As America was observing Memorial Day, Russia launched its largest missile and drone attack of the three-year-old war on Kiev and other Ukrainian cities. Scores of men, women and children were killed, adding to the more than 600 civilian deaths that have occurred since the beginning of the year, despite President Trump’s promise to end the war in a day.
The deliberate targeting of civilians in schools, playgrounds and hospitals adds to the long list of Vladimir Putin’s war crimes, none of which has motivated Trump to escalate either sanctions on Russia and the countries aiding its aggression or to augment and hasten the supply of effective weaponry to Ukraine. By contrast, when Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky hesitated before accepting Trump’s ultimatum on a one-sided mineral-rights deal without a security guarantee, Trump immediately suspended intelligence and arms support to Ukraine (since partially restored).
Trump has failed to follow through on any of his warnings to Russia, including its latest aerial attack on Ukraine’s population and infrastructure. Instead, he has gone from warning Putin weeks ago, “Vladimir, STOP!” to now declaring the Russian ruler “has gone absolutely CRAZY.” Trump’s latest declaration either serves to excuse himself for vastly misjudging a man he often claims to know well, and greatly admires, or, far less plausibly, to plead that Putin has somehow changed his nature.
Trump is not the first U.S. president to claim to have been deceived by Putin and Russia. George W. Bush said he had peered into Putin’s eyes and gotten “a sense of his soul.” Even before Putin, Jimmy Carter said the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan changed his opinion of Russia “more drastically in the last week than even the previous two and a half years.”
The application of Richard Nixon’s “madman” theory, which he used to intimidate potential adversaries by making them think him illogical and volatile, can serve as a pretext for Trump’s lack of action — not only for depredations Putin has already committed but to excuse any future outrages. Putin has cleverly fed those fears with his references to the use of nuclear weapons.
Like Joe Biden before him, Trump fears provoking World War III more than Putin supposedly does, and so he is prepared to back down in a confrontation with a seemingly irrational adversary. In fact, Putin has shown no sign of suicidal tendencies. Rather, his provocative and escalatory behavior is quite rational, carried out with the confidence that “responsible” leaders in Washington — Barack Obama, Biden, Trump — will always blink first to prevent the situation from getting out of control.
Never has an American president so abjectly subordinated himself to a foreign leader — a proclaimed enemy of the U.S., no less — and been so publicly humiliated as has been the dynamic between Trump and Putin. Explanations for Trump’s bizarrely un-American behavior range from the simplistically psychological (his fascination with the world’s dictators) to the dangerously sinister “Russian asset” theory, which posits that Putin has some nefarious hold on him through bribery or blackmail.
That would certainly explain their kabuki dance on the war, where Putin pretends to want peace as he proceeds with his Ukraine demolition project while Trump pretends to care. If the latter explanation is closer to the truth than that Trump is entirely out of his depth and is simply overwhelmed by Putin’s machinations, then the entire impetus of “making America great again” is a gigantic subversive smokescreen for the opposite objective: diminishing America’s strategic and moral leadership role in the world.
Neither gross incompetence nor treasonous intent would be a cause for hope.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies, a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute and member of the advisory board of The Vandenberg Coalition.
