Though endlessly critical of his predecessor, President Trump has adopted a Ukraine strategy similar to that of former President Joe Biden: Arm the Ukrainians to the teeth and threaten Russian President Vladimir Putin with even more sanctions if he does not agree to a peace deal.
Some of Trump’s closest domestic allies are already warning that the “expanded American role in the Ukraine War” will be “quite shocking” to the America First voters who returned him to the Oval Office.
But the same president who vowed to end the war in 24 hours has lost patience with Putin after six months. “He’s fooled a lot of people,” Trump said of the Russian leader. “He fooled Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden. He didn’t fool me.” Seated in the Oval Office next to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, the president offered a glimpse into the negotiation process and his seemingly shifting mood on the war.
“I felt we had a deal about four times,” Trump admitted. “But it just kept going on and on.”
So Trump will sell weapons to NATO to supply Ukraine, and if Russia does not yield in 50 days, Trump promises another 100% tariff on all Russian goods.
Critics accused Trump of dawdling out of hubris before arriving at the right answer for the wrong reasons. “President Trump couldn’t understand the utility of or stakes around arming Ukraine until he felt personally wronged by Putin,” said Ned Price, a spokesman for the State Department during the previous administration. “One helluva learning curve,” a former Biden White House official said of the perception that Trump was moving in a pro-Ukrainian direction, “and an expensive one too.”
A third former Biden official described the new strategy as different but similar to the former president’s Ukraine strategy, just with “a bit of an extra step.” And the twist in question is a big, Trumpian one.
Unlike Biden, the Trump administration will not send military aid directly to Ukraine. Instead, NATO allies will purchase weapons from the U.S. and then funnel them to the front lines, a development that comes in the weeks after those European nations finally agreed to meet Trump’s separate demand that they spend at least 5% of their annual GDP on defense within the next decade.
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Author: Ruth King
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