Is Donald Trump being outfoxed by Vladimir Putin?

Is Donald Trump playing four dimensional chess over Ukraine, or is he being outfoxed by Vladimir Putin?

Donald Trump’s friends and admirers say he is playing four dimensional chess over Ukraine, while everyone else is playing checkers, which is why no-one can understand him, but his purposes are masterly.

That’s a pretty feeble defence of what are simply indefensible, even despicable, comments from Trump about Ukraine.

Even long-time Trump admirers like Britain’s former prime minister Boris Johnson have pointed out that to claim, as Trump has quite bizarrely done, that Ukraine started the war with Russia is like claiming that America attacked Japan to kick off the Pacific war in World War II.

There is no ambiguity here, no shade of gray. Trump’s words are simply flatly untrue.

Similarly, it’s absurd to describe Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky as a dictator. He can be a bit rough on domestic political opponents. But he is Ukraine’s democratically elected leader. Ukraine has not tried to hold an election while waging a war. Britain made exactly the same decision in World War II. There was no British election between 1935 and 1945. Winston Churchill, Britain’s war time leader, who unlike Zelensky had not even won an election, was surely no dictator.

Further, Trump’s claim that Zelensky enjoys a paltry 4 per cent approval rating is also, let’s not beat about the bush, a ridiculous lie.

Trump is not stupid. So why has he said all this? Has he just fallen for Vladimir Putin’s propaganda?

Sophisticated Americans who have some general sympathy for Trump hold that he is administering shock treatment to Europe. Trump believes that Western Europe, with a substantially bigger economy than the US itself, is well and truly rich enough to provide the military capability to deter and if necessary defeat Putin’s Russia.

Trump doesn’t see why America needs to keep paying the bills, providing the hardware, and if necessary risking war with Russia. Europe has had decades of warning but has never stirred itself to do anything of real consequence militarily for the last 30 or 35 years, since the end of the Cold War.

It abolished military capabilities and never replaced them, just like Australia, though we are in fact much worse than Europe.

People who know Trump think he is also trying to entice Putin into serious negotiation. If Putin is not serious in negotiations, then Trump could just as easily reverse himself and go hard, economically at least, against Russia, while supplying Ukraine with more weapons.

Similarly, there is no way Trump will want to leave a legacy of having been humiliated, or completely outfoxed, by Putin. There’s a lot of negotiation on all this still to go. We don’t know where Trump will land, or even where he calculates he could land.

But those are all suppositions, ifs and buts. In the simple, plain English meaning of Trump’s words, they were somewhere between lies and despicable insults directed at a gallant ally.

Trump has every right to rail against feckless Europeans who talk big but abolish their military capabilities.

Ukraine is not like that. It’s fighting for its life. It’s fighting with great gallantry and heroism. It has not asked the United States to commit one soldier to its defence. It’s only asked that the West supply it with weapons.

It’s perfectly reasonable for Trump to want to bring this hideous war to an end. It’s not reasonable to insult an ally and tell lies about it.

There is a severe cost to Trump’s practice of crafting every statement as a negotiating position which can be modified, given up, reversed, whatever. The danger is that if Trump ever wants to say something of genuine and lasting strategic significance, everyone will always and automatically regard it as just another negotiating position.

The strategic weight of the word of the president of the United States was once a powerful and positive factor in the strategic environment. Trump is trashing the credibility of his own words. And he’s insulting people who have given their lives for freedom.

You don’t get the good Trump, so they say, without the bad Trump. There’s still a strong case that Trump is a net positive. But if this abuse of an ally is four dimensional chess, let’s bring back the chequered board with its regular squares and reliable pieces. Not everything can be a pawn sacrifice by the king.

Greg Sheridan travelled to London as a guest of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.