On the War in Europe, Trump Has Been ‘Tapping’ the American People Along

By Andrew McCarthy

Saturday, May 24, 2025

 

President Trump has said that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin may just be “tapping me along” on negotiations over ending the war in Ukraine. But this isn’t really true. While Trump may not be a very stable genius, he is no idiot.

 

He is, however, a bluffer — in this case, not a very good bluffer. The president never had a plan, and neither of the combatants ever believed he did. That is, the bluff was on us, not them. Trump hasn’t been tapped along because Putin has never retreated from his annexation ends or his savage means. Trump has been tapping the American people along since the early days of the 2024 election campaign, claiming he knew how to end the war instantly but that he couldn’t say publicly what his plan was. He didn’t have a plan. I don’t feel especially deceived because it was always arrant nonsense. But there’s a lot of that wafting around, which is a real problem since the effectiveness of a president on many matters of consequence hinges on credibility.

 

Predictably, the president’s personal diplomacy with “Vladimir” — a futile two-hour jaw-jaw on the phone Monday — got nowhere. Putin is not a congressional Republican. He doesn’t lie awake at night worrying about what might be said about him on Truth Social tomorrow if he doesn’t submit to the next impulsive careen from blandishment to browbeating. He doesn’t hang on Trump’s every word or worry about blowing off peace negotiations the White House has talked up. Trump can’t move Putin without taking significant steps that carry real risks of further entanglement in a war Trump personally wants no part of — regardless of America’s strong interest in aiding Ukraine to bleed Putin’s Russia, much the way Reagan aided the Afghan mujahideen to bleed Soviet Russia.

 

To the extent Trump’s bluff about ending the war in 24 hours was remotely plausible, it could only have been as a plan to induce Ukrainian surrender; that was not going to happen and has never been in the power of an American president to dictate. Besides that, Putin has never been the one pushing for the end of the war. It is Trump, not Putin, who shifts. It is Trump, not Putin, who complains that the killing is too much. It is Trump, not Putin, who craves a cease-fire.

 

As there has never been a Trump plan, the president has reverted to his mantra about how the war is stupid and would never have happened if he had been president.

 

There is nothing stupid about the war. Russia wants to swallow Ukraine, and Ukraine wants to survive. The former is evil but strategic, the latter is desperate but determined. To describe what’s happening as stupid is a tantrum, not an analysis.

 

As for the war never having started had Trump been in power, the president never mentions that Putin waged a low-thrum war of gradual conquest on the Ukrainian border throughout his first term — the same war Putin has been waging since Obama’s presidency, when he also took Crimea (which, of course, followed the annexations in Georgia that Putin executed during the Bush-43 presidency). Indeed, you may recall that Trump’s first impeachment stemmed from his withholding of military support from Ukraine — support that was congressionally authorized precisely because Russia was waging a war of aggression. Trump liked to brag that he supplied Ukrainians with lethal force while Obama sent them blankets. Well, yes, and rightly so. But the occasion for supplying weapons was Russia’s ongoing combat operations. Trump may have conned himself into believing that he and Putin were a mutual admiration society, but Putin never regarded Trump’s presidency as a reason to abandon revanchism and armed aggression against his neighbor.

 

The tapping you’ve heard is Trump: dressing down Zelensky, pleading with Putin, hoping something would pop to remove from view a conflict that exhibits his indecisiveness, his incapacity to arrive at an interest-driven strategy and stick to it. Putin, to the contrary, has a plan from which he has never wavered: He wants all of Ukraine, but — unlike Trump — he has plenty of time and will keep taking that country in chunks if necessary. It is Trump who proposes that maybe this or that concession — always by Ukraine — could produce a cease-fire. Not real peace; just a time-out that the president can spin for a while as a Nobel-worthy achievement while Putin rests and rearms for the next round. Meantime, Putin keeps fighting. The concerns over bloodshed that Trump claims to be animated by do not move Putin at all. It is Trump who moves; Putin stays his barbarous course.

 

I’ve opined that Russia’s retreat in humiliation as a badly damaged power is a much higher American priority than the president’s insistence that the killing must stop. Ukrainians are fighting for their country, and we should help them, within reason, as long as they are determined to keep fighting. Like Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky has higher priorities than stopping the killing.

