Vladimir the Weak

Not everything about this presidency will be terrible.

Most of it will be terrible. There will be surreal civic travesties, for sure. (There already have been.) All of us frogs who haven’t yet boiled will emerge on the other side with a much lower opinion of our country and its people.

But not everything will be terrible. There are upsides to a second Trump administration.

Stricter immigration enforcement will discourage many migrants from trying their luck, easing the crush at the border. Deregulation is usually more good than bad, and there’s plenty of that to come. Tax cuts are nice as a personal matter, however irresponsible they might be as fiscal policy. And Trump’s buddies in Saudi Arabia will likely reach a long overdue peace with Israel. 

It’s the least they can do to say thanks, frankly, after the Israelis spent the past year pulverizing their mutual enemies.

Every dark orange cloud has a silver lining. There will even be a pleasant surprise or two from Trump 2.0, cases when the man in charge catches everyone off guard by sounding more like a Reagan conservative than the postliberal goon we know and loathe.

Wednesday brought us the first case of him zigging when most of us assumed he would zag.

“I’m not looking to hurt Russia. I love the Russian people, and always had a very good relationship with President Putin,” Trump wrote yesterday on Truth Social, sounding very much like himself. Then came the curveball: “Settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War! IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE. If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.”

That sure didn’t sound like him.

Critics have always viewed Trump’s reluctance to criticize Vladimir Putin and Russia suspiciously. It’s so out of character, such a jarring departure from his usual dominance politics, that one can’t help but speculate about ulterior motives to explain it. Yet here he was on Day 3 of his second term threatening Putin outright. And not just that: He correctly put the onus on Russia, not on Ukraine, to end a war that will enter its fourth year next month.

Common sense, no? Russia started the conflict by invading and Russia alone can end it by withdrawing, obviously. To hear some populists tell it, though, Ukraine bears ultimate responsibility for the bloodletting because it refused to let itself be subjugated by an authoritarian power and allied itself instead with the godless decadent NATO-loving liberal resistance of the West. One such populist was Donald Trump—until, weirdly, this week.

His social media post wasn’t the only time he criticized Russia either. On Tuesday he told reporters that Ukraine wants peace “but it takes two to tango,” again placing blame on Moscow for prolonging the war. “He should make a deal. I think he’s destroying Russia by not making a deal,” Trump went on to say of Putin, describing the country as “in big trouble.”

This is not the Donald Trump I thought I knew. Or is it?

Weakness.

The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and the simplest explanation for Trump’s apparent turnabout on Russia would be that pro-Ukrainian elements are privately appealing to his ego.

China understands that flattery is the way to the president’s heart. So do tech titans. No doubt Volodymyr Zelensky and his European patrons have been laying it on thick behind the scenes as well, starting with the face-to-face meeting that French President Emmanuel Macron cleverly orchestrated by inviting Trump to the reopening of the cathedral of Notre Dame last month.

You’re the only man in the world who can save Ukraine. Stopping Russia is going to get you that Peace Prize you should have won for the Abraham Accords. That’s the sort of pitch that Putin, for all his levers of influence, can’t match. His strongman pride and silly nationalist pretensions to superpower status would never allow him to grovel to Trump for support the way Trump wants to be groveled to.

The czar has always met U.S. leaders by posturing as their equal, not as a supplicant. But Russia isn’t America’s equal, as the last three years have made shockingly clear. And that, ultimately, is Putin’s real problem in Trump’s eyes, I think: The weakness he and his country have displayed in struggling to subdue a far lesser power may have shattered the president’s respect for an authoritarian counterpart.

Remember how Trump talked about Russia’s invasion in the days immediately following? “I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine—of Ukraine—Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful,” he said in an interview in February 2022. “He used the word ‘independent’ and ‘we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.’ You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.”

At the time, Russia expected Kyiv to fall in three days. Three years later, the Russian military still controls only 20 percent or so of Ukraine and none of its major cities. It has taken more than 600,000 casualties in the process, forcing it to turn to North Korea for reinforcements. The Russian economy, while more resilient than expected, has lately begun to sag under the weight of soaring inflation. Not so “genius.” Not so “savvy.”

Trump admires autocrats like Putin and Xi Jinping because he shares their instincts toward ruthlessness and dominance and envies their ability to bully weaker opponents unimpeded. Watching Russia fail miserably in bullying Ukraine must have been sobering, even disillusioning, for him about the true extent of Putin’s “strength.” I wonder, in fact, if the reason Xi sounds like his dictator of choice lately is because he’s come to understand that Russia isn’t nearly as great a power as he assumed.

Never forget that Trump is a creature of nostalgia. He may well have spent the past 40 years operating off of an image of Russia that he formed circa 1982. Now that he’s been disabused of it, his sense of kinship with Moscow may have eroded and the war in Ukraine might be just another conflict in which his position changes month to month depending on what he thinks makes him look best.

And what would make him look best at this particular moment is keeping his campaign promise to end the war quickly. Russia, not Ukraine, is the obstacle to that; whether Trump understood that all along or had the postliberal scales fall from his eyes as his respect for Putin collapsed is known only to him. Either way, he’s appropriately applying pressure to the party in the conflict that can give him what he wants.

He has a heavy club to beat Russia with, too, should he choose to use it

Forget the nonsense in his Truth Social post about tariffs, as Russia exports next to nothing to the United States. Oil revenue is what’s keeping Putin’s war machine running. If the White House wants to force Moscow to the bargaining table, the obvious move is to throttle that revenue by getting foreign powers to impose stronger sanctions on Russian oil and/or to boost the global supply, driving prices downward.

