Author’s Note: I wrote this piece before the news about Charlie Kirk broke. What happened in Utah is simply appalling, indefensible, and horrific. Beyond that, I don’t really know what else there is to say. My deepest sympathies go to his family. Any other opinions about this evil act—or the responses to it—can wait.
Hey,
Donald Trump has said countless times that the Russian invasion of Ukraine never would have happened if he’d been president at the time. There’s some merit to this. After all, Vladimir Putin has initiated hostilities against neighbors under three out of the last four administrations: Georgia under George W. Bush, Eastern Ukraine and Crimea on Barack Obama’s watch, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine during the Biden administration. But during the first Trump term, Russia bided its time.
There are pro-Trump and anti-Trump theories for why. I tend to subscribe to the view that Trump’s Cabinet—Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, et al.—steered the administration in a more hardline direction than Trump himself might have wanted. But Trump was president, so he gets to claim credit for the policies and their results. There are of course other theories that have varying degrees of plausibility or explanatory power: Putin was distracted by the Syrian civil war; he was waiting for German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Trump to leave office; Putin had hopes that he could forge better relations with Trump and launching a war would force Trump to take a harder line given all of the “Russia, Russia, Russia” stuff. There are other theories involving things like the COVID pandemic, sanctions fatigue, Trump’s unpredictability, etc.
I’m willing to subscribe to all of them to one degree or another. I’m just not sure why any of it matters. Forget that Trump said, more than 50 times, that he could end the war in 24 hours (he now claims he was joking). The simple fact is that on Trump’s watch, Putin has intensified the war. I think it’s fairly bizarre that this point doesn’t seem to have much salience with anybody. I mean, imagine you’re a bouncer at a club. You take great pride in the fact that nobody would dare to start a fight when you’re on duty. You go to the bathroom and another bouncer spots you for 10 minutes. When you return, there’s a brawl initiated entirely by a thug who attacked patrons unprovoked. Okay, cool—brag that the fight started while you were away and the other bouncer sucks.
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But you still have some obligation to break up the fight.
It’s fine to argue that ongoing fights are harder to stop than they are to prevent. That’s probably true. But it impresses no one to simply stand back and watch as more tables get toppled, more glassware is smashed, and more innocent customers get injured, and say, “This never would have happened if I’d been there.”
Now, Trump hasn’t exactly stood on the sidelines. He’s tapped Putin on the shoulder a few times and said, “Maybe you should cut it out.” He has humiliated and undermined Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He’s yelled at NATO allies to do more. He’s picked a big—and stupid—fight with India allegedly over its purchases of Russian oil (though most reporting suggests it’s at least in part over Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s refusal to nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize and go along with the story that Trump stopped a war between India and Pakistan). Over the last nine months, Trump has said a lot about stuff that will happen in “two weeks.” And, of course, he had a summit in Alaska that yielded nothing but a P.R. coup for Putin by placing the onus for a peace deal on Ukraine and Europe, ending the isolation of Putin as a pariah and literally rolling out a red carpet for him..
Days after that summit, Russia bombed a factory in a part of western Ukraine that had been pretty much untouched by the war because it’s so far from the front. The only notable thing about the electronics factory, which produced things like coffeemakers, was that it was owned by an American firm.
America did nothing.
“This hesitation convinced Russia to strike British Council and EU buildings in Kyiv on August 28, and to use GPS jamming against European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s plane,” writes the Telegraph’s Samuel Ramani. “When these provocations received little more than a rhetorical response, Russia upped the stakes further by striking a Ukrainian government building.”
Then, yesterday, Russia sent drones into Polish airspace, prompting a scrambling of NATO fighters to intercept them. “It was the first time in the history of NATO that alliance fighters had engaged enemy targets in allied airspace,” officials told the New York Times. “The drone incursion prompted Poland’s government to invoke Article 4 of the NATO treaty, a rarely used mechanism triggered when a member is under threat that prompts a formal discussion within the alliance.”
As of this writing, Trump’s response came in the form of a Truth Social post: “What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!”
Again, it’s fine to claim that this war never would have started if Trump hadn’t lost the 2020 election. I just don’t see why it matters.
I agree with Jeremiah Johnson, who writes in The Dispatch today that this administration is obsessed with “performative toughness.” Some of it makes me roll my eyes, but I don’t really care if the Department of Defense now has an additional nickname, “the Department of War.” (The name can’t be formally changed without legislation, but the threshold for performative displays doesn’t require Congress.) I think it’s legit weird that the secretary of war loves to talk so much about reorienting the military to a warrior ethos and maximizing its lethality, but also doesn’t mind sending American troops to do trash pickup and landscaping in the nation’s capital. I’m more bothered when Trump posts stupid memes about how “Chicago [is] about to find out why it's called the Department of WAR.” And I’m legitimately appalled by the Navy blowing up a Venezuelan boat—without any authorization from Congress—on the hunch that it’s carrying drugs. Unlike J.D. Vance, I do care if it’s a war crime.
But the thing that really bothers me is how much of this fits the classic bully stereotype. Bullies love to pick fights with people they know they can beat. They love posturing about how tough they are. Nothing thrills them more than intimidating friends into sucking up to them. But when faced with actual formidable opponents, they back down. They’d rather blend in with the real tough guys than confront them or call their bluffs.
For instance, I remember when the Trumpists insisted that the central organizing principle of our foreign policy had to be confronting China. I think that’s a defensible argument, even if I think using it as a pretext to screw Ukraine and NATO makes no sense whatsoever. Regardless, here we are. India, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam get the tough-guy treatment, but China gets the AI chips it wants (so long as Uncle Sam gets a cut), and Chinese students keep their slots at American universities.
Ukraine and NATO get lots of tough-guy talk, Putin gets warnings about consequences two weeks over the horizon.
I don’t want to go to war with Russia and I don’t know anyone who does. But it used to be a standard argument on the right that we shouldn’t let our fear of “escalation” drive our foreign policy. Indeed, this was the central critique of Biden’s handling of the Ukraine conflict. He did enough to keep Ukraine alive, but little to help it win because he was afraid of Russian escalation. Best not to give Ukraine the weapons—or the permission to use them—that could deter Russia or bring its economy to its knees. Russia might escalate! Better to let Ukraine bleed Russia as it bleeds out in the process. Call me crazy, but I’d rather live in a world where Russia was afraid of American escalation.
Alas, that’s not the world we live in.
If Ukraine ultimately falls to Russia’s lawless and immoral invasion, it may not happen on Trump’s watch. And the potential wars that would follow such a calamity, as Russia picked its next targets in the quest to fulfill its imperial ambitions, would probably be his successor’s problems too. But nobody will be able to say, “This wouldn’t happen if Trump were president” because that process is well underway right now.
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