Now, Donald Trump is indulging in so-called anecdotes, and he couldn’t help but tell his usual set of so-called funny and inspiring stories to a bewildered audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Just hours later, after agreeing a “future agreement framework” with NATO, he made a surprise U-turn and completely abandoned his latest tariff threat against Europe. People wonder if all the drama was worth it.
Regardless, the president took time out of his lengthy speech to mention the war in Ukraine — a real and bloody conflict that stands in stark contrast to the unlikely conflict in Greenland. Specifically, the president mentioned that tens of thousands of soldiers are still being massacred every week as Vladimir Putin’s “Special Military Operations” enter their fourth year.
With temperatures well below freezing, Russia’s missile and drone attacks on civilians have apparently not stopped, now targeting Kiev and power stations. Electricity shortages affect everything—lighting, water supply, industry, transportation, and heating.
This amounts to nothing less than state terrorism orchestrated by the Kremlin, as undertrained and ill-equipped troops continue to make pitifully slow progress on the battlefield. Europe’s worst interstate conflict since World War II continues, as brutally as ever. That doesn’t provide an ideal backdrop for the White House to relaunch its peace efforts.
Trump said he hoped to meet with Zelensky for talks, although the Ukrainian leader left Davos earlier this week to return to Kyiv disappointed with the latest developments in U.S. foreign policy. Mr. Zelensky’s suspicions were and are correct.
Donald Trump appears to insist that neither Ukraine nor Russia is serious about ending the fighting (AFP/Getty)
Although Ukraine agreed to a U.S. ceasefire offer last March, President Vladimir Putin has found every reason to keep the fighting going and has rejected any peace settlement that doesn’t reward Russia with swathes of Ukrainian territory it has yet to conquer — even one approved by the White House. However, Trump seems to insist that neither side is serious about ending the fighting and that they have taken turns rejecting a ceasefire, which is simply untrue.
For Putin, there’s always some excuse for refusing to make a deal, usually involving a tirade about why Ukraine isn’t even a real country with its own culture. The Russians believe Ukraine should belong to them, just as Trump believes Greenland belongs to the United States. Nothing Trump says or does in recent days is likely to change that position.
Still, President Trump’s peace envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner will travel to Moscow for more discussions on advancing the U.S. peace plan without any hope of a sudden breakthrough.
After all, it didn’t come up at last August’s Alaska summit, when Trump might have expected to gain something in return for taking President Putin out of the cold so publicly and generously. President Trump is testing the outer boundaries of satire, even inviting accused war criminal Putin to join the Gaza Peace Council, a Trump vanity project. To be fair, he also asked President Zelensky to join the new agency, but Mr Zelensky refused, no doubt seeing this as a disheartening sign of how gullible and out of touch Mr Trump is with the Kremlin.
President Trump says Ukraine and Russia would be “stupid” not to sign his peace deal. However, he failed to notice how proactive and accommodating the Ukrainian side was and, even more sadly, how putting more pressure on President Putin would prompt him to end the war he started. Instead, Putin is constantly rewarded for his stubbornness, even as Trump occasionally expresses some anger at him.
As it stands, Putin has achieved without much effort where previous Russian and Soviet leaders have failed, and has watched NATO unravel in an unbelievable way and speed.
The U.S. National Security Strategy released in November portrayed Europe as a greater threat to U.S. interests than Russia, and Trump once again raised the theme of “civilization erasure” in Davos. While NATO managed to hold itself together under the stress of the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and decades of the Cold War, Trump has casually divided it.
If Putin had time to watch President Trump’s speech, he would have been delighted to hear the US President say that NATO has done nothing for the US, and that he does not believe that Europeans and Canadians would support the US if it requested aid (contrary to their painful experience after 9/11, of course).
The belated U-turn was both sudden and welcome, but Mr Trump still showed he was willing to shake the foundations of the Western alliance. That’s quite a legacy for an American president.
