Not for the first time in his already short second term, president Trump is at risk of once more being outsmarted by Putin, in this year’s ultimate game of diplomatic high stakes poker.
Having campaigned last year in an election in which Ukraine was front and centre – symbolising Washington’s failed foreign policy agenda and a perceived need for refocusing back on “America First” – Trump repeatedly vowed to end the three-year war “on day one”.
One hundred and twenty days later, and with no end to the war realistically in sight, the president held a private two-hour long phone call with Putin, in a further attempt to bring the Russian dictator finally to heel.
This time, instead of threats to further bank-roll Kyiv, Trump appealed to the businessman inside Putin, offering promises of “unlimited potential” of a post-conflict Russian trading relationship with the rest of the world.
Whilst understandable that Trump – himself liking to imagine he is the world’s best deal-maker – attempts to address Putin both as an equal and as a businessman, the Russian president is of course neither.
At best a relatively low-ranking career KGB agent, and now second-rate dictator, whose own lack of internal power nearly spelt the end of his regime when former aide-turned mutineer Yevgeny Prigozhin threatened a putsch on Moscow almost two years ago.
Trump may well have his flaws, but a second rate despot he is not – and to treat Putin as an equal and now as a fellow businessman is to not only do himself a disservice, it also risks emboldening Putin.
In less than four months, Trump’s strategy to dealing with Putin has lurched from sympathetic ally; then to annoyance; to threats of increasing military aid to Ukraine (seen as a near existential threat by the Kremlin); to now promises of unlimited trade with the US.
The right strategy to follow from the start was, of course, severely limiting Russia’s access to the US-led global financial markets. Starmer – to his credit – has led a fresh round of sanctions on both Russian individuals and on Russia’s infamous shadow fleet. Even the Russian-gas loving EU has issued fresh sanctions.
Read the rest at The Telegraph.
Robert Clark is a Fellow at Yorktown Institute.
