MOAR Pointless Sanewashing of Trump via the Myths of a Rational-Actor "Trump Administration" & a Consistent-Preferences Trump
Leading to fundamentally misinforming your readers about what has been going on in the Trump-Putin relationship over the past year. When journalistic wishful thinking meets geopolitical reality...
Leading to fundamentally misinforming your readers about what has been going on in the Trump-Putin relationship over the past year. When journalistic wishful thinking meets geopolitical reality, the result is a narrative that misleads readers fundamentally. To write as if the Trump administration can be usefully modeled as a single agent with coherent and consistent preferences and goals that it tries to achieve via means-ends rational calculation and action is bad enough. To say that Vladimir Putin has “misplayed his cards” because he did not share your pointless either delusion or misrepresentation—that is worse…
Sean Illing asks me what I think about SubStack.
I answer: I think I need to figure out the answer to deep questions about the role of information technologies over the past five years in enabling/hobbling the construction of the time-binding anthology intelligence that is humanity before I will be able to think about SubStack. I do think it is a better place to spend time than Twitter or TikTok or the Atlantic or the **shudder** MainStreamMedia.
And, lo and behold, across my screen right now comes something telling me that there is something called a "Trump administration" that can be usefully modeled a singular intelligent agent with consistent and coherent positions and goals that it pursues via some means-ends rational-actor process:
Julian Barnes: Putin’s error <https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/dynamic/render>: ‘Trump and Putin’s relationship has curdled. It’s a strange turn…. Putin badly misplayed his cards…. He turned a potential White House ally into a skeptic…. Trump [had] promised... to quickly end the war in Ukraine.... His administration was skeptical about Ukraine’s NATO aspirations, ready to let Russia control the Ukrainian territory it had taken, disinclined to spend a lot on Kyiv’s defense and even open to recognizing Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. It was a peace offering that achieved many of Russia’s war aims...
This is pointless sanewashing.
Barnes seems to think that Trump had a position, that Trump would stick to that position, that there was a “Trump administration” that agreed with that position, and that it would pursue achieving goals via some rational means-ends calculation process. Thus Barnes seems to think that Putin had a very good chance, if he had coöperated with Trump, to get an ironclad peace in which he accomplished his war aims. But what are Putin’s war aims? As I understand them, they are:
(a) Russia gets legal recognition reversing Khrushchev’s mid-1950s award of Crimea to Ukraine,
(b) Russia keeps the territory it has conquered,
(c) NATO stops arming Ukraine,
(d) NATO provides ironclad guarantees that it will never accept Ukraine as a NATO member,
(e) Zelenskyi resigns, and is replaced by a more Putin-friendly Ukraine leader,
(f) Ukraine accepts these terms, and
(g) the European Union guarantees no monkey business.
What do I mean by no European-Union monkey business? No EU membership for Ukraine with the construction of an integrated EU military, no EU “training” battalions scattered throughout Ukraine, and no supernational institutions to reverse the Verdict of Putin and Trump and History that Ukrainska Rus’ was, is, and forever will be a vassal state of Moskovskaya Rus’.
Those are Putin’s minimal war aims. After all, if all Putin wanted was a ceasefire-in-place, he would not have to negotiate that. Simply stop attacking. Simply tell Ukraine that air attacks on Russian units and territory will be met by threefold responses, but that otherwise the missiles and drones of Muskovskaya Rus’ will not fly. And it would be done.
Could Trump deliver on that deal? Maybe. Maybe not. He would have to apply full-court pressure to override bitter and vocal Ukrainian and European objections. He would have to be consistent. And he would have to want to keep his promises and remember what promises he made.
And even if Trump wanted to keep his promises, put the wrong five people in a room with him for an hour, and he would decide that it would be a good idea to make a sudden, complete, 180-degree pro-Ukraine face-turn.
Only if there was a Trump administration that would set out (a) through (g) as the U.S. proposed settlement, and then spend lots of real political capital to enforce it, would Putin have any incentive to negotiate with Trump.
And there isn’t.
Putin knows that there is no such thing as a "Trump administration" that could be usefully modeled a singular intelligent agent with consistent and coherent positions and goals that it pursues via some means-ends rational-actor process. Putin knows that Trump does not really have positions, and that if he did have positions he would not stick to them, and that there is no Trump administration that believes in those positions and tries to carry them out to achieve goals. Putin knows that do Trump a favor so he will reciprocate is simply not how things work in the chaos-monkey administration.
And so Putin does what he does. And, by his lights, he has not misplayed his hand. The US and the EU each have four times the productive capacity of Muskovskaya Rus’. Against this power imbalance, Putin’s only edge is that he cares more about achieving his goals and cares less about the economic and human costs borne by the people he rules. For him to accept Trump demands for deëscalation and ceasefires without (c), (d), (e), (f), and (g) attached weakens his position. For, given Trump’s weathervane-like nature, starting down the path of making concessions to Trump would get him nowhere but to ceasefire-in-place. And should Putin decide that he will settle for that, he does not need to make any anticipatory concessions to Trump for that to happen.
Why should any journalist cling to the idea of a Trump administration as a consistent, calculating entity? This framework is delusional, and cannot lead to any accurate understanding of the Ukraine situation. And to judge Putin as mistaken because he does not share this delusion makes matters worse.
Well I think you are both wrong: Trump's policy toward Russia has been more consistent than you acknowledge and the most recent "threats" are just kayfabe.
It is amazing how much good press Trump gets for such bad actions.
Last week he was hailed as a hero for releasing ten (10) missiles to Ukraine, having just previously blocked a shipment of thirty (30). So far, congress has appropriated zero (0) dollars to support Ukraine under Trump's administration; all of the actions he has taken so far apply to assistance already approved by congress under Biden. For some reason, when Trump allows 10 of 30 of Biden's missiles through, that is supposed to be better than Biden forcing the Europeans to divert seven hundred (700) Patriot missiles to Ukraine in 2024.
Now you're trying to tell me that Trump has magically ginned up 17 new missile batteries for Ukraine? Even if it's true, the claim is only that *he is now allowing Europe to buy Patriots on Ukraine's behalf*. That is, he is no longer going to block those sales. Such a hero!
Finally, when translated to English, the threat of "severe sanctions withing 50 days" issued by Trump means "sanctions are suspended for 50 days". Teflon Don.
Very well said! Those who want the world to believe that Trump is not a weathervane truly have been on another planet. His entire agenda is to grab as much money as he can, get out, and leave it to someone else to try to clean up the mess.