This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Who could forget the riveting moment, during the high Cold War tensions of the early 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan strode to the White House podium and told the American people that Soviet leader Yuri Andropov had “gone absolutely crazy.” Raising his voice to a yell, Reagan thundered that Andropov was bombarding thousands of people in the middle of Europe “for no reason whatsoever” and warned Moscow that “it better stop.”
No one remembers this, of course, because it didn’t happen. Once upon a time, Americans expected their presidents to be steady hands. Times have changed: These quotes are from one of Donald Trump’s latest rhetorical blasts on his Truth Social site. Trump wanted to let everyone know that he is very, very upset with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s continuing campaign of civilian slaughter in Ukraine.
Sunday’s outburst wasn’t the first time that the American president publicly asked his counterpart in the Kremlin to behave himself. More than a month ago, after Putin unleashed a wave of drones and missiles on Kyiv, Trump took to Truth Social: “Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP!” You could almost hear the whining, like a high schooler complaining that a member of the posse is being so embarrassing. (The Kremlin, for its part, responded yesterday to Trump’s tirade by suggesting that he’s suffering from “emotional overload.”)
Perhaps the only moment in recent U.S.-Russia relations that approaches this kind of fecklessness occurred when then–State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki tried to shame Russia out of its 2014 invasion of Crimea with a hashtag campaign. (When the State Department tried to get #UnitedForUkraine trending, the Russian foreign ministry appropriated the slogan, turned it around to connote that Russia was united in its determination to seize Crimea, and started trolling the American government with it.) Putin didn’t care then, and he won’t care now.
Trump apparently still believes that he has some personal connection to Putin, that he and the Kremlin dictator are peers and he can sway his friend to come back to his senses. “I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him,” Trump wrote in his post on Sunday, but this is not true, unless Trump thinks that being the obedient Renfield to Putin’s charming Dracula counts as a “good” relationship. And Putin hasn’t changed: He’s pursuing his war as viciously as he has from the start.
What has changed, however, is that Putin’s behavior is now a liability for Trump, who painted himself into a corner with laughable claims that he could end the war before he even took office, or on day one. The Russian president played along with Trump, as he has for years, because it is in Russia’s interest to have an anti-American, anti-democratic force of chaos in the Oval Office, but none of that meant that Putin was going to stop the war.
One positive sign in Trump’s frustration is that the American president is finally admitting that Putin is bent on the total conquest of Ukraine. “I’ve always said,” Trump wrote, “that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it.” This is some creative historical revisionism; Trump has long blamed former President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the war. He also has surrounded himself with advisers and supporters who cling to the canard that Russia had some sort of legitimate security interest in attacking Ukraine, but now Putin and Trump are on the same page: The war is about Russia’s attempt to absorb a neighboring state.
Trump has added Putin to the list of people responsible for the war, not because he has had an epiphany, but because (at least to judge by his message) he is, as usual, desperate to escape responsibility for his own failure to live up to his promises: “This is a War that would never have started if I were President,” the Truth Social post continues. “This is Zelenskyy’s, Putin’s, and Biden’s War, not ‘Trump’s,’ I am only helping to put out the big and ugly fires, that have been started through Gross Incompetence and Hatred.”
Evading blame is the kind of thing that obsesses Trump, but the only question that likely interests Putin is whether any of this will result in a meaningful change in American policy. Trump is eager to reduce U.S. sanctions on Russia, but Putin keeps making conciliatory moves impossible. Yesterday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz took charge of the Free World’s response to Putin’s atrocities—someone has to—and said that Western weapons could be used in Ukraine without range limits. “There are no longer any range restrictions on weapons delivered to Ukraine—neither by the British nor by the French nor by us nor by the Americans.” The Russians immediately denounced this as a “dangerous” move, and it is—for Russia.
Putin’s forces are in bad shape. (You don’t call in the North Koreans for help when things are going well.) And so the Kremlin has returned to the strategy it adopted when Russia’s invasion plans melted down in 2022: a campaign of terror and war crimes to break Kyiv’s will to resist. Removing range restrictions on Western weapons will help weaken that strategy, but the Ukrainians, as ever, need more help than they’re getting.
The United States might be in a better position to force concessions or even a cease-fire from Russia if it had a functional national-security team. Instead, Trump has stocked the institutions of American national defense with incompetent sycophants. Trump’s most prominent special envoy to Russia is a real-estate developer. The secretary of defense is a TV personality who mostly seems interested in bringing more bro culture into the military while his Pentagon falls into disarray. The national-intelligence services are under the charge of an unreliable former member of Congress who has clear sympathy for Russia and has reposted an anti-Western internet troll on her X account. The secretary of state is overseeing four different organizations, including the National Security Council where he is engaging in a purge of staff. (Several NSC staff were already fired in an apparent response to the demands of an oddball conspiracy theorist.)
The Kremlin—and other U.S. enemies—are unlikely to take such people seriously. Today, Trump pleaded again with Putin, posting on Truth Social that “if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire!” This is a typically hyperbolic Trump formulation: Trump’s record on Russia suggests that Putin need not worry. Indeed, Trump’s election was, for Russia, a lucky break, a breather when the Kremlin needed it most. Nothing is going to change until Putin sees more costs for his actions—and the president stamping his feet on social media doesn’t count.
Related:
Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Today’s News
- The Trump administration is planning to cancel the government’s remaining contracts with Harvard University, estimated to total $100 million.
- Britain’s King Charles III delivered a speech in Canada that seemed to defend Canadian sovereignty in the face of President Donald Trump’s annexation threats.
- The New York Times reported that Trump pardoned a man who pleaded guilty to tax crimes after his mother attended a Mar-a-Lago fundraising dinner last month that cost $1 million a person.
Dispatches
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
Unraveling the Secrets of the Inca Empire
By Sam Kean
The heaps of khipus emerged from garbage bags in the back of the tiny, one-room museum—clumps of tangled ropes the size of beach balls. Sabine Hyland smiled as she gazed down at them and said, “Qué lindo, qué lindo”: how beautiful. Hyland, an anthropologist, had traveled here to the remote mountain village of Jucul in the Peruvian Andes to study them, in the hope of unlocking one of the most important lost writing systems in history, that of the Inca empire.
Read the full article.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Watch. Sirens (streaming on Netflix) is the show of the summer, and it has a dark heart, Sophie Gilbert writes.
To believe or not to believe. Students are growing less religious. Many chaplains are adapting, Cornelia Powers writes.
Play our daily crossword.
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
Source link
