Putin is outwitting Trump

In the incessant conflicts of life and politics, people who know what they want tend to win. That is why Stalin won at Yalta and why, despite the extreme disadvantages of his country’s polity and economy compared with those of the United States, Vladimir Putin is outwitting Donald Trump. He wants Ukraine (and has related revanchist imperial ambitions), and has spent many years working out how to get it. His probing has taught him just how much both the United States and Europe, in their different ways, do not know what they want. The only real mistake Putin made was to think that Ukraine itself did not know what it wanted. It turned out that Ukraine most definitely does not want him. What about Trump? It is clear, as he has privately said, that he wants the Nobel Peace Prize, but on the issue of Ukraine itself, he is truly vague. His inner need seems to be to get it out of the way rather than to understand it. So Putin gets the better of every ‘very good’ phone call between the two presidents. And the pressure for Europe to work out what it really wants grows ever more urgent.

There is understandable rejoicing at the noise of the Trump/Musk chainsaw felling the dense jungle of American federal officialdom. But, in cutting Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe (and Radio Free Asia), Trump is not simply paring back waste: he is depriving oppressed peoples of information their own countries block. This is all of a piece with Trump’s idea that Putin’s Russia is all right and Cold War attitudes are out of date. In fact, all Putin’s attitudes and methods derive from the Cold War – the belief in the use of violence, of surveillance, of kompromat, the crushing of ethnic and religious minorities, the use of grey-zone conflict and interference in elections, the incessant, organised propagation of lies and the persecution of journalists.