What Is Trump's Legacy?

Now and then I see a piece that reflects on Trump's actual legacy, or perhaps what things might have been like had he won reelection. Last month I covered some revisionist opinion that reexamined his disastrous mistakes on COVID: He imposed lockdowns and extended them when they didn't work; he elevated Dr Fauci, who promptly undermined him in the name of "science"; he sent the hospital ships to New York and LA, which proved laughably unnecessary. In contrast, Gov DeSantis's reputation is rising as a more level-headed leader.

This is especially worth noting as we move into 2023 and are still recovering from lockdowns, the inflationary stimulus payments they generated, and supply chain disruptions from the same source. Although court decisions limited the worst of the the lockdown overreach, it is now accepted in at least some quarters that public health authorities can continue to impose masking, mandate vaccinations, close parks and beaches, and shut down businesses. Trump himself proved utterly feckless in restraining this and allowed Fauci to portray himself as Trump's foil.

The other Trump initiative that's aged poorly has been the effort to de-emphasize NATO and rely on direct negotiations with Putin. According to the New York Times,

Senior administration officials told The New York Times that several times over the course of 2018, Mr. Trump privately said he wanted to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Current and former officials who support the alliance said they feared Mr. Trump could return to his threat as allied military spending continued to lag behind the goals the president had set.

In the days around a tumultuous NATO summit meeting last summer [2018], they said, Mr. Trump told his top national security officials that he did not see the point of the military alliance, which he presented as a drain on the United States.

Instead,

On Thursday, November 7, 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron deemed NATO “brain dead.” Three years later, here is a dead man in full form!

The Atlantic Alliance is indeed contributing, by its supply to its Ukrainian ally of weapons, ammunition, air intelligence, and officer training, to tearing the reputation of the Russian army to shreds, whose spectacular deficiencies in logistics, equipment, officer corps, training and conduct of operations are now visible to the whole world, neighbors, adversaries, or allies.

With, as a bonus, the destruction of half of Russia's 3,500 operational tanks, 45% of its infantry tanks, 10% of its air force and its fleet, and the volatilization of the majority of its ballistic and cruise missiles (excluding nuclear). The strict financial cost of this support (i.e., excluding the impact of soaring energy prices on the economy, which would probably have been very important even if NATO had not supported Kyiv), is minimal compared to the resources devoted by the Alliance to its defense.

This is certainly not to say that Russia's invasion of Ukraine suddenly slapped President Macron upside the head, and now he sees things clearly. Au contraire,

French President Emmanuel Macron's statement on Saturday that the West should consider how to address Russia's need for security guarantees to end the war in Ukraine has drawn sharp criticism from some quarters, rejecting the option of making concessions to the Kremlin after nearly 10 months of the war.

. . . "This means that one of the essential points we must address -- as President (Vladimir) Putin has always said -- is the fear that NATO comes right up to its doors and the deployment of weapons that could threaten Russia," Macron said.

The problem with Macron's point of view is that there's no guarantee that Putin will ever negotiate in good faith, and he'll use any concessions NATO makes to rebuild his forces and renew the invasion whenever it suits him. This says to me that the West is still working its way through the implcations of the Russo-Ukraine War, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the only stable outcome will need to be the dismantling of the Russian empire.

The problem for Trump is that he's had so little to say about Ukraine since the war began. I think we can take his occasional remarks that Putin wouldn't have invaded Ukraine if he'd still been president to mean that he and Putin had an informal understanding that the US would quietly treat the post-2014 borders as fait accompli, and we would also oppose Ukraine joining NATO, in return for which Putin would not invade the rest of Ukraine. In at least Trump's mind, Putin would fear Trump's potential response too much to break this informal agreement.

Subsequent developments have made any such assumption questionable, although Biden's botched withdrawal from Kabul must also have figured into Putin's calculations last winter. Nevertheless, at this point, there's no realistic way the world can quietly return to the post-2014 borders, and no reason it should -- Ukraine at this point looks fully capable of returning to the internationally recognized borders, and it will have the side effect of rendering Russia militarily inconsequential.

A secondary question is how Western intelligence completely missed Russia's military weakness, but if this implicates Bush fils, Obama, and Biden, it also implicates Trump. Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel were both Trump appointees at the CIA, and as far as we can tell, they both missed the actual state of the Russian military as much as any of the others. Had they known, how would this have affected policy? Shouldn't Trump be willing to address this in some way?

Trump has had nothing to offer about this new state of affairs, which if he's reelected in 2024, he or any other president of either party will need to deal with. Given the current state of his public remarks, I'm starting to lose confidence he'll be able to do this.