Seeing Pete Hegseth running around in Europe like he’s a serious person is hard to take but we have to put up with him. His pronouncements about NATO and Ukraine are pretty shocking but they come directly from Trump so you can’t really blame him.
Reporter Josh Rogin had a good analysis on CNN of Trump’s “deal making” yesterday that I think is interesting:
The problem is that that creates a series of events that‘s now going to unfold that could have drastic and negative consequences for both Ukraine and the U.S., not to mention Europe. And what I mean by that is that the way that they‘re setting up this negotiation by dealing with Putin first and Zelenskyy second, and trying to negotiate away Ukrainian territory and Ukrainian aspirations without talking to the Ukrainians, in my view, is destined to fail.
And that‘s a big problem, because, you know, even though Trump really wants a deal, he thinks this is going to be a great deal and that everything is going to go fine, it‘s pretty obvious that the way that he‘s setting it up, it‘s going to be a deal that neither Putin is going to support, and the Ukrainians are not going to support.
So when you get to the end of that process that Trump just started, oh, we‘re going to give away all the concessions first, then we‘re going to negotiate, then we‘re going to see what other concessions Putin wants, and then we‘re going to see what the Ukrainians want, well, that‘s very low chance of actually succeeding. So we‘ll be back where we started by having given away all these concessions.
That‘s the risk of doing it this way, which is sort of the bass ackwards way of negotiating, where you give the concessions first and then you start the negotiations, and then you try to convince the Ukrainians to give up their territory, which they‘re not going to do. So it‘s kind of a mess, actually.”
The thing is that Trump has discovered that he can create his own reality. He will be happy to give Putin all of western Europe if that’s what he wants and he’ll just say that he’s the winner and it’s all much better for Europe because they wanted to be Russians anyway. Or something. But the fact is that it won’t be the reality. Most likely it will be what Rogin says and yes, it’s a mess. But what else is new?
Guess what?