In Praise of Trumpy Boredom

Published exclusively on Substack

Photo: Zelensky, Telegram

In Praise of Trumpy Boredom

Donald Trump, his admirers are fond of saying, always knows exactly what he is doing and he always gets results. So it was that they could greet his unexpected about-face on Tuesday, on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York. Trump had just met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a man he has called a dictator, blamed for starting a war that his adversary started, and otherwise treated as a member of the household staff suspected of stealing.

Asked by a reporter if Trump believed NATO should shoot down Russian jets that violate allied airspace – this is something Russian jets have long done but are now doing more frequently and at longer intervals – Trump replied in the affirmative. Zelensky looked shocked and ecstatic. As it happened, this was an appetizer to the feast that awaited. Taking to his favored communication platform of social media a few hours later, Trump let loose the following pronouncement:

“After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation and, after seeing the Economic trouble it is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form. With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option. Why not? Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win. This is not distinguishing Russia. In fact, it is very much making them look like ‘a paper tiger.’”

Defining a Ukrainian victory as the restoration of 1991 borders, including Crimea, is something Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden never did. No doubt that was part of the fun in posting what looked like a very bullish assessment of Ukraine’s military prospects, something Donald Trump has never done.

More noteworthy was Trump’s diminution of Russia as a busted flush of a great power. In Trump’s mind, Russia has forever been an unstoppable juggernaut not to be messed with, with an ample reserve of terrifying weapons that can kill hundreds of millions. In the current context, it was larger, stronger and numerically superior and fated to win a conventional contest against Ukraine. Now it might lose everything to Ukraine, backed by the pusillanimous and freeloading Eurocrats for whom Trump has previously shown little regard. What gives?

For months, Trump has reportedly grown angry and frustrated that Vladimir Putin, who he wrongly believes likes and respects him, has not engaged in good faith negotiations. Trump came to office believing this phantom affinity and the force of his charisma could end in twenty-four hours the largest land war in Europe since 1945. That was 247 days ago.

In the intervening period Russia has lost between 32,000 and 48,000 soldiers per month and waged a failed summer offensive to capture all of Donetsk and Luhansk, two oblasts it already claims to have annexed but does not control in full. (When Putin assured Trump this forward march was inevitable and one of many reasons to force Ukraine to accept a loss of territory, Trump took this judgment as an established fact.)

Meanwhile, Russia’s drones and jets and missiles have continued to kill Ukrainian civilians in nightly bombardments that are more intense than those that opened Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Tepid Trumpian threats to impose new sanctions or tariffs on Russia, followed by deferments of those threats for two weeks or 90 days or whatever, have predictably been met by no Russian concessions. If anything, the concessions have gone quite the other way.

The Pentagon has at least four times imposed moratoria or restrictions on critical security assistance to Kyiv, evidently the work of Elbridge Colby, the isolationist Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and a J.D. Vance loyalist who looks and sounds like the asshole from every John Hughes movie. The U.S. Department of Defense (excuse me, War) is currently “reviewing” its force posture on NATO’s vulnerable Eastern Flank where currently 20,000 American servicemen are stationed and announced its plan to cut military aid to Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as part of the Baltic Security Initiative instituted in Trump’s first term. These are said to be the singular undertakings of Colby and they come just as Russian aircraft have begun to “probe” NATO as a matter of course in exactly the neighborhood he wants to weaken.

So far, Russian drones have attacked Poland, Romania and possibly Denmark, and three armed Russian MiG-31s, aircraft capable of carrying nuclear warheads, entered Estonian airspace last week and lingered there for twelve minutes before being escorted out by NATO warplanes. Twice in the last fortnight Warsaw and Tallinn have each invoked Article 4 of the Washington Treaty, which seeks consultations with all NATO allies whenever the “territorial integrity, political independence or security” of one is threatened.

At the clandestine level, too, Russia is escalating. A bespoke department of the GRU, Moscow’s military intelligence service, has been stood up to conduct acts of remote-controlled state terrorism against the West, suborning Western saboteurs for “easy money” on Telegram to blow up commercial cargo planes using homemade bombs smuggled inside parcels of cosmetics, sex toys and massage pillows.

The rough bookends of these developments were the televised humiliation of Zelensky in the Oval Office in February and the televised humiliation of the United States in Alaska last month, when the literal red carpet was rolled out for an actual dictator with an outstanding arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for the crime of kidnapping children.

The anticlimactic exegesis of Trump’s TruthSocial post is that it is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing but a new “negotiating tactic,” per one senior White House official quoted by the Washington Post, to impel Putin to get down to business since being feted in Anchorage clearly wasn’t enough.

A small but distinct hint as to how effective this gambit will be was given by the Kremlin’s intoxicated id, Dmitry Medvedev, who responded to Trump’s intervention by dismissing it outright: “I have no doubt – he will return. He always returns. Probably, in a couple of days, he will offer [Zelensky] to sign a surrender.” Medvedev followed up this reassurance by threatening to nuke the United States, though it must be said his initial response was hardly different from that of most Ukrainian observers, who, while encouraged by Trump’s verbal pivot, nevertheless believe it won’t last.

Unnamed European officials cited by the New York Times suggested that Trump is trial-ballooning maximalist positions online because he’s growing bored with the whole issue offline and now realizes Ukraine is an insoluble problem best left to Brussels to manage. He’s got seven other wars he “ended” to pitch to the Nobel committee in Oslo, after all. This one can carry on.

For months I’ve heard from European officials how awful a development this would be, how they must do everything to keep Trump from walking away from Ukraine. All the while, however, those officials’ governments have been steadily making financial and military preparations that suggest they see this as the likeliest contingency. Europe suffers from a crisis of confidence of world-historical proportions, which is why European leaders in dialogue with Trump tend to come across as courtiers, therapists or spiritual gurus. And yet…Trump’s disillusionment and exhaustion with the war in Ukraine, brought about by Russian intransigence, might not be such a bad thing.

