Trump has the tools to force peace in Ukraine, but will he use them on Putin?
DAVID: Even people as dumb as George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton seeking a reset with Russia’s Vladimir Putin eventually learned their hopeful approach to the Menace of Moscow was a big mistake. At a summit scheduled for Friday in Alaska, Donald Trump has the opportunity to show he can learn not to trust in Putin, too.
MELINDA: Donald Trump’s years of right-out-on-Main-Street slobbering over this KGB killer are unparalleled. “We’ve got a lot of killers,” he said when Bill O’Reilly pointed out Putin’s criminal past and present years ago. So I’m not sure your opening insults to W and Hillary Clinton really apply here. It’s true that W’s famous peek into Putie’s soul was an illusion, and that the Obama/Clinton reset was a bust, but they weren’t wrong to try.
DAVID: Ugh, yes, they were wrong to try, especially in Obama’s case because Putin had clearly shown he would invade his neighbors and bully anyone who showed weakness during the Bush administration.
That’s part of why I have some faint hope that Trump will take a tough line with the dictator and hopefully advance the cause of peace in Ukraine. Maybe it will be because the Donald doesn’t want to be embarrassed publicly, as happened at a disastrous summit in Helsinki during his first term.
I am not the only one. Bookmakers have Trump in the lead to win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. He’d have a lock if he were able to wring a reasonable deal out of Russia’s leader.
The stakes are high. After Obama (and Clinton’s) failed reset, Russia invaded Crimea and took that historic peninsula from Ukraine with little opposition in 2014. Putin could take a weak display from Trump at the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson meeting as a green light to escalate his war in Ukraine.
MELINDA: Well if Obama was wrong to try diplomacy, then maybe it’s good we have hollowed out the State Dept. and fired so many of our senior diplomats, but I don’t see it that way. We can say we want no more wars, or we can say we want no more diplomacy, but we can’t realistically pick both.
And I hope you do not intend to imply that Russia’s illegal invasion of Crimea was somehow Obama’s fault, though sure, we could have gone to war over it and did not.
DAVID: The soft approach to a predator only whets its (his?) appetite. In any case, Trump has recently become disillusioned with Moscow, expressing frustration at a lack of progress in peace talks, but he has never attacked Putin directly. There was a positive sign this week when Trump said that he “had” a good relationship with Putin. That past tense might mean a lot, speculated a New York Times analysis. I hope so.
MELINDA: Trump’s approach hasn’t been soft, but slavering, and I wouldn’t hang too much on his use of the past tense. He has a long and unlovely history of gushing over this monster — and giving in to him, too, on Ukraine and NATO and even in mostly dismantling the Voice of America, a major irritant to Moscow, and cutting programs that went after Russian disinformation. And while it’s true that several weeks ago, Trump expressed some ‘Darling, how could you?’ frustration, he’s since then gone right back to pretending Ukraine started the war.
Trump’s disillusions are many, but smiles and words of love usually make them vanish. In this case, it didn’t even take that.
Michael McFaul, our ambassador to Russia under Obama, told The New York Times that “lately he has drifted back to his old self, again blaming (President Volodymyr) Zelensky in part for Putin’s invasion, not entertaining Zelensky’s proposal for a trilateral meeting, and already suggesting that Zelensky is going to have to make major concessions, but saying nothing about what concessions need to be made by Putin.” Oof.
While your hopes may be modest, mine are more modest still.
DAVID: I wouldn’t try to talk you out of that, but my hopes got a boost Wednesday afternoon when Trump gave a press conference at the Kennedy Center and said that he wanted to follow up the Putin meeting with one involving Putin and the leader of Ukraine, too. That makes me think there’s a chance Trump will press for concessions from Putin that are big enough to get Zelensky to agree to a meeting. Trump wisely talked with Zelensky and European leaders before the talks with Putin, giving better Western leaders a chance to stiffen Trump’s spine.
MELINDA: Yes, I saw Trump’s remarks about the 2025 honors awarded by what remains of the Kennedy Center – really, it just seems like it’s just him now — and his announcement that he had vetoed a couple of “wokesters” as potential honorees. Art threatens autocrats, which is why Trump fears it so, and felt he had to stage that coup on a premier cultural institution, too.
The Kennedy Center awards may have meant more when Meryl Streep and Stephen Sondheim took them home, but getting people out on the dance floor for more than 30 years is an achievement as well, and I happen to love 2025 honoree Gloria Gaynor. George Strait is on my good side, too, and not only because a couple of my exes do live in Texas. It’s not the fault of these talented and hard-working artists that they’re being recognized by someone who thinks that the more gold he pastes on every available surface in the White House, the more powerful that makes him look.
Back to Ukraine, though, I’m bothered by Trump’s insistence that he’s trying his hardest to push for peace when he’s left so many tools sitting out in the shed untouched. He could, for instance, sign the Senate bill that would impose 500% tariffs on goods from countries that knowingly deal in Russian oil and uranium. I agree with that bill’s sponsors, the Democrat Richard Blumenthal and Republican Lindsey Graham, that this piece of legislation is a “sledgehammer” that could have a major impact.
So why isn’t Trump interested? Are sledgehammers only to be wielded against the powerless? We’re paying a 50% tariff on Brazilian imports because Trump doesn’t like the way that country is treating his friend. But to end a war and protect Europe, no way?
He could also see that $300 billion in frozen Russian government assets were used to fund Ukraine, but that might wipe the smile off Putin’s face permanently where Trump is concerned, and I don’t think he’s willing to risk that.
DAVID: I wish we had a president who was willing to take that tough of a stance on behalf of Ukrainian democracy and the defense of Europe. In Trump’s defense, I don’t see any of the previous three presidents as likely to have had the stuff to confront a nuclear-armed power so boldly.
Trump has other virtues that will serve Europe well. One is the fact that his attacks on NATO and displeasure with supporting European defense have scared the continent’s democratic leaders into starting a still-too-slow move of their defense budgets from 2% of GDP to 5% of GDP, something they were supposed to be doing all along, but were too lazy and dependant to actual follow though.
I like Europeans. I was just in England, Norway, Belgium and the Czech Republic this summer. The cultural treasure of Europe is worth America’s time and treasure to defend. Heck, just the booze and food is worth protecting from the barbarians in the Kremlin. But Trump is right that they need to do more to protect themselves.
Poland is a great example for the rest of Europe. The BBC reported Wednesday that leaders in Berlin and London are embarrassed by the fact that Poland will soon have more main battle tanks than Germany and the United Kingdom combined. They should be.
MELINDA: How tough would he have to be? We’re not talking about the last three presidents, but this one.
If Donald Trump is not willing to use the kind of powerful and fully available financial cudgels that might actually work, then either he doesn’t care, beyond what this might do for his Nobel chances, or he’s still imagining that his one-way friendship with Putin will have the desired effect.
He could say that any deal that doesn’t return the land Russian has stolen from Ukraine since its invasion began in February of 2022 is no deal at all. If he does that, I will gladly say I was 10 kinds of wrong, and will even more gladly treat you to a Chimay.
This story was originally published August 14, 2025 at 8:39 AM with the headline "Trump has the tools to force peace in Ukraine, but will he use them on Putin?."
