Let’s play compare and contrast.
President Biden announced Friday that the United States and its allies will move to cut off normal trade relations with Russia. It’s the latest sign that Biden and the West are working in concert to maximize pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin amid the mounting humanitarian horrors of his invasion of Ukraine.
Former president Donald Trump, meanwhile, suggested on Fox News Thursday night that Biden should respond to the invasion by personally threatening to obliterate Russia with nuclear weapons. He decried Biden as weak for failing to do so.
We don’t know whether Trump would actually escalate nuclear threats in a situation like this. But we do know this: Even as the United States marshals a robust international response built around maximal economic leverage, for Trump, the key decisive factor must reflexively be reduced to perceptions of unilateral U.S. military strength and the leader’s manly willingness to unleash maximal destructive force.
This contrast raises questions about what it might look like if Trump is president in 2025, in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We constantly talk about Trump’s efforts to align our interests with Putin’s, and against Ukraine, during his presidency. But all that should also inform a debate that’s forward-looking as well.
If Trump runs for president again and wins, he’ll be charting relations with Russia, NATO and Ukraine in the aftermath of this war, possibly while Putin’s conquest expands, or possibly while Ukrainians fight a brutal resistance against Russian occupation.
Trump’s new interview with Sean Hannity shows what a disaster that could prove. Hannity practically pleaded with Trump to describe the situation with moral clarity, yet he largely demurred. At the same time, Trump claimed Putin would never dare invade in the face of Trump’s towering strength, and said Putin only acted now due to Biden’s weakness.
For Trump, it’s a measure of that weakness that Biden won’t threaten nuclear strikes. As Trump suggested, Biden should remind Putin that “we are a nuclear nation,” while advertising our ability to “wipe out Russia.”
But beyond that, note Trump’s deep inability to conceptualize the situation as an extremely complicated and difficult one without easy or good options. And note his continuing contempt for the ongoing response, which is extraordinary to witness but involves rallying international alliances and doesn’t rely on maximal (and unilateral) displays of performative strength.
This is particularly galling at a moment when the invasion has revitalized NATO and the Western alliance and stirred hopes for a rehabilitated international order of sorts. Conservative writer Matt Lewis points out that former Trump advisers believe he might withdraw from NATO in a second term, and asks: “If Donald Trump gets reelected in 2024, is NATO toast?”
Obviously the international response has not been enough to dissuade Putin, and we don’t know if it will be enough. There are more things Biden can do. We may soon face the crushing realization that the international response has failed, and it’s unclear where we’ll be then.
But as of now, that response has defied expectations, and those gains might be imperiled by a President Trump in 2025. How would a reelected Trump handle various situations in the aftermath of this war, such as partial Putin control over Ukraine combined with ferocious ongoing resistance, or Putin widening the lens of conquest?
Trump sympathizers might note that his tough talk about threatening Russia with nuclear annihilation shows he’s on Ukraine’s side. But that doesn’t really tell us much. Opinion among Republican lawmakers is running strong against Putin: Most have condemned the invasion and support maximal efforts against it. Heck, even Hannity is prodding Trump to condemn Putin.
In this environment, Trump is groping his way toward an explicitly anti-Putin position. But this says nothing about how he would approach more complicated questions about our relationship with NATO and our allies, and it seems like extreme folly to imagine he’d seek to build on Biden’s approach.
Heather Hurlburt, a foreign-policy analyst with New America, notes that this moment should spur Republicans to ask themselves such questions. Some Republicans, Hurlburt notes, seem to be seizing this moment to marginalize pro-Putin sentiment in the GOP, but once passions fade over Ukraine, that might become harder if Trump becomes its standard-bearer.
“Republicans who are pleased to see the reemergence of their party as an important support for trans-Atlanticism need to ask themselves whether that’s compatible with a second Trump presidency,” Hurlburt told me.
It should be noted that some analysts think the moral climate has shifted so overwhelmingly amid the invasion that Trump couldn’t revert to his previous pro-Putin, anti-West tendencies.
“Whoever the American people elect in that circumstance will continue to both support Ukraine and lead the NATO alliance,” former Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr., who testified during Trump’s first impeachment, told me.
Hopefully we won’t have to find out whether this applies to Trump. But in his case, it seems extremely dubious to count on such an outcome.
