Trump Frustrated By The Limits Of Brand Transactionalism In Peacemaking

That went even faster than I had expected

It is not hard to understand why Donald Trump got blustery yesterday. His team of peacemakers met with Russian counterparts in Riyadh on Tuesday, each side not sending their best, with no firm commitments of any kind from Moscow resulting. Kyiv is unwilling to sign a minerals-for-arms deal with Trump until Vladimir Putin commits to real peace with Ukraine. None of Trump’s deals are working out the way he wanted.

Putin and the ruling clique in the Kremlin hold the annihilation of Ukraine as a sacred value, something they are unwilling to trade for promises of gross material favor. They do not care about G7 membership. They want sanctions relief, to be sure, but not at the cost of giving up their spiritual commitment to making those Ukrainian metal reserves into Russian ones. Trump’s frustration is perfectly understandable: he cannot get Putin to “yes,” and Volodymyr Zelenskyy will not get to yes unless the Kremlin does.

Trump’s team made the best offer possible, indeed they offered Russia everything that Tucker Carlson thinks Putin wants, and still came up empty. No wonder Trump is mad. And reader, how many times have you witnessed someone take out their frustrations with Person A on Person B, simply because of the differential power dynamic? The drama triangle is the simplest, easiest narrative in storytelling. Even the poorest actor can beat his chest and bluster.

In social media posts yesterday morning, Trump called Zelenskyy a “dictator” who “better move fast, or he is not going to have a country left.” He blamed Ukraine and Zelenskyy for Russian invasions. By sheer coincidence, of course, this verbal diarrhea is all perfectly in line with the talking points that Putin uses in his conversations with Trump. It also fits his self-serving history in which Russia only invaded because he was not president and Joe Biden was.

Historically, Trump’s opinions have been fungible, influenced most by the person he spoke to last. It appears that William Kellogg, named as Trump’s special envoy for peace in Ukraine, was sidelined more than a week ago; he was not in Riyadh yesterday, whereas Trump spoke to Putin on the phone more recently than that.

Nor did Putin send his very best to Riyadh, either. “None of the members of the Russian delegation in Saudi Arabia appear to be among the closest inner circle that Putin would likely to empower to engage in serious negotiations on his behalf,” the Institute for the Study of War explains. For all the talk of peace by Easter, Secretary of State Marco Rubio got no greater commitment from Sergey Lavrov than increased diplomatic staffing on both sides, i.e. more spies will be admitted to Washington and Moscow.

Trump senses his own weakness here, so he is projecting strength. In fact, political commentary has always gotten this profoundly wrong about Trump. All politicans use the words "strong" or "strengthen" or "stronger" as much as possible because voters like strength. It's basic political messaging 101. Sound strong to look strong, and voters and negotiating partners will perceive strength, and so on. On this point, Trump has a perfect, intuitive understanding of his own popularity.

He is popular because he is perceived as strong. If Trump fears looking weak, he will lash out at someone below him in the hierarchy of power. It even pays to think of Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris as a kind of negotiating partner, in this sense.

Trump has always lashed out at real or potential partners to make himself look strong, doing the same with electoral opponents, or White House reporters, or Zelenskyy. The denigrating, bullying talk is always about projecting strength where Trump feels weak. Past is prologue: Trump screwed over every business partner he ever had because the profits always proved to be weaker than his pie-in-the-sky projections.

Trump has a weaker position now than he did before. Preemptive surrender of Ukrainian territory and national aspirations failed to get Putin to “yes.” Now Trump is sounding just like Putin as he talks about Zelenskyy and Ukraine because he wants to appear strong, and because he still hopes to get Putin to say “yes.” He reportedly wants to veto the “traditional” G7 unity statement calling Russia an “aggressor.” But Putin will not say yes to anything short of Ukraine prostrate before Russia. No amount of verbal appeasement is ever going to be enough.

Putin will never agree to meet with Zelenskyy, making stupid excuses about elections instead. “The real polls, how can you be high when every city’s been demolished? Somebody said, no, his [Zelensky] polls are good. Give me a break,” Trump said yesterday, again echoing Putinian talking points and ignoring the entire history of civilians under bombardment. Push Ukraine to hold an election in our reality-based universe and Zelenskyy will likely win it. What would Trump say then? “Stolen election”? Again, his voice would match Putin’s. He convinces no one.

This is all far more complicated than Trump had hoped. “We had a rare earth deal, but they broke it two days ago,” Trump lamented. Turns out that Ukrainians have agency, who knew? His diplomats asked Russia to stop bombing Ukrainian energy infrastructure and Lavrov denied Russia was bombing any Ukrainian infrastructure at all. Turns out the Russians are cynical, who could have guessed?

