The Ukraine war is not the end of Donald Trump
The idea that America needs a tough guy in charge will have more takers than it did before.
The Ukraine crisis is not the end of Donald Trump.
Liberals are right to bring up his past flirtations with the Kremlin, but they overrate the harm it will do to his electoral viability.
For one thing, few western leaders this century have a proud record on Russia. Biden belonged to a White House that “reset” relations with Moscow after its invasion of Georgia in 2008.
His former boss, Barack Obama, laughed away the notion of the Kremlin as America’s principal threat. The best that can be said about that administration’s Russia policy is that it has aged better than Angela Merkel’s.
Trump is damaged by his record, yes, but not uniquely or even especially so.
The other problem with invoking his past is selective quotation. Yes, Trump flattered foreign strongmen. But he also threatened them.
His world view has always been a dog’s breakfast of contradictions: praise for tyrants, but also a sense of macho competition with them; avoidance of foreign military burdens, but also a horror of anything that smells of weakness or retreat.
His handling of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un alternated between fatherly affection and impatience to nuke him off the planet.
In 2017, he enforced Obama’s red line against the use of chemical weapons in Syria — unlike Obama.
Trump, in short, meets the definition of strategic “madness”. He believes a US leader must be pugnacious and even reckless to keep the global peace. It is a belief that lacks nuance. It is likely a rationalization of what are just his own uncontrollable instincts. But it also has a surface plausibility now that it didn’t just a few months ago.
Were he taking Biden on in an election now, imagine the lines of attack at his disposal.
Should a US president really wait for Russia to invade a country before imposing sanctions?
Should he state up front (via tweet, no less) what he is not willing to do for Ukraine? What happened to strategic ambiguity?
And why is Trump the only US leader elected this century on whose watch Vladimir Putin has not attacked a neighbor?
Discuss.
https://www.ft.com/content/047803e1-0785-4b8e-87be-46a99b42438e