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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2928 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 19, 2025

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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 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.

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