Trump is the proverbial bull in the china shop. That makes it much harder to negotiate a "just peace" in Ukraine as he will act on impulse to get what he wants. And his main motive is money, not peace
Trump is the proverbial bull in a china shop. He is not driven by policy or a plan. He simply latches on to things put under his nose and reacts. Picking a trade fight with Canada, possibly the US’ oldest and most loyal ally is crazy. And he doesn’t seem to understand that if he reduces the trade deficit with Canada, it will have to be increased elsewhere.
Canada’s biggest export product to the US is crude oil accounting for just over half of all its imports. If you reduce Canadian oil imports you have to import more from somewhere else, like Iran, Venezuela or Russia? You get the idea. If you are going to spend real money, you are better off spending it on your friends as they won’t try and screw you over.
These disasters are coming thick and fast. The Gaza Riviera is the latest. I was saying yesterday that Trump looks like Yeltsin, well this story is out of that screenplay; Trump’s aides today are madly trying to walk back Trump’s plan to turn Gaza into a holiday resort, coming out with phrases like “what the president meant to say..”.
Trump reportedly didn’t tell anyone what was coming, especially Netanyahu, and seems to have made it all up on the spur of the moment. One of the few front-page stories I had when I was at the Daily Telegraph in Moscow was when Yeltsin got drunk and in a fit of pique ordered all of Russia’s nuclear missiles to target London in a televised address.
It’s the same with his “decision” to halt weapon deliveries to Ukraine last week. This also seems to have been a spontaneous decision – we want to stop the war, so let’s just stop sending weapons and the war will stop – until his team managed to persuade him that was aa stupid idea and reverse the decision – for now.
It’s crystal clear that Trump wants to get out of this war. It’s now a question of when not if. The only issue to be resolved is how. And bargaining with someone who has a “F*ck it” mentality to his commitment is going to be hard, especially hard on Zelenskiy.
Trump’s entire philosophy to international relations is based on
“can we make more money”. He doesn’t care about anything else. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has done well to dangle Ukraine’s raw materials under Trump’s nose and he seems to have taken the bait, but of course Zelenskiy is selling off the family lithium to try and keep Trump in the game, richest it will need for reconstruction.
But it does seem we are inching towards talks. Again, watching what players do rather than their rhetoric and there have been several steps into the middle ground in the last week. Zelenskiy told British journalist Piers Morgan that he is now willing to meet Putin face-to-face. Russia’s presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov made the same move, saying the Kremlin has dropped its refusal to meet with the “illegitimate” Zelenskiy, all of which is new and clears several obstacles to talks, which look like they will happen somewhere like Qatar or UAE, maybe in March.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio also said that the unipolar world is over and we now live in a multipolar world, which is remarkable, as this has been Putin’s biggest complaint for years. The result was a statement from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs “praising” Rubio’s comments, saying how sensible they were.
I’m not sure this was meant as a signal as it could just be part of Trump’s isolationist intentions and disengaging from the international community. But still, I haven’t seen anything like that for years. And bottom line that is all Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping want: for the US to stop meddling in everyone else’s business and leave them alone to get on with the task of building up their economies.
Trump will go along with this, except – and this is what will complicate things – he wants to get paid for staying out of your hair.