Lo and behold, that’s exactly what Trump threatened to do on Thursday when he addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos—and he has some important friends in Riyadh who might plausibly help him do it. It sounds like “big trouble” really is in the making for Russia, just like the president said.

But only for now.

Strength.

The problem for Ukraine, and to a lesser extent Trump, is that Russia is winning the war.

“Winning” is a relative term given the massive casualties taken to achieve modest gains, but the Russians are making gains. “At the moment, [the war] is moving not in the right direction,” NATO chief Mark Rutte said recently. The frontline “should be moving eastwards and it [is] moving westwards.” Best estimates are that the Ukrainians have suffered half the losses Russia has—but with a population roughly one-fourth the size.

Zelensky isn’t the heroic political juggernaut he used to be either. Last year his approval rating dropped to 60 percent, down from 84 at the start of the war, while public confidence in the government declined to just 28 percent. A more recent survey finds him at around 50 percent approval overall and below that number when pitted against other potential presidential candidates, some of whom are reportedly in contact with Trump’s team.

Trump being Trump, it’s easy to imagine him handling a stalemate in peace negotiations by shifting away from pressuring Russia and toward scapegoating Zelensky, hoping to see him replaced with a more cooperative (read: pliable) Ukrainian leader. The president doesn’t care about ensuring a just peace for Ukraine, he cares about being seen as a peacemaker and keeping his promise to end the war. The terms, in the end, are but a detail.

The Russians understand that, I assume. And so, given their halting momentum on the battlefield and the well-known fact that Donald Trump is, er, a tad fickle by temperament, they sound inclined to keep fighting at least until fall in hopes of extracting more concessions from Ukraine and its American sponsor.

According to the Washington Post, the Kremlin’s vision of a peace deal “involves a neutral, demilitarized Ukraine outside of NATO, with Russia keeping the territory it has already annexed. It may also encompass Moscow’s demands for broader talks on Europe’s security architecture and for NATO to roll back its military infrastructure from its eastern borders.” Above all, one analyst said, Russia wants the other side to acknowledge its right to dominate its neighbor: “The main thing is a friendly Ukraine. Kyiv should capitulate and admit that it has lost the war and stop resisting.”

That’s a dealbreaker for Zelensky, I’m sure. Is it a dealbreaker for Trump?

Imagine that the White House organizes peace talks between the two combatants this spring. Russia insists that Ukraine surrender and that its Western allies concede that Ukraine properly belongs to Moscow’s “sphere of influence,” not to Europe’s. The Ukrainians laugh and refuse. Talks break down and the shooting resumes. Trump, the alleged dealmaker who once boasted about ending the war in 24 hours, feels humiliated by having failed so miserably.

What does he do then?

He could turn up the pressure on Russia to reduce its demands by going all-in on Ukraine, ordering another massive round of U.S. military aid to Kyiv and playing hardball on oil prices. But that would be risky. Ukrainian forces have been sufficiently degraded that even more American weapons might not stave off the Russian offensive.

Many populist Republicans would be furious at him for continuing to fund Ukraine’s defense after they spent three years browbeating Democrats and Reagan Republicans in Congress for supporting it. And Trump would be furious at Ukraine if he gambled on its military’s ability to fight on until fall, only to see its forces steamrolled before a deal is reached. The last thing he wants to do is lose a test of “strength” with a foreign authoritarian by having his proxy exposed as weak.

In the end, he wouldn’t risk it. What’s likely to happen—and what Russia is surely counting on—is that Trump’s current tough-guy posture toward Moscow will soften over the next eight months as Russian troops continue to advance. A narcissist can’t bear not being on the winner’s side; the clearer it becomes that Putin is winning, the likelier it is that Trump will stop pressuring him for concessions and start pressuring Zelensky to throw in the towel.

The president may have a low opinion of Russian power right now, but there’s nothing that impresses him more than resolve amid adversity, as his various Cabinet nominees have been made to understand. From the Access Hollywood tape to the fallout from January 6 to his criminal tribulations, his own approach has always been to plow ahead defiantly knowing that, if he wins in the end, many of his opponents will capitulate to him. 

Putin intends to win him over to Russia’s side, I assume, by demonstrating the same strength of will in Ukraine. If so, his strategy is wholly Trumpy.

The art of the deal.

In the end, if I were negotiating for Russia, I wouldn’t put up much of a fuss if Trump proposed a peace deal in which the U.S. pledged to guarantee Ukraine’s security.

Moscow has good reason not to want Ukraine in NATO, as some or all of NATO’s European members really might invoke Article 5 and ride to Kyiv’s defense the next time Russia attacks, I think. But if, in lieu of admitting Ukraine to the alliance, the Trump White House promised to send U.S. troops to repel the next Russian invasion, I’d take that deal all day long if I were Putin.

Why not? No U.S. administration would actually honor those terms if Russia called its bluff by crossing the border.

Trump’s certainly wouldn’t. It would be beyond preposterous for an “America First” president, of all people, to get sucked into a hot war with the Kremlin. Trump would end up ignoring his obligations under the treaty. So would President J.D. Vance or whichever other nationalist chud ends up succeeding him in office. The postliberal vanguard of the GOP is more devoutly isolationist than Trump himself is.

Only a Democratic president might honor a pledge to defend Ukraine, but I’m even skeptical about that. The liberal establishment is desperate to keep pace with an electorate that’s grown Trumpier; it’s hard to believe that, having evolved on policy to overcome that challenge, a new Democratic commander in chief would turn right around and put boots on the ground to confront an army with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal behind it.

An American pledge to defend Ukraine would be worthless, as American pledges to defend Ukraine tend to be. If Putin needs to accept a worthless promise in order to get everything else he wants, he’d be foolish not to do so.