Trump Is Talking To Putin--Why This Is Supremely Important

In a very brief article at the Newspaper of Record for Trump 2.0—the NYPost—Miranda Devine quotes President Trump confirming that he has been speaking with President Putin in person—in person by telephone, that is.

Trump reveals he’s spoken with Putin by phone, says Russian president ‘wants to see people stop dying’ in Ukraine war

President Trump has spoken to Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the phone to try to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war, he told The Post in an exclusive interview aboard Air Force One Friday.

“I’d better not say,” said Trump when asked how many times the two leaders have spoken.

But he believes Putin “does care” about the killing on the battlefield.

Obviously there’s a generous helping of Trumpian BS involved here—the portrayal of himself as the humanitarian who hates war, except when Israelis are bombing the sh*t out of Palestinians with US supplied planes and 2000 lb. bombs. Maybe the debacle of Trump’s clownish presser with a war criminal last week got through to Trump—that it was time to start doing actual diplomacy and put his previous dumbass statements about Russia behind him. Remember? He was going to knock heads and force Russians and Ukrainians to stop killing each other or else he’d flood Ukraine with so much war materiel that the Russians’ heads would be spinning? Or something like that? It’s high time that Trump stopped toying with the success of his presidency—because if he screws this war on Russia up the consequences will be devastating.

Therefore, the fact that Trump has decided to get personally involved—essentially cutting out his clown emisarry Kellogg—is hugely relieving. This way Trump will get an idea of just how serious the Russians are and will be able to shape some sort of agreement—perhaps, as I’ve suggested, with a side helping of arms control—that has a chance of success. Because the Kellogg-Fleitz-Waltz plan was going to be DOA.

OK, with that rant out of the way, I want to highly recommend CTH’s article on this development:

President Trump Has Begun Discussions with President Putin

Significantly, in this long article Kellogg—the supposed emissary—gets no mention at all and Waltz gets only one mention—in a typically Trumpian throwaway line about “handsome soldiers.” No, I’m not kidding.

Sundance writes at a bit of length, but it’s all pretty worthwhile (I don’t necessarily agree with everything, but that’s not important). Here’s the nub of it all:

The Western economic sanctions against Russia have failed. There is no outward pressure or internal concern about Western financial and economic sanctions any longer.

Putin almost certainly doesn’t care if the sanctions remain.

Putin is not going to withdraw.

Putin is not going to cede an inch of territory he has gained.

Putin is in a strong position ...

As a consequence, President Trump can offer President Putin very little.

MAGA has no desire for the USA to engage in expanded military conflict with Russia. The overwhelming majority of the American people, in combination with an ever-increasing number of Europeans, do not want to see any escalation of the military hostilities with Russia. Vladimir Putin is well aware of this.

As I’ve said before—Russian diplomats are professionals, not like ours. They are students of the politics of their countries of assignment, and nowhere more so than at the Russian embassy in DC. They know what Trump is dealing with, what is in his hand. As Sundance says: “Very little.”

Now, here’s a partial transcript of Alexander Mercouris’ discussion of these issues from yesterday—before this news broke. Mercouris eloquently explains why it’s so important for Trump to get past his clown advisers and get this right. The very first line suggests why Trump is now involved—for at least the second time the Russians have politely told Kellogg to take his “plan” and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine. The very fact that Trump has appointed clowns to these positions is bound to have made a bad impression on the Russians, so pushing them aside is a good move.

I’ve omitted most of what Mercouris has to say about the sanctions because Sundance provides the bottom line, but there is some additional commentary on that score which again illustrates why it’s so important that Trump should get serious about foreign policy. If Trump thinks Kellogg could effectively play the bad cop to his own good cop, it’s very clear that the Russians have disabused him of any hope that that could possibly work—again, as Sundance also makes clear. Time to get serious and get this mess behind—the sooner the better.

