Eric Ciaramella, Aaron David Miller, and Andrew S. Weiss
Andrew S. Weiss: I wish I could give you a bumper-sticker assessment without putting it in a bigger frame. And the bigger frame is that Trump has been trying to put Ukraine on the back burner and get on to some bigger reconciliation or relaunch of the U.S.-Russia relationship since he became a candidate for president in 2016. At every turn, he tries to overcorrect or simplify U.S.-Russian relations, and the reason for that has never been well-defined either by him or members of his administration. Alaska’s the most recent manifestation of that effort.
Every single time Trump tries to say, “Let’s solve the Ukraine problem,” he keeps being hit upside the head by reality, which is that this is a major point of departure in Russia’s relationship with the outside world to launch a war of aggression of this scale. Ending it is not something that’s really in the hands of the United States president unless he’s willing to throw Ukraine under the bus. In Alaska there seems to have been yet another attempt by the Russians to say, “This could all be over really quickly if Ukraine would either surrender territory or agree to give up its sovereignty.” That’s not easy for Ukraine’s leaders to sign off on unless they wanted to commit political suicide. It was yet again one of these moments of false overpromising by the president and his team.
They seem in Alaska to have heard a couple things from Putin that, upon close scrutiny, just don’t check out. One, this is not a war about territory, and if it was just about where you draw the line of control in Eastern Ukraine, this war probably could have been resolved some time ago. Two, the terms of what the U.S. side was portraying as a big Russian concession and that there’s now some new opening for a security guarantee by the United States—that’s just not there as well. And then lastly, the president seems to think that this is a crisis that could be resolved simply by putting people in a room. This is not a situation that is going to lend itself to an emergency set of convenings and be resolved quickly.
No comments:
Post a Comment