Since US President Donald Trump decided to rebrand the Defense Department as the “Department of War”, to more accurately reflect how tough he is, I suggest we rebrand the White House as “The Waffle House” – to more accurately reflect Trump’s incessant waffling when it comes to actually doing something to deter Vladimir Putin’s steadily increasing onslaught on Ukraine, not to mention his recent drone incursion into America’s NATO ally, Poland.

I was in Ukraine last week, attending the Yalta European Strategy conference in the capital, Kyiv, and interviewing Ukrainian and European officials, analysts and entrepreneurs. Some version of the same question came up quietly in almost every private conversation: What in the world is going on with your president? Putin keeps spitting in Trump’s eye and Trump keeps telling the world that it’s raining.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin with US President Donald Trump in Alaska last month. Credit: AP

No one wants to say this publicly right now. Indeed, at the opening of the conference, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky could not have expressed more gratitude to Trump, as did several key NATO foreign ministers and national security advisers. They are clearly hoping that if everyone pretends that Trump is doing a lot – letting NATO allies use their own money to buy arms for Kyiv, even though Trump has not allocated a dime of fresh US money to do so – the US president will not abandon Ukraine altogether.

But our European allies were aghast last week at Trump’s response to the swarm of about 20 drones that Russia sent across Polish borders, prompting NATO to scramble fighter jets to shoot them down. While Poland’s Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, told his parliament the episode was “the closest we have been to open conflict since World War II”, all that Trump could muster was a post on his Truth Social platform: “What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!”

A day later, though, he made clear he was going nowhere. “It could have been a mistake,” he said of the drone penetration.

(According to the German publication,........

© The Sydney Morning Herald