| Hello from France,
After a desultory effort to bring peace to Ukraine, is Donald Trump about to walk away? On Friday Mr Trump, asked about the prospects of a truce, moaned that if a deal would not come quickly, then “we’re going to just take a pass”. Marco Rubio has said America has “other priorities” and will turn to focus on them, perhaps within weeks, if there’s no progress. So much for the idea that the president could snap his fingers and bring peace. He neither wants to be bogged down by fiddly matters of ending a war, nor provide the military resources to help Ukraine to fight it. I suspect it is dawning on him, at last, that his leverage over Vladimir Putin is far less than he imagined. It seems clear, too, that his attention span is miserably short.
The trouble is that in geopolitics quitting can be as costly as acting. Mr Trump has demonstrated this himself: cutting off an ally while failing to force a foe to compromise sends a clear signal that America is weak. A prime example is the scrambled exit of American forces from Afghanistan in 2021. That defeat for the superpower seemed to signal that it was unwilling to project effective power at great distances. That surely encouraged Mr Putin to get on with his full-scale invasion of Ukraine just a few months later.
Taking “a pass” on ceasefire efforts is not the same as giving up on a real-estate deal. It would surely have big consequences. Here’s one thought: Xi Jinping will be watching closely, to see what sort of resolve and patience Mr Trump really has, or whether he’s only interested in the sugar-high moments of high drama. This matters for Mr Xi’s efforts to manage the trade war with America, and potentially for other clashes, such as over Taiwan.
Could something yet be salvaged from all of this? Russia and Ukraine did agree to “stop all military activity” for 30 hours over the Easter weekend. (But note that there have previously been other, brief, attempts at short truces.) Ukraine, at least, has said it is willing to extend that to 30 days if Russia will do so. At the same time, however, some fighting continued at the weekend. My judgment is that Russia, despite its enormous loss of soldiers, increasingly feels emboldened in Ukraine. It is making real, if modest, gains on the battlefield. Mr Trump, in contrast, has shown only that he is able to put the squeeze on Ukraine, without—so far—threatening any serious consequences for Mr Putin.
Thanks to everyone who wrote in following last week’s newsletter. I asked whether you thought a ceasefire in Ukraine was likely to happen. Art L. Morin’s message summed it up best. “A ceasefire in Ukraine is on the cards,” he writes. “We just need to find the cards.” See you next Sunday. |
