Once again, Trump exposed his weakness and ‘got played’ by Putin
On the flight to Alaska, President Trump declared that if he did not secure a cease-fire in Ukraine during talks with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, “I’m not going to be happy,” and there would be “severe consequences.”
Just hours later, he got back on Air Force One and departed Alaska without the cease-fire he deemed so critical. Yet he had imposed no consequences, and had pronounced himself so happy with how things went with Mr. Putin that he said “the meeting was a 10.”
Even in the annals of Mr. Trump’s erratic presidency, the Anchorage meeting with Mr. Putin now stands out as a reversal of historic proportions. Mr. Trump abandoned the main goal he brought to his subarctic summit and, as he revealed on Saturday, would no longer even pursue an immediate cease-fire. Instead, he bowed to Mr. Putin’s preferred approach of negotiating a broader peace agreement requiring Ukraine to give up territory.
The net effect was to give Mr. Putin a free pass to continue his war against his neighbor indefinitely without further penalty, pending time-consuming negotiations for a more sweeping deal that appears elusive at best. Instead of a halt to the slaughter — “I’m in this to stop the killing,” Mr. Trump had said on the way to Alaska — the president left Anchorage with pictures of him and Mr. Putin joshing on a red carpet and in the presidential limousine known as the Beast.
“He got played again,” said Ivo Daalder, who was ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama. “For all the promises of a cease-fire, of severe economic consequences, of being disappointed, it took two minutes on the red carpet and 10 minutes in the Beast for Putin to play Trump again. What a sad spectacle.”
Mr. Trump’s allies focused on his plans to convene a three-way meeting with Mr. Putin and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. “Let me tell you, I’ve never been more hopeful this war can end honorably and justly than I am right now,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a leading hawk on the Ukraine war, said on Fox News Friday night.
The cease-fire that Mr. Trump gave up in Alaska had been so important to him last month that he threatened tough new economic sanctions if Russia did not pause the war within 50 days. Then he moved the deadline up to last Friday. Now there is no cease-fire, no deadline and no sanctions plan. [Continue reading…]