credit from trying to broker a peace. As Sanger noted, the tell is that Trump ended his message by saying: “I wish both countries well.” That’s Trump-speak for being bored and exhausted with two nations that seem to have other priorities in the world besides getting a Nobel Prize for President Donald J. Trump.
Worse, Trump’s carping about Russia today could be a way for Trump to head down the road of normalizing relations with Russia—removing tariffs, encouraging trade, and ending Russia’s isolation. By showing just how deeply disappointed he is in Russia, he shows America and the Russia hawks in his own party that he’s really talked tough to Putin, while simultaneously ditching the Ukraine war as an intractable and endless problem that is no longer worth his attention. Life goes on: The Europeans buy American weapons, the Russians continue to bomb Ukraine, and the Ukrainians continue to bleed and die.
I hope I’m wrong. But Trump has a well-known tendency to agree with whoever he spoke to last, and his comments today may only reflect the immediacy of his meetings with Zelensky and Macron. The only way the world can know if the president meant what he said today is if he comes back to Washington and puts America firmly back on the side of NATO and Ukraine with money and materiel. Until then, it’s just talk.
The post Does Trump Really Think Ukraine Can Win? appeared first on The Atlantic.
