Opinion | The Disturbing Question at the Heart of the Trump-Putin Drama

The drama going on between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine raises one of the most disturbing questions I’ve ever had to ask about my own country: Are we being led by a dupe for Vladimir Putin — by someone ready to swallow whole the Russian president’s warped view of who started the war in Ukraine and how it must end? Or are we being led by a Mafia godfather, looking to carve up territory with Russia the way the heads of crime families operate? “I’ll take Greenland, and you can take Crimea. I’ll take Panama, and you can have the oil in the Arctic. And we’ll split the rare earths of Ukraine. It’s only fair.”

Either way, my fellow Americans and our friends abroad, for the next four years at least, the America you knew is over. The bedrock values, allies and truths America could always be counted upon to defend are now all in doubt — or for sale. Trump is not just thinking out of the box. He is thinking without a box, without any fidelity to truth or norms that animated America in the past.

I can’t blame our traditional friends for being disoriented. Read the sorrowful essay last week by the heroic Soviet dissident and freedom fighter Natan Sharansky:

“When I first heard President Donald Trump’s words on the tarmac — when he blamed Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for starting the war that Russia launched against Ukraine — I was absolutely shocked,” Sharansky wrote for The Free Press. “Trump seems to have adopted the rhetoric of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. He repeated a line from the Kremlin that sounded like Soviet-style propaganda: that Zelensky is not a legitimate leader. When Putin, the seemingly eternal leader of Russia, says it, it is laughable. When the president of the United States says it, it’s alarming, tragic, and does not comply with common sense.”

That’s a benign interpretation of Trump — that he is just besotted with Putin, Russia’s Christian nationalist, anti-woke crusader, and not applying the common sense that he promised. But then there is also another explanation: Trump does not see American power as the cavalry coming to rescue the weak seeking freedom from those out to quash them; he sees America as coming to shake down the weak. He’s running a protection racket.

Consider this stunning paragraph from a Wall Street Journal article about Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s recent meeting in Kyiv with Zelensky. Bessent presented Zelensky with an offer he couldn’t refuse — to sign over Ukrainian mineral rights to America, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, to compensate for U.S. aid.

It was a scene right out of “The Godfather”: “Bessent pushed the paper across the table, demanding that Zelensky sign it …. Zelensky took a quick look and said he would discuss it with his team. Bessent then pushed the paper closer to Zelensky. ‘You really need to sign this,’ the Treasury secretary said. Zelensky said he was told ‘people back in Washington’ would be very upset if he didn’t. The Ukrainian leader said he took the document but didn’t commit to signing.”

This whole story shows you again what happens when Trump is no longer surrounded by buffers but only by amplifiers. Bessent, a savvy investor, surely knew that the president of Ukraine could not just sign a piece of paper turning over hundreds of billions in mineral rights without checking with his lawyers, his Parliament or his people. But the Treasury secretary felt he had to do Trump’s bidding, no matter how foul or absurd. If the president wants to empty Gaza and make it a casino, then that’s what you sell. Extort Ukraine in the middle of war? That’s what you do.

A serious U.S. president would recognize that Putin is playing a very weak hand that we should exploit. As The Economist noted last week, most of Russia’s “gains were in the first weeks of the war. In April 2022, following Russia’s retreat from the north of Ukraine, it controlled 19.6 percent of Ukrainian territory; its casualties (dead and wounded) were perhaps 20,000. Today Russia occupies 19.2 percent and its casualties are 800,000, reckon British sources. … More than half of the 7,300 tanks [Russia] had in storage are gone. Of those that remain, only 500 can be reconditioned quickly. By April, Russia may run out of its T-80 tanks. Last year it lost twice as many artillery systems as in the preceding two years. … The reallocation of resources from productive sectors to the military complex has fueled double-digit inflation. Interest rates are 21 percent.”

If this were poker, Putin is holding a pair of twos and bluffing by going all in. Trump, instead of calling Putin’s bluff, is saying, “I think I’ll fold.”

