President Donald Trump's new posture against Vladimir Putin isn't because he's had a genuine change of heart in favor of defending Ukraine, but because the Russian leader personally hurt his feelings, Jonathan Lemire wrote for The Atlantic in an analysis published Monday.
This follows Trump announcing, to great fanfare and a bit of ridicule, that Russia will have 50 days to agree to a peace deal in their invasion of Ukraine, or face 100 percent tariffs on their goods in the United States.
"Trump did not develop a new fondness for Ukraine or its president, Volodymyr Zelensky. He did not abruptly become a believer in the traditional transatlantic alliances prized by his predecessors as a counterweight to Moscow. Rather, Trump got insulted," wrote Lemire. "By ignoring Trump’s pleas to end the war and instead ratcheting up the fighting, Putin has made Trump look like the junior partner in the relationship. The Russian leader has 'really overplayed his hand,' one of the officials told me. 'The president has given him chance after chance, but enough is enough.'"
Trump, who bragged repeatedly that he could end the conflict on his first day in office, has spent months trying to broker peace deals between Russia and Ukraine, which mostly resulted in Russia bombing civilian targets and then walking away from the table.
"In recent weeks, Trump has grown angrier with Putin and ended a brief pause by the Pentagon in sending weapons to Ukraine," wrote Lemire. At the same time, Zelensky "has worked on repairing his relationship with Trump and agreed to a U.S. cease-fire proposal. In Trump’s own words, Putin began 'tapping him along' by spurning that same deal while unleashing some of the biggest bombardments of the war. Trump and Putin have spoken a half dozen times in the past six months, and Trump has grown steadily more frustrated, the four people told me. He told advisers this spring that he was beginning to think Putin didn’t want the war to end, an assessment that U.S. intelligence agencies reached more than a year ago."
According to insiders, Trump is still afraid that retaliation against Russia on this scale will destabilize global energy markets. For that reason, he hasn't yet endorsed a bipartisan bill, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), that would impose new sanctions on Russia and a tariff of 500 percent on any country that trades freely with them.
"Trump, as is his custom, took questions in the Oval Office from reporters, and grew visibly more frustrated when repeatedly pressed on the state of the conflict," Lemire noted in conclusion. "Finally, when asked what he would do if Putin escalated the violence further, Trump refused to answer — and, perhaps tellingly, snapped at the reporter. 'Don’t ask me a question like that.'"
