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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2928 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 19, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Do you think that Trump's strategy in Ukraine is just him messing with EU leaders, because he knows how much hate and contempt they and their societies feel towards him (and showed it during 2016-2024) and he just enjoys their squeals? Dangling some help and resolution that will never materialize, especially since Europe is no longer of interest for USA.

I'm not sure if Trump has a strategy. He plays by instinct and the seat of his pants, as he does in many other situations. It's got him this far, why quit now?

and he just enjoys their squeals?

This is you imputing your revenge fantasy on geopolitics.

he knows how much hate and contempt they and their societies feel towards him

You write this like you think Europeans wake up every day and go "awe fuck trump is alive, fuck I hate that guy", they don't (they reserve that daily affirmation of hatred for Gypsies, lol).

The opinions you see as presented to you by rage and engagement maximizing algorithms are not real life.

you think Europeans wake up every day and go "awe fuck trump is alive, fuck I hate that guy"

If Canada is any indication, the answer to that question is ‘yes’.

Europe isn’t Canada

I am European and even in my eastern europe backwater the pro EU parts of the intellectual yet idiot class foam at the mouth at every mention of Trump.

You write this like you think Europeans wake up every day and go "awe fuck trump is alive, fuck I hate that guy", they don't

Most people aren't very political, so you're right about that, but the ones that are... ho boy...

I don't think Trump cares too much how much they squeal. He does want to have a "peace achieved" badge on his belt, but he is not overly concerned whether or not some particular EU squealers are happy with it, as long as he is happy with it. The problem with this is you can't really have peace without Putin actually giving the peace, and the latter has zero interest in it so far, unless he achieves either swallowing Ukraine fully or a reasonable approximation of it that can be sold as such.

No.

Trump doesn’t actually play 5D chess. I don’t see any reason he’d set up a gambit like that. No, trickling aid to Ukraine lets him score some points without actually committing much materiel.

Humiliation of the people that looked down on you for 10+ years is hardly 5d chess.

I’m saying if he really cared about humiliating them he wouldn’t bother “dangling” aid.

I think we've seen what Trump does when he wants to humiliate someone. He's going to be direct and crude, not act coy.

No.

I think Trump would very much dislike having a loss on his record as president, and bounces back and forth on whether that means he needs to push negotiation at any cost, or that he needs to keep Ukraine from losing, or if he can just blame the whole thing on Biden and pretend the USA didn't lose.

It's pretty similar to the gyrations of Nixon and Kissinger during the Vietnam war and the Decent Interval combined with bombing Laos and Cambodia.

I think Trump wants to get out of Ukraine without taking blame for it.

EU leaders are fully committed to Ukraine as part of their grand EU project, but don't want to commit their own resources on scale or take the blame for failure. EU foreign policy experts are basically in a state of delusional groupthink.

So Trump is doing a dance where he acts cooperative enough that they won't all band together and blame Trump while also attaching conditions that EU leaders are unwilling to meet.

He probably enjoys messing with them, but not enough to actually affect his behaviour.

I think Trump wants to get out of Ukraine without taking blame for it.

I think this is the core of the issue from a Trump admin perspective. Trump came into office wanting to stop the fighting (and take credit for it), and believed that there was an easy deal to do where Ukraine gives up territory that Russia already controls, the US recognises Russian sovereignty in Crimea and promises not to let Ukraine into NATO, and everyone agrees some kind of face-saving arrangement so that Ukraine can feel safe from Little Green Men XVIII - Whoops I did it again. I strongly suspect (because it was and still is the standard position among most MAGA-adjacent foreign policy thinkers, and because it is consistent with what he says when he is in a pro-Russian mood) that he thought that the only reason why Ukraine hadn't accepted this deal was that the US Deep State was encouraging Ukraine's unreasonable belief that it could regain lost territory.

Trump has now learned that

  • Putin doesn't want a deal where there is still an anti-Russian government in Kyiv. The real Russian war aims are about sovereignty (or "neutrality" when pro-Russian voices are talking to Westerners), not territory. And unless and until he takes a bigger beating than he has done to date, he isn't willing to agree to one. Likewise, he isn't interested in a temporary ceasefire along the current front line. (Ukraine has publicly said that they are open to this, but it is likely that they only said that knowing that Putin wouldn't agree, and that the Zelenskyy regime doesn't want a clean temporary ceasefire either).
  • Ukraine and Western Europe have credibly signalled that they won't co-operate with a face-saving surrender agreement - if Trump tries to sell out Ukraine the way Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia or Nixon sold out South Vietnam, the Ukrainians will probably tell him to pound sand and keep fighting, and Western Europe will continue to support them to the best of our ability. Whichever side wins that war, Trump looks like a loser.

The logic of MAGA thought is that the Trump administration's response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine should be "Not my circus, not my monkeys" but once Trump has said he will fix the problem his ego won't let him do that.

There aren’t a lot of good solutions for Ukraine. It’s like trying to give a mouse stuck in a glue trap helpful advice on how to get out. The only way for Ukraine to actually win would be to send half a million NATO troops to openly fight the Russians in Ukraine. That would be dicey for multiple reasons. Other than that, you can continue military aid and hope for the best. Trump doesn’t like Zelensky, and he’s annoyed by the EU’s cheapskate attitude toward military spending. But he’s always been more pro-Ukraine than is widely reported, he was the first president to start sending them weapons.

There aren’t a lot of good solutions for Ukraine.

The only "realistic" solution for ukraine right now is Russia holds the territory (taking it back will be way too bloody), but forfeits the assets and pay additional hundred or two billion more over decades as reparations. Guess what - it is unacceptable for everyone.

Europe should just confiscate the Russian assets it has had frozen over the last few years and use them to arm Ukraine. Those add up to more than a hundred billion.

One hundred billion dollars sounds like a lot, but when you’re talking about funding the western military industrial complex it’s not as much as you would think. Ukraine has already gotten about 430 billion dollars worth of aid. So the impounded funds would be enough to sustain the current level of aid for about another year. And that’s putting aside @ArjinFerman’s very good point about transmuting money into actual tanks.

Couple of problems with that approach - there is additional reputational damage about EU being a good place for your money, especially when Germany and France's economies are going down the drain. Second - it is not clear that this will be enough money to turn the tide of the war. And there is not even certainty that there is even enough materiel on the market to be bought and gifted to Ukraine. No one is too keen on giving their latest toys to Ukraine, or even second to last gen - they know China has lots of advisers and they are taking notes. And there will be a problem if they are needed somewhere else and china has figured a way to make the wunderwaffes a lot less wunder will be a nasty surprise. The 4000 thousand tomahawks the US have will be worth a lot less if their efficacy suddenly becomes comparable to obsidian tomahawks.

And of course the big question - what happens when those money are over and there is no breakthrough?

Money makes for poor munitions.

They could simply pay $500k to every deserting Russian soldier. That's 200000 deserters. Could have somewhat of a cobra effect, though.

Imagining a world where wars are settled by each side bidding on each others deserters

I’m pretty sure a couple of Roman wars were settled this way.

I mean... it's kind of the best explanation that fits.

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