Trump’s pursuit of a one-on-one (“bilateral”) deal with Putin is typical of his style. Simplification was always the Trump paradigm of international relations. He loathes multilateralism, i.e. multiple negotiating partners, so he excluded Ukraine and the Europeans from Riyadh.

Still, the peace on which he hopes to stamp his personal brand eludes Trump, so he follows his instict by attacking what he perceives to be the weakest negotiating partner. The fairy tale of a Manchurian candidate was never real. The real Trump is however easily understood and manipulated by even a middling KGB spy. Russian intelligence correctly assessed that Trump held no ‘trump cards’ (heh) over Russia in Riyadh and would turn on Ukraine and Zelenskyy and the Europeans before he ever thought to try bullying Russia.

The real question, then, is why Trump never criticizes or denounces Putin, and so far does not use any levers of power to push Russia into serious negotiations of any kind, even bilateral ones. We know that he knows that he has these powers. Is he afraid of Putin? Why does he seem beholden to Putin as the superior in his hierarchy of power? Does he only respect dictators? This is the questioning that I get from people who voted for Trump, but remain worried that MAGA will accept a terrible outcome in Ukraine.

Set aside the conspiracy theories. Assume, for the sake of argument, that Donald Trump is sincere enough about wanting peace, and criticizing the war itself, that he actually wants to form a closer relationship with China and Russia for the peace of the world. He does criticize war and prefer business to war. Making peace is hard. It is harder still when any negotiating side is unwilling to make peace. Desire for peace, plus a couple of euros, will buy you a cup of coffee.

Not at all by coincidence, the European Union just came up with €700 billion in funding for Ukraine. Trump wanted the Europeans to look to their own defense. He told them to raise their defense spending, and they have; he left them to fund Ukraine’s war, and so they are. Trump now finds his position weaker, his leverage reduced all around, in no small part by his own design. Lashing out will not fix this. Still, he will lash out because that is what he does.

Nor will Trump simply be able to impose a bad peace on Ukraine. Not only is his leverage limited, congressional Republicans are already contradicting Trump. Threats to starve Ukraine of aid will likely work out the way they did before: a long delay, followed by congressional action. Trump may go to war with his own Congress, but it will cost him more than it will cost the Ukrainians.

The transactionalism of Donald Trump is a shortcoming more generally in examples of American power, but usually it is mitigated by liberalizing impulses and statements of solidarity. With Trump, the transaction is purely a power exchange. Money is magic. Advice is for pussies, because everything is fungible. Europeans loathe it. When this purified essence of the American transactional character meets an immovable object, such as the genocidal religious character of Russia’s war, it proves to be a very resistible force. Trump is finding out.

His general unwillingness to commit force or take risks is playing out as noise, for now, and has yet to play out as political drama. It will not however force Ukraine to surrender, or convince Vladimir Putin, the most obstinate peace partner of all, to make peace. Trump’s anger at Ukraine and Zelenskyy will not translate into Ukrainian defeat. At best, Trump can give away sanctions relief to Russia, bleed away his existing leverage, and prolong the war, even make it worse for Ukraine, but this would put his brand on a war, not a peace.

War in Ukraine will ultimately turn on macroeconomic realities. Choices made henceforth will shape the strategic conditions and Trump only gets to make some of those choices. Many of the most important choices are already made in Moscow: the limit of inflation controls, the empty sovereign wealth fund, the risk of bank runs due to forced loans going bad, the overheated defense sector and collapsing housing sector, the use of ever more expensive contract soldiers in ‘meat assaults,’ the arrival of donkey logistics on the Russian front.

After Inauguration Day, Ukraine redoubled their long-range drone strikes against Russian oil infrastructure. Trump has very little influence over this threat to Russian state revenues, and if he dropped sanctions tomorrow, western oil companies would still be shy of returning right away to repair the refineries and cracking towers and storage tanks. Ukrainian troops receive 200,000 drones a month and Russian milbloggers are moaning about the conditions of the front.

Trump does not actually care what people say about his relationship with Putin. He only cares about his relevance, which is to say his brand. Through continued obstinacy, Donald Trump risks irrelevance, his worst nightmare. I had expected us to reach this pass, but not quite so quickly.

Woodrow Wilson was reelected in 1916 with the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” He went to Congress for a declaration of war in 1917 after Germany resumed unrestricted u-boat warfare, reversing the single meaningful concession that American diplomacy had wrangled from the Kaiser. Of course, Wilson was president when America was a nation of shopkeepers. Trump is president to a nation of reality television viewers. The times have indeed changed. America has changed. What has not changed is the magical thinking that peace can be bought at some uncertain price to be negotiated.