Donald Trump is no stranger to the rise and fall of great love affairs. One could ask his former wives and girlfriends—from Ivana Trump to the infamous Stormy Daniels—who each saw his interests pass to a new flame. One could also ask his geopolitical paramours: Kim Jong Un, for example, with whom he exchanged diplomatic “love letters” in 2018.
Today, Trump’s waning passions are for Russia’s Vladimir Putin. For months now, the US president’s apparent respect for Putin and eagerness to negotiate with him have been diminishing as he began to suspect that his Russian counterpart was stringing him along. The issue finally came to a head in a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, at which Trump announced that he’d be canceling a Pentagon hold on weapons to Ukraine and considering new sanctions.
Though congressional hawks may be salivating at the thought of a harder line on Russia, there’s little evidence Trump’s latest moves signal a significant shift in US policy towards Ukraine, or even an end to the Trump administration’s efforts to engage.
Trump may well be undergoing a genuine change of heart about Putin. His comments in the Oval Office suggested that he increasingly feels slighted by the Russian president’s friendly talk and lack of action to back it up. As Trump put it to reporters, “I go home and I tell the first lady: ‘I spoke with Vladimir today, we had a wonderful conversation. And she said: ‘Oh really? Another city was just hit.’” Putin’s apparent unwillingness to negotiate seriously, combined with constant airstrikes on Ukrainian civilians, makes Trump’s overtures to Moscow look foolish.
At the same time, it’s less clear that Trump’s shift in attitude marks a significant shift in US policy. Take weapons shipments. It’s true that Trump ended the Pentagon-ordered moratorium on sending certain weapons to Ukraine and is instead allowing European states to buy these weapons—a shift that’s undoubtedly better for Kiev. But it’s also a return to the status quo prior to the moratorium, with US support dwindling as the money previously authorized by Congress during the last administration runs out.
Unless the administration seeks to pass another Ukraine supplemental—which still seems highly unlikely—US support for Ukraine remains in terminal decline, and the burden is passing to European states. It also remains unclear whether the stockpile issues that led the Pentagon to pause weapons shipments in the first place will impact the number of weapons Europeans can buy for Ukraine. Simply put, we’re running out of some weapons, and no presidential change of heart can fix that.
Trump’s threatened sanctions—described rather dramatically, if inaccurately, as “secondary tariffs”—are also dubious. The threat was simple enough: If Russia doesn’t find a peace agreement with Ukraine in the next 50 days, the United States will put sanctions on Russian trade, including oil and gas, with other countries. It sounds impressively threatening.
In practice, however, this would mean imposing draconian sanctions on Russia’s trading partners, which include both states like China that are major US trading partners, and US partners like India or Turkey. These restrictions would substantially complicate ongoing US tariff negotiations with these countries. And then there’s the fact that the president has been known to back away from brinksmanship of this kind as the deadline draws nearer. In short, the sanctions are unlikely to ever be implemented. Even financial markets don’t view the threat as credible: Oil prices actually fell after the president announced the 50-day ultimatum.
US policy towards Ukraine has not completely reversed. The more interesting question, however, is what all of this means for Trump’s attempt to stabilize and reopen relations with Russia more broadly. It’s now clear that the president’s initial hopes that the Russia-Ukraine war could be easily settled in a few months were unfounded. Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted as far back as April, noting to reporters that if peace isn’t possible in Ukraine, “then I think we're just going to move on.”
All the reasons, however, for shifting away from the Biden administration’s plan to fund an endless war in Ukraine—and for finding ways to talk to Russia about other issues—are still valid. The United States should not continue to pour huge resources into a losing war in Ukraine, draining our own military stockpiles in the process. The war in Ukraine cannot be the totality of US-Russian relations; we need to be able to talk to Russia about issues from strategic arms control to the Arctic.
The president should therefore be wary of letting hawks in his administration and on Capitol Hill bait him into further shifts toward supporting Ukraine. His desire to resolve the conflict and thaw relations with Russia is correct, even if it has proved difficult to achieve. And though this opening is now very firmly on ice, it is possible that future developments in the war—or increased openness from Moscow—could thaw the process in the future.