ON UKRAINE AND EUROPE
Ukraine and Europe have even harder calculations ahead. They remain vulnerable to Trump’s ability to nonchalantly withdraw America’s critical security umbrella. They will also be (with exceptions for Europe’s own far-right populists) hostile to his views on the role of democracy and the West. In this sense, they are more Trump’s enemies than Putin, and that is unlikely to shift.
Yet there’s also no change to the obstacles that have so far prevented him from securing the Ukraine-Russia deal and, with it, the peacemaker’s image that he clearly wants to be his legacy.
Logically, Trump’s calculation should be that if giving Putin the Ukrainian territory and European security concessions he wants in exchange for commercial deals beneficial to the US failed even when he controlled Congress, then perhaps now is the time to try the other approach. That would mean harnessing the pro-Ukraine sentiment of the incoming US lawmakers and pressuring Putin to compromise by making it clear that he will never achieve either Ukraine’s subjugation or the dismantling of NATO.
The Kremlin is betting that won’t happen. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov greeted Trump’s defeat by saying, “We sincerely count on him continuing his peace-making efforts,” for which read: attempting to force Ukraine and Europe to capitulate to Putin’s demands. Or as the state-controlled Rossiya 1 TV channel put it, the hope in Moscow is that: “Instead of a lame duck, the world might see a different bird, one more akin to an enraged eagle”.