 

To summarize, Trump’s personal priority is not America’s highest national interest, nor is it the highest interest of either combatant. Vital strategic interests and existential interests are why countries fight wars, notwithstanding their awareness that lots of killing and dying are sure to result.

 

While I can’t know what Trump believes (and I think he believes different, even contradictory things at different times), I suspect that he doesn’t like Ukraine, that he is mindful of Ukraine’s being made a cause célèbre by his political foes in the United States and Europe, and that he craves the plaudits won by Presidents Clinton and Obama for being perceived as peacemakers — mostly by the left and for no actual achievement of peace. If I’m right, then there is no strategy; there are only inchoate feelings and impulses.

 

To my mind, it’s a pointless exercise to try to tease out a Trump strategy. To invoke the shopworn metaphor, the president is not playing eight-dimensional chess.

 

On that score, he is certainly not emulating the Nixonian approach of studied unpredictability: the effort to convince rivals that the U.S. president might even be a little crazy, the better to induce them to accept outcomes that president had methodically thought through. Sure, Trump may think he is emulating Nixon, but Putin, a trained Soviet intelligence officer and a ruthless despot, is under no such illusion. Nixon was a serious foreign-policy thinker and committed anti-communist who had tens of thousands of boots on the ground in Vietnam, and who demonstrated his willingness to step up bombings and invade Laos and Cambodia, despite international outcry — and through it all, Nixon was pursuing a plan to set the table for a favorable withdrawal (it didn’t work out, but there was a deliberate plan). Nixon also confronted the Soviet Union in the Middle East by arming Israel sufficiently to reverse the gains made by Moscow’s Arab clients at the start of the Yom Kippur War — while simultaneously pursuing a plan to restrain Israel in order to pry Egypt out of the Soviet orbit (a plan that eventually paid dividends).

 

Trump, by contrast . . . wants the killing to stop. Putin’s not too worried about ignoring that.

 

The United States could make life impossible for Putin if a president chose to do so. Presidents during Putin’s reign have chosen not to do so, each deliriously confident he alone possessed the secret sauce that would make Putin a “strategic partner,” “reset” relations with him, and forge collaborations with him to dismantle Iran’s nuclear weapons programs. All the while, Putin remained a murderous dictator and committed enemy of the United States, in the Soviet mold.

 

Still, the stubborn facts remain: The United States is a superpower and Russia is a sickly, shrinking basket-case country with an economy smaller than Brazil’s — an economy 15 times smaller than ours — run by a mafia regime. Yes, it has lots of nuclear weapons, somewhere between 4,300 and 5,600 depending on whether old nukes slated to be dismantled are counted. But Putin isn’t going to start a nuclear war. His backers are not millenarian jihadists; they’re crooks who need to keep the gravy train going, and they’d rid themselves of Putin if he became an obstacle rather than a facilitator of that arrangement. Plus, Putin has amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune, diverted from his country’s wealth and salted away through various nominees and offshore accounts. Armageddon is not in the plans of such a man, however much daydreaming he does about a Soviet revival.

 

The incumbent president is not interested in pressing America’s overwhelming advantages against Putin. For all the nationalist blather, Trump is more of a personalist. Europe may be important to the United States, but it is not important to Trump. He has convinced his devoted base, and maybe himself, that the war on the continent, like other global crises, can be resolved through the sheer force of his own persona, the occasional tariff, and his capacity to forge one-on-one relationships with despots, shorn of such complications as morality, justice, American tradition, and international norms. Good luck with that.

 

Taking meaningful action against Putin would have downside risks, not least that Trump would be blamed for intensifying a “forever war.” Better to have deals, deals, deals. Trump thinks the war is stupid because he figures we could otherwise be doing deals with Putin and deals with Ukraine. He can’t get over himself enough to grasp that they are animated by different beliefs and will never see it his way.

 

Easier to pronounce everyone an imbecile, blame the war on Zelensky and Biden (and the autopen), and plead “Vladimir, STOP!” Or maybe just wash his hands of the whole mess — just what Vladimir needs to GO.