Trump loses patience

Back in February I made the following assessment of Donald Trump’s policy towards Ukraine:

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.

And so it was. Vladimir Putin had an opportunity for a ceasefire that would have allowed his forces to regroup while ratifying his control of large swathes of Ukrainian territory. But he chose not to take it, holding out for better terms. Now, like many world leaders before him, he has a Trump problem.

This week Trump, for the first time, has been directing serious rhetorical fire against Putin. On Monday he promised to send Patriot air defence missiles to Ukraine, overturning a previous decision by his defence department to cut back on such aid, and he framed it as a response to Putin’s duplicity: “He talks nice and then bombs people at night.” He went on to threaten tariffs and other measures if Russia refuses to negotiate seriously.

In an interview last night with the BBC, he reiterated the point: “We’ll have a great conversation. I’ll say: ‘That’s good, I’ll think we’re close to getting it done,’ and then he’ll knock down a building in Kyiv.” Pressed as to whether he trusted Putin, “There was … a very long pause … Eventually he replied: ‘I trust almost nobody.'”

No-one should infer that we are suddenly getting a thoughtful, sensible and well-intentioned Trump. He remains the same impulsive narcissist he has always been, and it remains the case that, as I said last week, “his instincts are mostly bad ones.” He’s also not usually the first to notice that he’s being played for a fool, but like most of us he does notice eventually, and Putin has been doing it for just a bit too long.

As many of us have been pointing out for a long time, searching for depth in Trump’s words or actions is a losing game. This is not a move in some well-calculated strategy: he has no such plan to save Ukraine, but he has no such plan to destroy it either. He is fundamentally indifferent to geopolitical outcomes except when they happen to come into contact with his own needs for respect and loot.

So while he has an instinctive understanding of and sympathy with Putin of the sort that he doesn’t have with Volodymyr Zelensky – a leader with courage and integrity is simply incomprehensible to him – that doesn’t mean that Zelensky’s flattery has been ineffective. Putin, on the other hand, appears to have made the mistake of taking Trump for granted.

There’s no doubt that Putin is much more skilled than his American disciple, but (as the invasion of Ukraine surely demonstrated) he is far from being a strategic mastermind. It seems that he miscalculated just how far he could string Trump along, and decided to push his advantage on the battlefield before agreeing to any sort of ceasefire. He may also have misjudged, not for the first time, his military prospects, turning down what would in fact have been a valuable breathing space.

Perhaps he even believed advisers who told him that Trump was not just a fellow-traveller but a Russian asset, who would just do what he was told. A few pundits in the west seemed to believe that, but it was never likely. He might be, as I put it once, a “participant in a common design” with Putin, but each of them is mostly out for himself; Trump will sell out his friends and allies, but he won’t sell out his own ego.

So where do things go from here? Wars are not won by defensive weapons, welcome as they might be; Ukraine needs either new attacking capabilities – Trump apparently at one point asked Zelensky if he could hit Moscow and St Petersburg, although he now denies encouraging the idea – or new international sanctions against Russia. And it’s simply impossible to tell whether or not some Trumpian caprice will one day lead to that.

I suspect that before long Trump will be distracted by some new enthusiasm and Ukraine will return to the neglected backwaters of his mind. And in between his unpredictable interventions his officials will continue doing more or less the same things American officials always do, following their own interpretations of their boss’s wishes, or of the national welfare, or simply of their own self-interest. That may or not involve helping Ukraine, but it is unlikely to be decisive either way.

And while we wait, people will keep dying.

UPDATE, Friday: John Lyons’s analysis of Trump’s new position is well worth a read, although he takes his pro-Ukrainian comments rather more at face value than I would.