Instead of rallying all our European allies, doubling down on the military pressure on Putin and making the Russian leader “an offer he can’t refuse,” Trump did just the opposite. He divided us from our allies at the U.N. by refusing to join them in a resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine — voting with the likes of North Korea — and began a lie-filled campaign to delegitimize Zelensky, not Putin.

Besides falsely claiming that Ukraine started the war, Trump declared that Zelensky’s popularity rating is 4 percent (his popularity rating is 57 percent, 13 points higher than Trump’s) and that Zelensky is a “dictator” and should submit to an election. Meanwhile, he gave Putin — who sentenced his biggest rival for the presidency, Alexei Navalny, to a total of 28 years in an Arctic hellhole, where he mysteriously died — a total free pass.

Zelensky apparently feels he has no choice but to sign some kind of cockamamie minerals deal, even though Trump is demanding three times or four times the roughly $120 billion the United States has given Ukraine in military, humanitarian and other financial aid — aid Ukrainians used to fight to protect the West from the Russian aggressor.

The whole thing is just shameful. Trump, in effect, is looking to make a profit off Ukrainians as a result of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine while making no demand on Putin for reparations or promising any future U.S. protection for Kyiv. As the White House made clear, “This economic agreement with Ukraine will not be a guarantee of future aid for war, nor will it include any commitment of U.S. personnel in the region.”

I have no problem with America asking for preferred access for our companies to investments in Ukraine’s natural resources after the war, as a thank-you for our aid. But doing it now, and with no security guarantees in return? Don Corleone would be embarrassed to ask for that. But not Don Trump.

Trump completely misreads Putin. He thinks Putin just needs a little positive attention, a little understanding, a little concern for his security needs — a hug! — and he will sign the peace Trump so badly desires. Nonsense. As the Russia specialist Leon Aron, the author of the acclaimed “Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War,” remarked to me: Putin is not looking for “peace in Ukraine. He is looking for victory in Ukraine” — because without a victory, “he is very vulnerable at home. Capitalist democracies will do anything for peace, and Putin’s autocracy will do anything for victory. We need to switch that around.”

The way to do that, Aron added, would be by signaling to Putin that the Western allies will see his bet and raise him one — “not maligning a heroic nation” that has been fighting to preserve a Europe whole and free.

We should back the Ukrainians to get the best deal they can. It will most likely have to include a cease-fire in place, so that Putin’s de facto control of parts of eastern Ukraine is acknowledged; a moratorium on Ukrainian membership in NATO; and a lifting of Western sanctions on Russia, but only once Russia demobilizes its offensive army from Ukrainian soil. In return, Putin will have to accept European peacekeeping troops in, and a no-fly-zone over, a free and sovereign Ukraine, backstopped by the United States to guarantee that Putin’s army cannot return, plus Russian noninterference in Ukraine’s process of entering the European Union.

It is critical that the United States insist Ukraine be allowed to enter the European Union — a negotiating process that Kyiv is in the midst of right now. I want Russians to look over at Ukraine every day and see a prosperous, Slavic, free-market democracy and ask themselves why they are living in Putin’s Slavic thieving autocracy. In my view, this whole war has never been about Putin keeping Ukraine out of NATO. It is Ukraine in the E.U. that Putin really fears.

A Russian international affairs scholar, who can speak only privately, remarked to me from Moscow that Putin’s team sees Trump’s team as a clown car, full of amateurs — easy pickings for the savvy and cynical Putin’s ultimate goal: “MRGA — Make Russia Great Again (and Make America Less Great Again).” Putin’s long-term goal, he added, is to manage the decline of U.S. hegemony so that America is “just one of the peer great powers,” focused on the Western Hemisphere and withdrawn militarily from Europe and Asia. Putin sees Trump as his blunt instrument “to manage that inevitable decline.”

Will Trump and his G.O.P. bobbleheads ever wake up to that? Maybe — when it’s too late.