To his admirers, Donald Trump is playing 3- or 4-D chess with such aplomb that they can always identify a considered strategy behind his seemingly baffling foreign policy gambits. Usually, China is the bad guy that the US President is seeking to harm or isolate.
Hence, the theory goes that Trump has been pressurising Ukraine for over a year to settle with Russia and give up a large chunk of its cherished sovereign territory in order to drag President Vladimir Putin into America’s friendly orbit – thereby isolating China. Checkmate.
Or, in the case of Iran, that Trump decided to launch an all-out attack on the Islamic Republic, partly because the regime exports 90 per cent of its oil to China. Choking off this supply would damage the People’s Republic economically, giving the US another win.
There has been so much of this “winning” under Trump that Americans truly have grown “tired” of it, as indeed he promised they would for rather different reasons. There is no far-sighted master chess strategy at work.
The most consistent guide to Trump’s outlook on the world is that he loves dictators, has cosied up to Putin for years and has never been seriously hostile to China. He envies Xi Jinping, a man who rules a billion people with an “iron fist”, as he often says fondly.
Trump will be meeting Xi in Beijing on 14-15 May for what he likes to refer to as a “G2” summit. A sign that he is eager for a successful meeting is his determination to “settle” the Iran conflict before he reaches the Chinese capital. The summit was initially postponed when the war broke out, lest the US appear to be consorting with the “enemy” (China is Iran’s ally).
But there is another President warily eyeing the Beijing summit. Far from the US working with Russia to isolate China, Putin has reason to fear the opposite situation – the two superpowers leaving him in the dust. The Russian president is the faltering leader of a declining nation that has lost much of its superpower glow.
Trump will forgive Putin almost anything, including Moscow’s willingness to supply satellite imagery and the latest drone technology to Iran, enabling it to target US forces and allies in the Gulf. But he hates to be associated with losers.
No amount of military pageantry at the scaled-down May victory parade in Moscow this weekend or reduction in access to the internet and social media can disguise the growing level of popular disaffection with Russia’s president. It would be a mistake to think Trump hasn’t noticed.
In a televised interview with the pro-Maga Salem News Channel, Trump delivered a surprisingly friendly olive branch to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “I like Zelensky, I’ve always gotten along with him, other than the one moment in the White House, when I thought he was a little aggressive on his behalf.”
The message Zelenksy delivered in February last year, which led him to be monstered by Trump and Vice President JD Vance in the Oval Office, was that Putin would flatter and string them along but was not serious about peace. Given the difficulty Trump has had settling the Ukraine war on “day one”, this truth is now self-evident.
At best, Russia is clinging on to junior superpower status based on its nuclear weapons stocks after so many setbacks in Ukraine – a war, or rather a “special military operation”, that has now lasted longer than the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 against the Nazis, at a cost of over one million casualties. This is leading Trump to sour on Putin.
Zelensky suggested this week that US peace envoys Steve Witkoff (a frequent Moscow visitor but thus far a no-show in Kyiv) and Jared Kushner may visit Ukraine soon in late spring or early summer. There are not high hopes of a breakthrough but the two Middle East peace negotiators will have been hearing how helpful Ukraine’s experience in countering Iranian drones has been to US allies in the Gulf.
The Ukrainian leader has just been visiting troops on the front line while Putin has allegedly spent weeks hiding out in his palatial bunker, fearing assassination attempts or a coup, according to a CNN story on a leaked European intelligence report (Russia denies this).
Trump has also learned from the drubbing handed out to Maga fan-favourite Viktor Orbán in last month’s Hungarian elections that Putin’s axis of influence is shrinking. This hasn’t enhanced Vance’s reputation vis-à-vis his likely 2028 presidential rival, Marco Rubio (long hostile to Russia), after Vance invested a lot of political capital in Orban’s success.
There is no doubt it would stick in Trump’s craw to concede anything to Ukraine. For instance, he keeps bristling at the idea that the US could learn anything about drones from Ukraine. But he does not want to back the wrong horse.
Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting
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