Kellogg Flounders, Wants Ceasefire, Sanctions: Moscow Says No

Let's get back to Kellogg. He's made a number of comments. He's said that this plan that he's going to announce is basically a plan for a ceasefire. He says that we have to have a ceasefire, we have to stop the war, we have to stop the killing--and only after that happens can we get down to negotiations. Now, already that is something that the Russians have said they will never accept. The Russians repeatedly pointed out that Minsk was essentially an agreement for a ceasefire. The Ukrainians made all kinds of commitments which they were supposed to follow up with further negotiations. Those negotiations never substantively happened the Ukrainians went back on their commitment ... And they started to rebuild their army and to prepare for the next war. The Russians are not going to let themselves be maneuvered into that position again. So already the very fact that Kellogg is talking about a ceasefire is something which, based on every comment every Russian official has made up to this point, tells me that whatever his diplomatic initiative is going to be, it is going to be rejected in Moscow.

Now, Peskov, Putin's spokesman, has been talking again and he, again, has said that, yes, it is true they're getting all kinds of statements now from the United States about the need to end the conflict. There's been talk about negotiation, about compromises, about all those things. The Russians, however, have still not received--this is according to Peskov--anything really concrete, anything that they can work with. That strongly suggests to me that Kellogg actually doesn't have a worked out plan, but that this plan--which as I said I suspect has a Ukrainian origin--is the plan that he's going to announce eventually in Munich, if only because there is none other. So he's going to go to Kiev. I doubt that he's going to get a warm reception from Zelensky, but Zelensky has again said that he's prepared to sit down and negotiate with Putin. No doubt he will now endorse the idea of a ceasefire and then Kellogg will go to the Russians and the Russians will, of course, say, No. And then the question is, what do the Americans do now?

According to reports that have been circulating, Kellogg has been going around telling people that, as far as he's concerned, on a scale of effectiveness from 1 to 10 the existing sanctions against Russia are at about three--so that there is plenty of scope to harden them even more. I gather that this is also the view of the National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz. If that is what Kellogg thinks then I have to say straight away that that is completely delusional. If anybody had suggested back in February 2022 that the sanctions that are currently in force against Russia--which are the most thorough going and extensive sanctions against any country in the world--are at level three instead of level 10 nobody would have accepted that. ...

If the United States wants to tighten this sanctions regime even further than it can only do so by going against the economic interests not just of allies like Germany--which have behaved more like vassel states than allies--but of powerful countries around the world like China and and India and others. And Brazil. Brazil has just announced, for example, that it is increasing imports of diesel fuel from Russia. The US is going to launch an attack on the vital economic interests of all of these countries, which those countries will all see as an attack on themselves and which they are all certain to resist. I cannot imagine anything more counterproductive, and of course it will almost certainly result in higher global inflation overall, because that is the effect of disrupting supply chains in this kind of way. And, of course, it is going to take away any incentive on the Russian side to negotiate or any interest in moving forward to establish any sort of dialogue with the United States. So this whole approach that Kellogg and Mike Waltz seem to be drifting towards is remarkably ill conceived and is not connected to the realities.

...

if Kellogg and Waltz get their way, what is already shaping into a debacle for the United States is going to be far worse. Mike Waltz in particular is said to be haunted by the humiliation of the fall of Kabul in Afghanistan in 2021. Apparently he served in Afghanistan as did many of the veteran military officers who have now become such important figures within the Trump Administration. Some of them--Mike Waltz specifically, to some extent apparently even Tulsi Gabbard--believe that, if Iraq was the Bad Illegal War that should never have been started, then Afghanistan was the Good War, the war which was betrayed when the Taliban was given back power and the United States was humiliated. I don't agree with that narrative, by the way. I think that it is wrong in many fundamentals, but I'm not going to waste time debating that. What I will say is this. The parallel that Mike Waltz and Kellogg should be worried about is not the fall of Kabul in 2021--a relatively minor event in global terms, one which the United States was able to brush off and one which made no fundamental difference to the overall geopolitical picture. The event that they should keep in mind and which should haunt them is the fall of Saigon in 1975.

