Trump Ups the Pressure on Putin

As I mentioned on Prophecy Today last week, President Trump has found a novel way of increasing pressure on Putin, supporting Ukraine with more weapons, and getting the Euros to pay for it.

That’s called a trifecta, and it goes like this. The Pentagon determines what weapons the Ukrainians need — right now, it’s Patriot missile batteries. We then sell them to the Germans or the Poles or some other NATO country, and they in turn deliver them to the Ukes.

This gets the US taxpayer off the hook, and ensures that the Euros have more skin in the game.

The problem, of course, is that many of the weapons the Ukrainians need are in very short supply. Deliveries to the US Army are behind, Taiwan is pressing us for more, and the Swiss are going to have to wait for their Patriots — due from Raytheon next year — for several more years to come.

Trump has spent the past six months doing everything he can think of to get Putin to the negotiating table, just to agree to a 30-day ceasefire.

So now he is pivoting to the strategy he set out during the presidential campaign last year, not just increasing weapons supplies to Ukraine but threatening countries that buy Russian oil — mostly China, India, and Brazil — with 500% tariffs if they don’t sever those ties.

And he has given Putin 50 days to come to the table. That deadline expires on September 2.

Something tells me Putin is smarter than the mullahs in Tehran, who Trump gave 60 days to negotiate an end to their nuclear weapons program. When they brushed him off, Trump gave Israel the green light to start bombing — which they did on Day 61.

Asked by a White House reporter when he announced the deadline earlier in the week if he was “done” with Putin, the president responded:

“No, I’m not done. I’m disappointed in him, but I’m not done with him. I thought we had a deal done four times, and then you go home, and you see he just attacked a nursing home or something in Kyiv.”

A little advice for Vlad: you don’t want to disappoint this president.

Meanwhile, the French and the Brits have signed a piece of paper committing them to “deepen their nuclear cooperation and coordination.”

According to my friend Dov Zhakeim, who was the Pentagon Comptroller during Bush 43, Macron and Keir Starmer announced that “a U.K.-France Nuclear Steering Group will be established to provide political direction for this work. It will … coordinate across nuclear policy, capabilities, and operations.”

Does that mean they are decoupling their nuclear capabilities from the US and NATO? Not exactly. But it does mean that Putin is going to have to think twice before he starts nuclear saber rattling again, as he has done several times during the Ukraine “special military operation.”

As Zakheim points out, this is not the first time the French and the Brits have pledged closer nuclear weapons cooperation. And neither country would today possess advanced nuclear weapons without the United States.

While it’s common knowledge that the Brits have purchased US-made submarine-launched ballistic missiles and subcontracted their weapons program from the U.S., the French nuclear debt to the United States is less well-known.

When I was a defense correspondent in Paris in the 1980s and early 1990s, I got to know a French defense official named Henri Conze, who ended his career as the Délégué Générale pour l’Armament, in charge of all French weapons design, procurement, and foreign sales.

In his youth, Conze had been posted to the United States, where in the 1960s he stole our nuclear secrets.

Later, he was instrumental in crafting a secret deal between President Pompidou and President Nixon in 1972 that established a back channel between US nuclear weapons labs and French nuclear weapons designers.

As he and others – including US weapons designers — described it to me, it was known as the Game of The Ten Questions. When the French faced a roadblock in developing their own thermonuclear warheads they would go to their American counterparts and ask if they should take the fork to the left or to the one to the right.

And the Americans always steered them in the right direction. It shaved years off of French nuclear weapons development, especially their submarine-based warheads.

In 1996, this secret nuclear cooperation took an unexpected turn when the French and the US signed another secret agreement to jointly develop and build two gigantic laser fusion colliders.

The one at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which I toured, is called the National Ignition Facility. The French duplicate quietly began operating in 2008 in Bordeaux. They are the size of a sports stadium, and can contain three football fields inside.

I write about this top-secret nuclear cooperation between the US and France in my 2004 best-seller, The French Betrayal of America.

I discuss these topics, as well as the latest developments in Iran and China in this week’s Prophecy Today Weekend. These podcasts complement and often expand on what I write here.

As always, you can listen live at 1 PM on Saturday in the Jacksonville, Florida area on 104.9 FM or 550 AM or by using the Jacksonville Way Radio app. You can listen to the podcast later here.

Yours in freedom.

©2025 Kenneth R. Timmerman. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Moscow Times: The Kremlin’s Political Influence In Iran, And In The Middle East As A Whole, Is Reaching Zero

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Ken Timmerman’s 14th book of non-fiction, THE IRAN HOUSE: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, can be ordered by clicking here or by viewing my author’s page, here. 

Raising Olives in Provence, can be ordered by clicking here.

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