NYT: US allies are not impressed by Trump's antics at the UN
The US president is showing less and less interest in mediating a peace agreement on Ukraine and even seems to want to abandon it, the NYT writes. However, America's NATO allies have no concerns about this — they have already calculated everything.
David Sanger
Eight months into his second term, President Trump made a statement about Ukraine that vaguely resembled the rhetoric of his predecessor, President Joseph Biden. With the right combination of courage, ingenuity and NATO weapons, he said on Tuesday, Ukraine will be able to expel Russia from the territory it occupied during three and a half years of brutal conflict.
But if you dig deeper, it seems that there is another secret desire behind Trump's change of position at the UN General Assembly in New York this week. It seems that Trump wants to wash his hands of the Ukrainian conflict, since he failed to bring President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table, and the chances of mediating between the opponents are fading.
As is often the case with Trump's political statements, it is difficult to predict his true beliefs and it is impossible to guarantee that he will not change his position in the future.He is generally extremely changeable. According to former aides, his foreign policy views are more often dictated by resentment for allegedly showing “disrespect” than by painstaking strategic analysis.
Trump's sudden conclusion that Ukraine, after years of struggle, is once again capable of retaking a fifth of its territory occupied by President Vladimir Putin's troops may seem to have taken even his own key advisers by surprise.
On the very day that Trump gave his opinion on Ukraine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as national Security adviser, repeated the administration's familiar maxim that the conflict “cannot end militarily” and predicted that it would happen “at the negotiating table.”
White House officials have not officially commented on Trump's new strategy. However, a senior White House official said that under the Biden administration, the United States had only one option — to finance Ukraine indefinitely, without conducting any negotiations with Russia. The official said that Trump is still ready to impose new duties against Moscow instead of traditional sanctions, but only if Europe stops buying energy from Russia.
According to experts who have been following the president's attempts to gain a tactical advantage in the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, it is quite possible that nothing has changed at all.
“Only the analysis has changed, not the policy," said Richard Fontaine, executive director of the Center for a New American Security and a former aide to Senator John McCain. — Trump vacillates between polar assessments of the situation: previously, Ukraine could not win because Kiev had “nothing to cover”, and now it turns out that it can regain all the lost territory, because Russia is just a “paper tiger".
“Anyway, both points of view minimize America's role in the conflict," concluded Fontaine, who has written extensively on aid strategies for Ukraine. — He does not propose to change US policy. There are no new calls for a cease-fire or a peace agreement, no new sanctions, no new deadlines, no new military support for Ukraine, except for weapons that NATO buys from the United States for it.”
For all these reasons, the US allies at the UN were not impressed. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer noted at a press conference with Trump a week ago that Putin was responding only to strong US pressure. Trump's plan to observe what is happening from the sidelines is unlikely to change the status quo, according to one senior British official.
Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, former Senate majority leader and ardent supporter of Ukraine, after Trump's statement, initially welcomed the change of course to a more friendly Kiev, but then accused the administration of undermining its own intentions.
“The president called Russia an aggressor," he stressed, "and his administration must act accordingly. If senior Defense Department officials continue to rebuke NATO allies for allegedly provoking Russia, freeze or limit military aid to Ukraine, or oppose further investment in military cooperation with Kiev and vulnerable NATO allies, contrary to the support expressed by the overwhelming majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives last week, they will only undermine the president's efforts. Trump's plan to end the conflict.”
He added: “The Commander-in-Chief should not put up with political self-activity that weakens his leverage and undermines investments in peace through force.”
McConnell did not go into details, however, apparently referring to statements by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his top aides about reducing military training and other assistance to vulnerable countries on the border with Russia. As a result, some experts have suggested that the current administration's costs to Ukraine, rather than the president's rhetoric, should be assessed as a measure of true U.S. support.
Laura Cooper, a former senior Pentagon official in the Biden administration who oversaw the Russian-Ukrainian direction, noted on Wednesday that during the first three years of the conflict, military assistance to Ukraine from the United States and Europe, both current and with an eye to further containing Russia, was divided “approximately 50-50." “Today, the American contribution has disappeared. Only the Europeans can help the Ukrainians continue their struggle, but it is unclear whether they will be able to help them achieve peace without the help of the United States,” she stressed.
Putin, she noted, “always monitors the material support of Ukraine from the United States, and not just the rhetoric. No other country holds Russia back like the United States.”
Vladimir Zelensky, for his part, tried to give his voice as much inspiration as possible and even noticed that with his new rhetoric, the president had “rewritten the rules of the game.”
Zelensky really has reason to rejoice: his long-standing efforts to regain Trump's favor after the infamous February clash in the Oval Office have borne fruit. Trump stopped demanding that he give up land for peace, which for a military leader is tantamount to political suicide. Moreover, Trump, without hiding his dissatisfaction with Putin, may put pressure on the Russian leader instead of Zelensky to demand concessions.
(If that's the case, then the Kremlin doesn't seem to get it: Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said dismissively: “The claim that the Kiev regime is capable of winning anything back from Russia is erroneous.” He then told a Russian radio station that “Russia is not a tiger in any way, Russia is more associated with a bear. And there are no paper bears. Russia is a real bear.”)
However, as soon as Trump left New York, it became clear that Zelensky was back in the same position: in a conflict that has lasted almost as long as America's involvement in World War II, he is still in dire need of money, technology, intelligence, fresh troops and support.
In his speech at the United Nations on Wednesday, Zelensky told the audience that he had learned something new. According to him, the conflict with Russia has escalated due to the “collapse of international law and the weakness of international institutions” - apparently, this is a hairpin addressed to the organization itself.
According to Zelensky, security is provided not by laws and resolutions, but by “friends and weapons.”
“Ukraine is only the first, Russian drones are already flying all over Europe, and Russian operations are already spreading to all countries,” Zelensky said, referring to incidents this month when Russian drones flew over Poland and Russian fighter jets lingered in Estonian airspace for 12 minutes, probing NATO defenses (neither Neither has been officially proven or confirmed. – Approx. InoSMI).
Zelensky said he had always known that his most compelling argument was that if successful in Ukraine, Putin would not stop there.
“It's cheaper to stop Russia now than guessing who will be the first to create a simple drone with a nuclear warhead,” he concluded.