Kiev is a much more important city than Kabul. Ukraine is a country that is part of Europe, that adjoins Central Europe, one of the key areas of American power. If Kiev falls in a disorganized way--if there is a military collapse there as there was in Saigon in 1975--then the repercussions will be very great and, in fact, greater than they were at the time of the fall of Saigon where, despite the humiliation and the defeat, at least the damage was contained. I have said repeatedly that if you want to draw comparisons with any war that the United States has fought and the war that the United States is fighting in Ukraine--it is waging a proxy war there; maybe American ground forces and aircraft are not involved but there are many, many American technicians and spies and scientists and intelligence officers and command officers and all sorts of people both on the ground in Ukraine and running the Ukrainian part of the war by remote control from NATO headquarters in Brussels and from Washington. If you want to talk about an American defeat on a really big scale, then this war in Ukraine parallels Vietnam much more closely than any other conflict that the United States has fought since then.

Now, it may be that at the end of this, even if there is a negotiated solution, there will be a change in power in Kiev and new authorities will come to power there and they may be more sympathetic to Moscow than the existing ones, but even if that is the outcome of a negotiation it is better that it were done in that way than that we have the kind of scenario that played out in Saigon ... I would have thought that was obvious, ... if the Russians besiege and capture Kiev in that sort of way then it's very very difficult to see how the United States and Russia will be able to come to terms in the future in order to stabilize the situation in Europe. And then those predictions by people at the Institute for the Study of War about how defeat in Ukraine will oblige the United States to maintain an indefinite strong military presence in Europe, tying down American resources in Europe at a time when American officials themselves say that they need to redeploy them to the Pacific, it is impossible to see how that scenario will be avoided. ...

In what follows Mercouris makes a point that I have long agreed with—contra people like Macgregor. A Russian push to the Polish and Romanian borders is not out of the question—especially not if the use dithers and delays in coming to a settlement with Russia.

Now it may be that in their own interest the Russians will decide that they don't want to take care they might not they might choose they might choose to stop before they do that. Some would say that would be the wise thing for them to do, but if the Americans come up with proposals that the Russians cannot work with and won't accept, and if the Russians conclude that advancing westwards is the only way that they can secure their own defenses and their future security, well, at that point the Russians may decide that they have no choice. I think that many of the articles that have appeared--with which, by the way, I generally agree--that for the Russians it doesn't make best sense to try to occupy the whole of Ukraine, or most of Ukraine, or to take Kiev or Lviv or any of these places, one of the things that many of these commentaries in the West miss is that if the Russians decide that taking Kiev and taking Lviv is the only way that they can establish the security of their Western borders then--despite their own misgivings and their own doubts--they will decide to do it. And we are getting closer to that point when they will be able to so.

I do hope that, in spite of everything, good sense will eventually prevail. No doubt Kellogg himself is now committed to a certain process. I think we have to accept that this is going to have to play out. He's going to go to Munich--and, by the way, I think that's a mistake. I think that announcing a peace plan in Munich is an extremely bad idea. I think the best thing for Kellogg to have done before he announced the plan was to talk to the Ukrainians and the Russians first and to work out what their thinking is. I think coming up with a plan and presenting it--to the Russian, especially--might work in the world of real estate deals but, as I've said many times, international diplomacy is not the same thing.

So, anyway, I think that was a mistake. But Kellogg has committed himself to doing that. He will no doubt then go to Kiev and he will then go to Moscow. I presume at some point he will probably meet Ryabkov there and, perhaps, Lavrov and conceivably even Putin himself. But when the Russians say, No, I hope that the understanding exists in Washington that one should take that Russian No for an answer [Nyet means nyet.]. We are long past the point when the Russians can be bullied or pressured or forced or bribed into negotiating an outcome that they consider unsatisfactory to themselves. I don't believe that the Russians are going to make any sort of sudden concessions. I see no sign from any Russian official that that idea is even being entertained. I think the idea that massive sanctions across the board are going to change anything misreads both the reality of the Russian economy and the response of most countries around the world to the sanctions. Whether that ability, that imagination, to take No for an answer exists in Washington remains to be seen. But, as we enter the end game in Ukraine, it is the big question that we must wait to see the answer to.