Trump's Eyes Opened on Putin. Now What Will He Do?

"I'm not happy with what Putin is doing. He's killing a lot of people, and I don't know what the hell happened to Putin," said Donald Trump on Truth Social over the holiday weekend.

"I've always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY! He is needlessly killing a lot of people, and I'm not just talking about soldiers. Missiles and drones are being shot into cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever."

Trump is not the only president who has stressed the importance of personal relationships with other nations' leaders. But even the most sympathetic relationships have been frayed by national interests rooted in history. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had rough patches over the Falklands and Grenada.

It seems possible that Reagan and inconceivable that Trump read Harvard historian Richard Pipes' volumes on Russian history, showing how the rulers of tiny Muscovy, starting with Ivan the Terrible, constantly expanded their domain over the featureless north European and Ukrainian plains, seeking ever more land and peoples as a buffer for those they already held.

Reagan appointed Pipes to his National Security Council and, as a close but secret follower of geopolitics (the movie magazines wouldn't have understood), observed Joseph Stalin's postwar expansion of Russian military suzerainty westward. When asked why he was bent on heading toward the Rhine, Stalin supposedly answered that Tsar Alexander I, after defeating Napoleon, took the Russian army all the way to Paris.

So Putin's assault on Ukraine, Russian territory from the time of Catherine the Great (Alexander's grandmother) to the fall of Mikhail Gorbachev, was an expression of a historic national impulse likely popular among his nation's ethnic Russian majority.

Trump's seeming astonishment that Putin "is needlessly killing a lot of people ... for no reason whatsoever" shows a reassuring horror at mass slaughter but also an innocence of knowledge about Putin's career.

In his 2004 book "Darkness at Dawn" and in later writings as well, Russian expert David Satter has written that Putin, the former KGB agent and aide to Saint Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak, arranged the 1999 bombing of four apartment buildings, killing 300 people, and blamed them on Chechen rebels.

To attack them, Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin prime minister and then resigned in return for pardons for him and his family. Putin promptly won the first of several elections from a wary electorate (which I observed briefly as a reporter in Moscow) that hoped he would be the "strong hand" that many have traditionally believed Russia needs.

That such a man would lodge the war's largest drone attack on Kyiv and Ukraine last weekend should not have come as a shock. Yet Trump is not the first American president who has seen Putin as just another politician whose not unreasonable concerns could be appeased.

George W. Bush was impressed by the cross Putin wore and his profession of religious faith, and admitted this misjudgment in his short memoir. Barack Obama sent Hillary Clinton out with a (mistranslated) reset button to the multilingual Russian foreign minister. Candidate Trump in 2016 admired Putin as a strong leader, which provided ammunition for the propagators of the Russia collusion hoax. Joe Biden declined to oppose the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which provided cheap natural gas (and dependence on Russia) to Germany and lots of euros to Putin.

In each case, American solipsism -- assuming that others are much like us -- that in tourists can be dismissed as a childish and charming innocence, has been the basis of a flawed and unsuccessful foreign policy.

An evidently unprepared Obama administration made no serious protest of Putin's seizure of Crimea and occupation of part of the industrial Donetsk in February 2014. The Biden administration, expecting Russia's tanks to quickly take Kyiv, ordered American diplomats evacuated in February 2022.

Trump states, correctly, that Putin launched no similar attacks while he was president. Whether that was from fear he would not similarly acquiesce or for unrelated reasons is and may always be unknowable. But last weekend's attacks may have opened Trump's eyes to Putin's true nature and undermined his disdain for Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky.

That disdain, and the dislike shown by JD Vance in the Feb. 28 Oval Office meeting, seems to have roots in the admiration of some cultural conservatives for Putin's repudiations of "woke" attitudes, a sense that he is a Christian protector of traditional values dismissed as bigotry by Western European and American coastal elites.

It may also be the case of some on the Right taking the same view of Ukraine's leaders that some on the Left took of Chiang Kai-shek and of South Vietnamese leaders in the Cold War. In this view, foreign authoritarians steeped in corruption are demanding that young Americans die to preserve their hold on power.

Such views are on vivid display in 1960s bestsellers like Barbara Tuchman's "Stilwell and the American Experience in China" and David Halberstam's "The Making of a Quagmire." We await a similar depiction of the Ukrainian regime.

For all the deficiencies of America's allies in those earlier conflicts, it would clearly have been better for the people of China and Vietnam had the Communists not prevailed. And for all the deficiencies of those America and Europe have been backing in Ukraine, Putin's cold-blooded prosecution of the war seems to have made it clear at last to Trump that the people of Ukraine and, arguably, Russia will be better off if he does not succeed.

What, if anything, Trump will do to end the war he promised to end is unclear. On his Truth Social post attacking Putin's actions, he also attacked Zelensky for "talking the way he does." As Walter Russell Mead wrote in his Wall Street Journal column this week, "President Trump sometimes does the right thing."

Sometimes. Now?

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Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, "Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America's Revolutionary Leaders," is now available.