Was I right? 80% isn’t bad, considering others’ reading of the tea leaves

20250715

Trump has finally come around. While I don’t claim to be Nostradamus, I’ll be glad to compare my prediction from March 31 (see below) with anybody else’s prognostications. Moreover, Trump has gotten the Europeans to mostly pay for it, something that I doubt would have been possible three months ago. By being thick-skinned, willing to take a lot of abuse from the press and Europeans (who seldom had nice words for him in the first place) he has maneuvered into a position that appears to be a workable compromise, perhaps the best balance for all parties.

It is true that this has come at the expense of the lives of a few Ukrainian civilians. Trump, one may note, was not elected by Ukrainians. Quite the opposite – they vigorously opposed him. And he is not the first president to balance civilian lives against larger interests. Roosevelt (so it is claimed) allowed Pearl Harbor because he wanted the war. Netanyahu has recently sacrificed thousands of Palestinian lives, and hundreds of Israelis, for his larger ends.

I doubt that the stooges in Stockholm will ever award The Donald a peace prize, but if Obama and Kissinger deserved them, he probably will also.

Graham

From my post of March 31

The latest war news is that Trump is “pissed off” at Putin. I do not know whether Trump's involvement is being good or bad for Ukraine. I read many and vastly differing opinions on how the war is going and how well Russia is holding up. I can give you the view from my bunker in a sheltered suburb of Kyiv.

Putin continues to rocket our city. It appears to me to be out of spite and revenge, with no particular military objective. He kills civilians in large apartment buildings as a matter of terror. They are easy to hit with cheap drones. He is not, so far as I know, taking out much of military value at least here in Kyiv. Despite three years of attempts he has not knocked out our electric infrastructure. Our backup butane stove and uninterrupted power supply have not seen much use this winter. We are fortunate to be in a one-family residential area more than a mile from any high-rise, business or commercial center. Nothing even Putin finds worth shooting at.

Neither side is making much progress on the battlefield. Drone warfare has made going on the attack extremely dangerous. Putin's relentless push to conquer a few more square kilometers of what is still held by Ukraine is costing him an inordinate number of soldiers, armor and trucks. But, on the other hand – and this war is full of other hands – he seems to have had more Soviet era equipment to expend than anybody imagined. Despite having lost – by Ukraine's obviously inflated reckoning – close to a million soldiers, he keeps on coming.

My opinion is that Putin is so personally invested in this war that he simply cannot let go. If the war were to end with as little to show for his vast expenditure as now appears to be the case, his presidency would seem precarious. He who rides on the back of a tiger cannot get off.

More than that, as I wrote three years ago and have often repeated on my blog, Putin is not a 5-D chess player. He is a thug, a palooka. Trump is the one playing 5-D chess. He has allowed the whole world to call him a Putin puppet, a sympathizer. He has certainly known Putin’s true character all along. Now, when he says that Putin is not negotiating in good faith, the world will believe him.

I’ll go further out on a limb. Putin, as a palooka, is quite predictable. At this juncture he will swallow and accept Trump’s economic sanctions, the oil tariff deal, trying to tough it out. Trump knows this. When it becomes totally obvious that he has given Trump no choice, Ukraine will get the lethal aid we need to win. The move will look credible to even Trump’s isolationist MAGA supporters.

Russia’s military position is already fragile. This will tip it, and allow Trump to achieve a better deal for Ukraine than we could have gotten had Putin been reasonable and bargained in good faith from the beginning. The Russian tradition of bad faith bargaining will have cost them.