President Donald Trump’s sincere desire for peace in Ukraine is laudatory. His chances of achieving it are advanced not by courting Putin, but rather by standing firm. Trump, both in person and through symbolic gestures, has been more accommodating of Putin than any other US president, with very little to show for it. It’s time to change tack and take a cue from Ronald Reagan, who asked Gorbachev to “tear down the (Berlin) wall” and got it done. Reagan is the only US president to engage a Soviet or Russian head of state and achieve a desired result. Trump can be the second by looking Putin in the eye and stating, “Leave Ukraine alone or face consequences.”

Putin is at best an unreliable partner and a manipulative deviant. He has made an art of manipulating US presidents. He let President George W Bush “get a sense of his soul.” He lulled Obama into disparaging Mitt Romney when the latter suggested Russia as America’s greatest threat, and followed by dispatching Lavrov to make a fool of Hillary Clinton’s “Reset.” He convinced Trump in Helsinki to accept the Kremlin’s assessments over those of his own US national security staff. He riddled the Biden White House with fear of escalation, forcing it to resort to congenital bouts of half-measures and rethink arming Ukraine to defend its territories.

Recently, President Trump went to Alaska, determined to secure a ceasefire, only to return repeating Putin’s desire for a full peace deal instead. Putin’s subterfuge of American presidents is only surpassed by his mockery of a long line of European counterparts—Angela Merkel, Olaf Scholz, and Emmanuel Macron in particular.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently gave voice to a fact known to every foreign policy realist in America and Europe:

President Putin, since the historic meeting in Anchorage, since the phone call, when the European leaders and President Zelensky were at the White House…has done the opposite of following through on what he indicated he wanted to do. As a matter of fact, he has, in a despicable, despicable manner,........

© The National Interest