Trump's Pivot On Ukraine Still Leaves The Onus On Europe

2025-07-21 02:01:43

(MENAFN- Asia Times) Everything that President Donald Trump says is unreliable, simply because he says so much and because he has succeeded in politics by making image and sensation his priority, rather than substance.

So if we want to decide how seriously to take his sudden reversal of position on helping Ukraine, the right people to listen to are the Ukrainians themselves and their opponents, the Russians. Neither has shown signs that they consider this American reversal to be truly game-changing.

President Volodymr Zelensky, of course, welcomed Trump's new promises to supply more weapons and missile-defense systems, contradicting a decision by the US Department of Defense just a week earlier, but Zelensky also promptly got on the phone to European leaders asking them to supply more weapons too, and urgently.

If you are fighting a war for national survival, the only weapons that truly count are the ones that actually arrive in the hands of your soldiers.

Until that happens, and with still no clear information about when American weapons will arrive, Trump's promise has some value in terms of the message it sends to Ukraine's invader, Vladimir Putin, but that value is strictly temporary until new things are said in the White House, and it saves no lives directly.

On his side, Putin has continued his army's“summer offensive” to try to seize more Ukrainian territory, has continued to bombard Ukrainian cities, and has stuck to the uncompromising list of conditions he says he requires before any serious ceasefire talks can occur.

In fact, in one important sense, Trump's announcement may have even relaxed the pressure on Putin to stop the fighting. While the decision to resume weapons deliveries was obviously important, an equally important decision may have been the one to set a 50-day deadline before any new economic sanctions will be imposed on Russia by the United States.

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