Now, deep into what might be called his anecdote, Donald Trump couldn’t resist offering his usual repertoire of supposedly entertaining and inspirational stories to a stunned captive audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Then, just hours later, he made a surprise U-turn and dropped his latest tariff threat against Europe altogether after reaching a “future agreement framework” with NATO. We wonder if all the drama was worth it.
In any case, the president found time in his lengthy speech to mention the war in Ukraine – a real and bloody conflict in stark contrast to the improbable one in Greenland. Specifically, the president referred to the tens of thousands of soldiers who are still being slaughtered every week as Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” nears the end of its fourth year.
There has certainly been no slowdown in Russia’s missile and drone attacks on civilians, now targeting Kiev and electricity generation as temperatures drop well below freezing. Lack of electricity affects everything – lighting, water supplies, industry and transport, as well as heating.
It is nothing less than state terrorism, orchestrated by the Kremlin because the progress of undertrained and ill-equipped troops on the battlefield remains woefully slow. Europe’s worst interstate conflict since World War II continues, as brutal as ever. It is not an ideal backdrop for a renewed White House peace effort.
Trump said he hoped to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky for talks, even though the Ukrainian leader left Davos to return to Kiev earlier in the week, disappointed by the latest developments in US foreign policy. Mr. Zelensky was and is right to be skeptical.
Donald Trump appears to insist that neither Ukraine nor Russia want to end the fighting (AFP/Getty)
Despite Ukraine agreeing to a U.S. cease-fire proposal last March, President Putin has found every reason to continue fighting and reject any peace deal that does not reward Russia with huge swaths of Ukrainian territory it has yet to conquer — even one that has been approved by the White House. However, Mr Trump seems to insist that neither side is serious about ending the fighting and that they are taking turns rejecting a ceasefire, which is simply not true.
For Putin, there has always been an excuse to reject a deal, which often involves a long speech about why Ukraine isn’t even a real nation with its own culture. The Russians believe that Ukraine should be theirs with almost the same fervor that Mr. Trump believes that Greenland belongs to America. It seems unlikely that anything Mr. Trump has said or done in recent days has changed that position.
However, President Trump’s peace envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are off to Moscow for more talks on advancing the US peace plan, but with little expectation of any sudden breakthroughs.
After all, it didn’t happen at the Alaska summit last August, when Trump might have expected a reward for so publicly and generously bringing President Putin in from the cold. President Trump, testing the outer limits of satire, even invited Putin, accused of being a war criminal, to join the Gaza peace council, a Trump vanity project. To be fair, he also asked President Zelensky to join the new body, but Zelensky refused, no doubt a depressing sign of how gullible and out of touch Mr Trump can be with the Kremlin.
President Trump says Ukraine and Russia would be “fools” not to sign his peace deal. However, he fails to register how much more positive and accommodating the Ukrainian side has been and, more and more seriously, how much pressure on President Putin would push him to end the war he started. Instead, Putin is consistently rewarded for his obstinacy, even as Trump occasionally expresses some exasperation with him.
As it stands, and without trying very hard, Putin is succeeding where every previous Russian and Soviet leader has failed, and is pursuing the unraveling of NATO in a manner and speed that is hard to believe.
The US national security strategy, published in November, painted Europe as a greater threat than Russia to US interests, and the theme of “wiping out civilization” was taken up again by Trump at Davos. While NATO has managed to hold together under the strain of the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and throughout the decades of the Cold War, Mr Trump has unquestionably torn it apart.
If he had time to watch President Trump’s speech, Putin will surely be pleased to hear an American president say that NATO has done nothing for the US and that he does not believe that the Europeans and Canadians would support the US if it asked for assistance (contrary, of course, to the painful experience after 9/11).
The late reversal is as welcome as it is abrupt, but Trump has nevertheless shown himself willing to shake this Western alliance to its foundations. Quite a legacy for an American president, that.