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Can Trump Be the One to Finally Curb Russia's Putin?

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, file

Every time I see something about Vladimir Putin these days, the classic coyote-roadrunner cartoon series comes to mind. 

Wile E. Coyote is always trying to catch the annoying beep-beep roadrunner with all kinds of clever and hare-brained schemes, thanks to explosives, rockets, and other handy devices, always from the Acme family of companies. 

Wile E. is forever failing. And forever trying again.

That is always good for laughs. Vladimir Putin is not. Nor is he an innocent annoyance, and definitely not funny. For a quarter-century, the former KGB colonel has ignored, outrun, and (excuse me) outfoxed the West’s attempts to corral his evil territorial ambitions to restore some semblance of the Soviet empire that produced him.

So far, he has succeeded in outrunning all those attempts. He just continues on blithely and ruthlessly, spending upwards of 1,000 Russian lives every week in his ill-founded, three-year invasion of Ukraine. 

Add to that hundreds of Ukrainian deaths from combat and waves of Russian drone attacks on helpless civilian targets.

President after president and European leader after European leader have condemned Putin’s designs and tactics to no avail. Unsolicited, Barack Obama even canceled an important missile defense system in Eastern Europe to buy goodwill in Moscow. It had no effect, except to undercut allies in Eastern Europe.

Putin, however, may have come up against his match in Donald Trump. The American leader has had good things to say about Putin in the past. And initially this term, Trump had appeared to lean harder on Ukraine to end that bloody conflict that Kyiv did not seek but has fought valiantly to endure with Western help.

The Russian dictator’s two-faced response has been characteristically Putin – sound nice about ending the killing that he began, but continue the deadliness, especially against civilians. 

This is not new for Putin. His critics abroad have died from radiation poisoning. Domestic critics have become an endangered species, with dozens mysteriously exiting windows in high-rise buildings.

But now, possibly staged administration leaks indicate the patience of the U.S. commander in chief and his advisors and even some congressional Republicans is wearing thin with the Russian’s obvious stalling. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson put it this way:

Putin has shown an unwillingness to be reasonable and to talk seriously about brokering a peace, and I think we have to send him a message — that's my view,

Characteristically, Trump put it a bit more bluntly during a Cabinet meeting:

We get a lot of bull***t thrown at us by Putin … He's very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless,

We never know – and, frankly, we’re not supposed to know — if this is just part of Trump's maneuvering for a deal, much like his back and forth on tariff talks and deadlines. 

But the tougher talk toward the Russian leader was welcome to the ears of those who believe appeasing bullies only prolongs the strife and actually invites more. And to be honest, depleting Russian military capability at no cost in American or NATO ally lives is not a bad deal at the cost of only military equipment, much of it fueling U.S. jobs and sold at a profit by Americans. 

Already, Trump has authorized new arms shipments to Ukraine via NATO allies, who have sent billions in aid themselves.

History suggests Putin now is likely to make a friendly gesture – perhaps some kind of ceasefire that his forces will violate anyway – just to ease the pressures. That’s worked with past administrations eager for the appearance of a deal, which gets broken anyway. Putin's public suggestion to Iran could be an indication.

But Trump 2.0 is different. Iran’s mullahs learned that the hard way after ignoring Trump’s offer to negotiate recently with the over-night delivery of 30,000-pound bombs by B-2 stealth bombers on three sites building nuclear weapons.

Iran’s proxy troublemakers, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, have also suffered serious damage in tag-team attacks with Israel.

The last Trump-Putin phone call reportedly did not go well. It was followed by hundreds of new Russian drones falling on residential areas of Ukraine, seeking to create fear and corrode morale.

Now, the billionaire who became leader of the free world is a transactional man. You do deals, piece-by-piece, one-by-one. Bargain hard. Threaten to walk away. Come back to the table. Win some, lose some.

That’s the way it worked well in real estate, and we’ll see now how well that works in international diplomacy, and the drive for a potential Nobel Peace Prize.

The harsh reality, however, is that the 72-year-old Putin has nothing to lose by continuing the war and everything to lose by quitting without a victory. He cares nothing about the war’s casualties, now around one million.

He’s now getting help from North Korea and China, which is delighted to keep the U.S. occupied in Europe while it expands influence in Southeast Asia.

The threat of new sanctions on Russia, even their reality, is great for photo-ops in the free world. They were effective in 1992, forcing an end to apartheid in South Africa. 

But since then, nothing. When Putin unilaterally annexed two provinces of Georgia in 2008, sanctions did nothing. Likewise, in 2014, sanctions for annexing Crimea and two provinces of Ukraine changed no policies.

In fact, Joe Biden’s sanctions on Russia after the 2022 invasion not only failed to curtail it — they boosted the price of Russian oil exports, helping to finance his war. 

Putin, who faces no popular restraints, is counting on waning war endurance in Western democracies subject to voter disapproval. He hopes the ongoing political and financial costs of supporting Ukraine come to outweigh the possible future threat of a Putin win in Ukraine, fueling his future expansionist dreams.

Putin is sponsoring unrest to weaken the government next door in Moldova, which is not a NATO member. Other potential targets like the Baltic States, Finland, or even Poland are NATO members. 

Invasions there should involve instant help from all 33 members under the mutual defense obligations of Article 5, including the United States, which got alliance help in Afghanistan that way after 9/11. Trump has raised the possibility of the U.S. not helping unless all members jack up their own defense spending.

Trump has also suggested “peace” in Ukraine could involve Russia keeping what it has already conquered, including Crimea. 

For now, Volodymyr Zelensky rejects that, accurately pointing out that Moscow already violated an agreement to respect the country’s sovereignty when it gave up all its nuclear weapons in 1994. Why would it honor any new agreement?

The Republican president’s reputation and unpredictability appear to have earned him some standing with Putin, among other world leaders. The Russian’s annexations in Ukraine came during Obama’s second term. 

When Trump became president, they stopped. Then, not coincidentally, less than two months after Trump left and Biden took office, Putin began organizing the Ukraine invasion, which came in February of 2022.

Another wrinkle to complicate Trump’s pressure on Putin is the concern that too much pressure could topple the 5-foot-seven strongman. He is not a nice man. And term limits in the Soviet Union and now Russia come suddenly and terminally without popular vote. 

No guarantee that a Putin replacement would be any better, perhaps even worse. And there’s the possibility that the country of 144 million in an area nearly twice the size of the U.S. could split into feuding fiefdoms, each with its own rogue leadership and stash of nuclear weapons.

Creators of the Roadrunner cartoons had a set of rules for every episode of the iconic series. One of them was that the coyote’s perpetual failure to stop the roadrunner must generally be due to his own ineptitude. 

In my imagination, the real-life version of that ongoing confrontation between not-so-wily coyote and slick roadrunner ends with the American president finally corralling the shifty Putin.

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