| | | With His Pivot on Ukraine, Trump May Be Washing His Hands of the War
President Trump has shown dwindling interest in mediating a peace accord, joining European “security guarantees” for Ukraine or providing aid and intelligence to the Ukrainians.
nytimes.com
Eight months into his second term, President Trump has made a declaration about Ukraine that sounded vaguely like the ones his predecessor, President Joseph R. Biden Jr., used to make. With the right mix of courage, ingenuity and weapons from NATO, he asserted on Tuesday, Ukraine could force Russia to retreat from the territory it has seized in three and a half years of brutal war.
But scratch the surface, and a deeper desire seemed buried in Mr. Trump’s reversal of position during the U.N. meetings in New York this week. Mr. Trump appears to want to wash his hands of the Ukraine conflict, after having no success bringing President Vladimir V. Putin to the negotiating table, and a dwindling chance of acting as mediator between the two warring parties.
Like many policy declarations by Mr. Trump, it is hard to divine his true beliefs, and impossible to assure he will not change position again. He is nothing if not mercurial. His foreign policy views, former aides say, are more often driven by pique and a sense that he has been disrespected than by strategic analysis.
And his own key advisers seemed taken by surprise by his sudden conclusion that Ukraine, after years of struggle, is suddenly capable of winning back the one-fifth of the country that President Vladimir V. Putin’s troops now occupy.
On the same afternoon that Mr. Trump issued his conclusion on Ukraine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who is also acting as national security adviser — repeated the administration’s old maxim that the war in Ukraine “cannot end militarily,” predicting that “it will end at a negotiating table.” The White House, asked to clarify the contradictions between the two statements, did not immediately respond to a series of emailed questions.
It is possible, said several experts who have followed the president’s search for tactical advantage in dealing with Russia and Ukraine, that nothing much has changed here at all.
“The reversal is one of analysis and not policy,” said Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for New American Security and a former aide to Senator John McCain. “Trump is oscillating between extreme views of the situation — previously, Ukraine couldn’t win because Kyiv didn’t have cards to play, and now it can win all of its territory back because Russia is merely ‘a paper tiger.’”
“Either view seems to minimize America’s role in the war,” concluded Mr. Fontaine, who has written extensively about strategies to help Ukraine. “He suggests no change in U.S. policy. There is no new call for a cease-fire or peace agreement, no new sanctions, no new deadlines and no new military support for Ukraine, beyond the weapons NATO buys from the United States.”
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