ON UKRAINE AND EUROPE
Ukraine and Europe have even more durable calculations forward. They continue to be susceptible to Trump’s skill to nonchalantly withdraw America’s vital safety umbrella. They can even be (with exceptions for Europe’s personal far-right populists) hostile to his views on the position of democracy and the West. On this sense, they’re extra Trump’s enemies than Putin, and that’s unlikely to shift.
But there’s additionally no change to the obstacles which have up to now prevented him from securing the Ukraine-Russia deal and, with it, the peacemaker’s picture that he clearly desires to be his legacy.
Logically, Trump’s calculation needs to be that if giving Putin the Ukrainian territory and European safety concessions he desires in alternate for industrial offers useful to the US failed even when he managed Congress, then maybe now’s the time to strive the opposite strategy. That will imply harnessing the pro-Ukraine sentiment of the incoming US lawmakers and pressuring Putin to compromise by making it clear that he won’t ever obtain both Ukraine’s subjugation or the dismantling of NATO.
The Kremlin is betting that received’t occur. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov greeted Trump’s defeat by saying, “We sincerely rely on him persevering with his peace-making efforts,” for which learn: trying to power Ukraine and Europe to capitulate to Putin’s calls for. Or because the state-controlled Rossiya 1 TV channel put it, the hope in Moscow is that: “As an alternative of a lame duck, the world may see a unique hen, yet another akin to an enraged eagle”.
