Trump, Putin and Ukraine

Less that a year ago (although it feels longer), when Congress in the United States was debating aid to Ukraine, I remarked that many of Donald Trump’s supporters “remain[ed] in denial about Trump’s obvious hostility to Ukraine,” and suggested that they would “keep telling themselves that another Trump presidency would not in fact be the gift to Vladimir Putin that all the evidence suggests.”

I also linked to a column by Jon Chait, which expressed the same point: “It is glaringly obvious that Trump admires Russia and resents NATO and Ukraine, and would strengthen the former at the expense of the latter. The remaining Republicans who fear these outcomes are too craven to even admit they will happen.”

Some have now woken up, but in general the state of denial continues. Even the last fortnight, in which Trump and his team have sent unrelentingly negative signals to Ukraine and the European Union, [has] failed to convince the committed. Nor is there anything unique to Ukraine or even to foreign policy: on domestic issues as well – perhaps most obviously the pardons for the 6 January insurrectionists – there was widespread unwillingness to believe that Trump would actually do the things that he said he would.

At one level this is understandable. We all like to search for positives, if only to make life bearable, and it’s easy to believe that a chronic liar will break bad promises as well as good ones. And given Trump’s willingness to sell out his allies, why shouldn’t he also sell out Vladimir Putin? Indeed, that idea was given a boost a few weeks ago when he appeared to double-cross Benjamin Netanyahu over the Gaza ceasefire. (Although since many are also in denial about the Putin-Netanyahu alignment, they tended to miss the lesson.)

So a rash of positive stories between Trump’s election and inauguration forecast that his policy towards the rest of the world, and Ukraine in particular, would be something like business as usual – even that his instinct for deal-making would be able to produce results (good ones) that had eluded others. Those of us who argued that his admiration and fellow-feeling for Putin would be a better guide seemed very much in the minority.

But I think there’s more to it than that. Although Trump is unquestionably an authoritarian, he is in some ways an untypical one. Fascist leaders were notorious for their military ambition and love of war, but Trump does not fit that mold. He likes violence, but not on the scale of warfare; his desire for peace seems quite genuine.

Most of Trump’s supporters fall into one of two groups: either they are war-mongers in mostly traditional Republican fashion, like secretary of state Marco Rubio, or they are anti-imperialists, like director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (anti, that is, American imperialism; Putin’s imperialism doesn’t bother them). Trump, unusually, is neither: he is an imperialist who doesn’t much like war.

A wish for peace is always a praiseworthy instinct, but it does not always have good consequences. Munich, which I have referred to before, is an obvious example; Chamberlain’s love of peace was unquestionably genuine as well. The problem becomes acute when the peacemaker focuses solely on the short term, failing to look further down the road – as with the Abraham Accords in the Middle East, the showpiece of Trump’s first term, which indirectly unleashed the carnage of 7 October 2023.

At the moment, Trump’s desire for peace and his solidarity with Putin seem to be pushing him in the same direction: a diktat at Ukraine’s expense that will give Russia most of what it wants. But it’s possible that at some point there will be sufficient resistance to that, whether from the Europeans or within his own ranks, for the need for a quick fix to take over. In that case, he may try to bully Putin into something that is from the latter’s point of view a less than ideal solution, possibly even involving a substantial withdrawal from Ukrainian territory.

In other words, although Putin has been dealt, shall we say, a trump card, he still has to be careful about how he plays it. If he pitches his terms too high, there is always the risk that Trump will notice he is being taken to the cleaners and will push back out of wounded pride. There is also a risk of continued Ukrainian resistance (the Czechs contemplated the same in 1938), backed by Britain and the European Union.

Because of course the Republican Party are not the only ones that held unrealistic expectations of Trump. The Europeans also should have seen this coming and should have been better prepared. But that will have to be a topic for another day.