Trump’s transactional nature coupled with the abiding but misinformed MAGA grievance about U.S. security assistance being some kind of welfare scam (most of the money spent has been invested at home or in the service of the U.S. military overseas) has locked in place a more reliable mechanism for getting kit to Kyiv than presidential drawdown authority or congressional supplementals. NATO’s Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) allows allies to pay Washington for American-made weapons for the express purpose of handing them over to Ukraine. These weapons include Patriot air defense systems, 155-millimeter artillery shells, HIMARS and the rockets they fire. More than $2 billion has been committed to this pay-to-play arms program and the first billion has already been authorized by the Pentagon, according to Reuters. (It must have all but killed Elbridge Colby to sign off on this sale.) Forgoing solidarity and any moral imperative in helping a country under attack in favor of making money from its ordeal is the compliment vice pays to virtue in the geopolitical age of the grift and boardroom shakedown.

Ukraine’s requirements currently stand at a ratio of about 40:30:30. Forty percent of its war needs are sourced domestically, 30 percent comes from Europe, and the other 30 percent from the United States. As time goes on, whatever Trump decides to do, the domestic and European percentages will only rise, further diminishing America’s chequebook license to determine how Ukraine should conduct its own affairs. Dobre.

On sanctions, Trump could do well just by doing nothing. He cannot lift all of the major sanctions on Russia by himself even if he wanted to because, under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), they require Congressional approval to be lifted. Moreover, America’s financial relief won’t be much of a boon to a faltering Russian economy in the absence of the roll-back of secondary EU sanctions. The EU is currently working on its 19th sanctions package. Trump not only doesn’t object, he wants to outsource more economic warfare to America’s Atlantic wingmen. He is now quixotically demanding that the EU impose 100% tariffs on China and India to force Beijing and Delhi to halt their Russian oil and gas imports – this as a precondition for the Godot-like U.S. sanctions he keeps insisting are on the way.

So even if Trump makes good on Medvedev’s forecast and swings back to blaming and shaming Ukraine, it doesn’t really change anything so long as nothing is changed. America’s recessional is already underway. Europe is assuming more financial and military responsibility for both itself and for its invaded neighbor. Ukraine is not only not collapsing, as many military analysts and U.S. and Russian intelligence officials imagined it would (and sometimes still do), it is regaining ground in places such as Sumy and Dobropilla while battering Russia’s economy from afar.

Which brings me to the slightly more optimistic interpretation of Trump’s loop-de-loop in New York, as offered by the Wall Street Journal. Trump, reported the broadsheet, isn’t just thoroughly fed up with Putin, he’s grown more favorably disposed towards Zelensky, who now smiles and wears a suit for meetings. He is also spending more time with two pro-Kyiv voices in his administration, his Special Envoy to Ukraine, Gen. Keith Kellogg, and his former National Security Adviser turned Ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz. Unlike his outer borough real estate crony Steve Witkoff, who gets his news about the war directly from Putin via a Kremlin-selected translator working for Russia’s foreign intelligence service, Kellogg and Waltz have real data.

Russia has only managed to capture one percent of Ukraine’s territory in the last year, at an excruciating cost in blood and treasure that would prompt any rational nation to call off its disastrous misadventure.

Kellogg and Waltz will have also pointed out to Trump that Ukraine’s hammering at Russia’s energy infrastructure using a homemade fleet of sophisticated and long-range drones, which America is now eyeing for its own arsenal, have plunged Russia’s fuel exports to their lowest levels since 2020. (This is what Trump was alluding to when he wrote that Ukraine was causing “Economic trouble” for Russia.)

Zelensky is thus conducting his own sanctions or tariffs regime from above, doing what Trump wants the EU, Turkey, China and India to do – reduce Russia’s energy revenue. That Zelensky is doing so as an underdog outside of NATO and the EU and in direct contravention of the conventional wisdom of what he should be capable of only makes him more attractive and worthy of respect to a guy like Trump. And it only makes Russia more of a “paper tiger,” as he noted.

Recall that after Operation Spiderweb, in which Ukraine’s domestic spy service, the SBU, unleashed swarms of truck-borne suicide drones against Russia’s strategic bombers at numerous air bases across Russian territory, Trump asked Zelensky if he hadn’t perhaps considered striking Moscow or St. Petersburg as retaliation for the nightly attacks on Kyiv and Kharkiv and other Ukrainian cities.

In fact, Ukrainian drones have hit Moscow, repeatedly, causing the shutdown of Sheremetyevo Airport and otherwise disrupting the lives of ordinary Muscovites. But behind Trump’s provocative question was the strongman’s appreciation of sheer will and brute force for their own sake. He may be leery of prolonged and bloody wars and in desperate search of baubles that bring them to a close, but he is infatuated with spectacular acts of warfare that embarrass the enemy and draw applause from everyone else. This is how the Israelis lured him into bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, by demonstrating that even they were able to cripple the ayatollah’s defenses in a matter of hours, practically daring Trump not to share in the glory of finishing the job by powdering Fordow with bunker-busters.

Showing, not telling, through fire and steel is how Zelensky is trying to win Trump to his side now, or at least render his intercessions to ones of benign neglect. Per the Journal, Trump has been informed of an impending Ukrainian offensive to claw back occupied territory, which will require U.S. intelligence to be successful. Now imagine it is. Will Trump want to cede the credit to Zelensky and the Eurocrats he bullied into ponying up, or will he want something bigger than a tweet with which to get Vladimir Putin’s attention?