Trump looks to be caving in to Putin, but the deal is not yet done
It came as no surprise to anyone who followed US politics on Sky News in Australia and/or Fox News in the US when Donald J. Trump won the presidential election in November 2024. Or that the Republicans won control of the Senate and kept their majority in the House of Representatives. Or that Trump won the popular vote.
The evidence suggests most Americans are sick of the left-wing/progressive ethos (some call it “woke”) that prevailed throughout the land in recent years.
However, the atmosphere changed on Thursday morning. Many political leaders possess a strain of narcissism. Trump has it in spades. How else to explain his post on X dated February 20 in which he referred to himself in the third person as “TRUMP”.
Trump described Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “modestly successful comedian” who decided “to go into a war that couldn’t be won” and “never had to start”. The implication being that Ukraine started the hostilities against Russia on February 24, 2022. It also overlooked the fact that Russia conquered Crimea in Ukraine in 2014.
Which suggests that Trump’s approach to diplomacy with respect to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aims in Eastern Europe goes something like this. First step: ask Putin what he wants. Second step: if possible, give it to him.
The Wall Street Journal is one of the few parts of the mainstream American media that broadly supports Trump and the Republican Party. This week the paper’s editorial board stated “global politics can be an ugly business, but the looming rehabilitation of Vladimir Putin is especially hard to take”.
The board pointed out that in 2022, Putin “started the biggest land war in Europe since Hitler, and his ‘special military operation’ has killed or maimed hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians”.
Putin’s initial war aims failed. Ukraine was not conquered within days or even weeks. The Russian air force and navy have performed poorly and Putin had to secure ground troops from North Korean communist dictator Kim Jong-un to aid the Russian army. What’s more, the Russian economy has been devastated. Yet Trump is willing to hear from Putin before he consults with Zelensky.
It’s impossible to say what the future may be. Trump is correct in calling on European nations to spend more on defence and take responsibility for the security of their region. Poland and the Baltic states, which until some three decades ago were controlled directly or indirectly by the Soviet Union, are pulling their weight. But many leaders in Western Europe like getting their security on the cheap, via the US.
The evidence suggests that Trump remains popular in the US. Moreover, the idea that the US is in constitutional crisis is mere hyperbole. However, Trump’s foreign policy in Europe is a concern.
If Putin is allowed to prevail over Ukraine, he and his cronies are unlikely to cease Russia’s demands to conquer land beyond its borders that were determined after the collapse of European communism. As British historian Antony Beevor has argued, “we should always distrust historical parables, especially those with World War II”. But he says: “Donald Trump’s overture to Vladimir Putin sounds like a terrifying echo of the betrayal of Czechoslovakia in 1938.”
Who knows, Trump may have in mind what may be called “a cunning plan”.
Meanwhile, in Australia on Thursday it was Clive Palmer who was blowing his own trumpet. The former Queensland businessman held the seat of Fairfax for three years from 2013 as a member of the Palmer United Party. He subsequently headed the United Australia Party. It appears Palmer has risen from the (political) dead once again. Newspapers have carried an advertisement that contained a photo of Palmer over the caption “Chairman, Trumpet of Patriots”. It declared: “A Message To All Australians From The Trumpet of Patriots And The Next Prime Minister.”
Spoiler alert: According to Palmer, the next prime minister is the little known Suellen Wrightson. She maintains that “The Trumpet of Patriots believes in many of the same commonsense policies as President Trump in the US”.
In recent years Palmer has spent a large amount of money to achieve political representation in Australian politics but with very limited success. It’s unclear what impact, if any, his new party will have on the election.
One likely benefit of the emergence of the Trumpet of Patriots is that it will help to reduce the claims by commentators hostile to Peter Dutton that he will “do a Trump” to get elected and if he happens to become prime minister.
Writing in Nine newspapers on February 6, Niki Savva claimed the Opposition Leader was “relishing playing his role of a lifetime as Little Sir Echo”.
Savva is just one of a number of Dutton antagonists among Canberra-based journalists.
American and Australian politics are quite different. It may suit a fringe political player such as Palmer to imitate Trump. But Dutton is smart enough to know the forthcoming election will be determined in Australia on Australian issues. Moreover, on matters such as border protection, Dutton as minister of immigration in the Abbott government was focused on unlawful arrivals well before Trump first became president.
Trump is an American nationalist. He is not the first president to be wary of the US entering European wars. This was true of Woodrow Wilson in 1914 and Franklin Roosevelt in 1939. Eventually the US entered both conflicts. So far Trump looks like he is caving in to Putin – but, in Trumpian language, the deal is not yet done.
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