"They Have All The Cards"

Trump talked about who has the cards again on Friday:

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump urged Ukraine to "get on the ball and get a job done" as he expressed frustration over Kyiv's position over peace talks, saying he found it "more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine."

. . . "As you know, we're meeting in Saudi Arabia on, sometime next week, early, and we're talking - what I find that in terms of getting a final settlement, it may be easier dealing with Russia, which is surprising because they have all the cards," Trump said.

When asked whether he believes Putin when the Russian leader says he wants peace, Trump responded, "Yeah... I believe him."

"I think he wants to get it stopped and settled and I think he's hitting them harder than he's been hitting them and I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now," Trump said.

He referred again to Ukraine, saying "They don’t have the cards", the same thing he said to Zelensky a week earlier, while he also said in February

he believes Russia has "the cards" in any peace talks to end the war in Ukraine because Russia has "taken a lot of territory".

On the other hand,

U.S. President Donald Trump is "giving away his cards" to Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia.

McFaul was an Obama advisor from 2008 to 2011 and Ambassador to Russia from 2011 to 20l4. He has been generally aligned with Democrat establishment policy on Ukraine, and it isn't entirely clear what cards he thinks Trump holds. (Nor is it clear why McFaul resigned as ambassador in February 2014, concurrent with the Maidan revolution in Ukraine.)

But this brings me back to the business-school analysis of Trump's negotiating style, part of which I linked yesterday:

Speaking on a television talk show in 2009, he emphatically told the audience that one key to a successful negotiation is “to be able to size up your opponent” (Trump 2009b).

This advice reflects Trump’s belief that he is a keen interpersonal observer, unusually effective in assessing the power resources of his counterparts (Ferguson 2018). He prepares for a negotiation by learning as much as possible about the other side’s strengths and vulnerabilities. “Know thy adversary” may be a well‐accepted bargaining principle (e.g., Raiffa 1982), but Trump’s emphasis on this aspect of negotiation preparation is notable: “You’ve got to know what the other side wants and where they’re coming from,” he wrote in Why We Want You to Be Rich (Trump and Kiyosaki 2011: 148). And, Trump advised his earlier television audience regarding potential negotiation interlocutors, “when they’re on the other side of the table, that’s what they are – they are an opponent” (Trump 2009b, emphasis added). Competition is central to Trump’s conception of the negotiation process.

. . . Understanding one’s counterpart’s fundamental “interests” as opposed to their publicly stated “positions” in order to negotiate a deal based on achievement of mutual gains (Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991; Mnookin, Peppet, and Tulumello 2000) is critical to cooperative negotiation approaches (e.g., integrative, interest‐based, principled, mutual‐gains). But Trump’s orientation is distinctly more coercive: “Learn your adversary’s strengths and weaknesses: Find out who your adversaries are, what resources they have, who is backing them, how much they want, why they want it, how much they will settle for, and how much they will pay or insist on receiving” (Trump 2006: 62). Trump does not empathize with his opponents; he sizes them up.

I think we can speculate on what Trump must see in Putin's position: he continues to occupy the parts of Ukraine that he seized in 2014, especially Crimea. He now occupies additional parts of eastern Ukraine, and the battle lines there are in stalemate. Ukraine has no prospect of regaining this territory, which the failed counteroffensives of 2023 demonstrated. These are several key cards.

Ukraine's best prospects are in continuing the stalemated war of attrition in eastern Ukraine, with compensatory incursions into neighboring Russia-aligned areas like Kursk, hoping this may somehow eventually force Putin to change his mind. However, the US is now unwilling to provide indefinite continuing support for the meat grinder or additional incursions and drone attacks into Russia, withdrawing targeting intellgence and curtailing weapons aid.

This is because Putin holds an additional card: he himself appears to be capable of feeding the meat grinder indefinitely, or at least for longer than the US is willing. However, there are some constraints: his initial objective in 2022 was to seize Kyiv quickly and take over the whole country, something he's unlikely to accomplish now under nearly any circumstance. Thus the cost-benefit of the meat grinder is marginal if all it will do is continue the current standoff.

What, in Trump's view, does he think Putin will settle for? Trump seems to think Putin is sending messages that if he can get a recognition that the territory Russia currently holds in Ukraine is effectively Russian, plus maybe more to sweeten the deal, the US will force Ukraine to stop the meat grinder and the incursions and drone attacks. Both countries then get to return to other business without the meat grinder.

Nevertheless, Putin's cards still include the territory he has, plus the ability to continue the meat grinder. Trump fully recognizes those are powerful cards -- as he put it, "I think probably anybody in that position would be [hitting them harder] right now". So he's teasing other possibilities:

President Trump suggested that Ukraine might not be able to survive against Russia even if the US forged ahead with full-blown support for its fight.

Trump’s remarks came while defending his decision to draw down support to Ukraine in the face of Polish President Andrzej Duda’s and others’ concerns that Europe lacks the might to prop up Kyiv without the US.

“Well, it may not survive anyway,” Trump told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” in an interview that aired Sunday.

“We have some weaknesses with Russia,” Trump added. “It takes two. Look, it was not going to happen — that war and it happened. So now we’re stuck with this mess.”

As Trump currently sees it, Zelensky's wish, supported by the EU, to continue the meat grinder indefinitely in the hope that maybe Ukraine can outlast Putin is unrealistic, and Trump is now trying to convince them that there's a bigger downside: the meat grinder won't go on indefinitely, but Putin will last it out longer even if the US continues to support it -- and the outcome down the road could well be worse.

But, as former Ambassador McFaul put it, what cards does Trump have to give away so unwisely? As far as I can see, it's little more than maintaining an appearance that he's willing to support the meat grinder a little longer. But that's just another way of saying do the same thing over and over but expecting a different result. Those aren't cards, that's insanity.