Trump Is Shifting Strategy on Putin

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There’s been a lot of news that President Donald Trump, apparently, has changed his position on Ukraine.

He addressed the United Nations recently and he said that Russian President Vladimir Putin is stalled, that he’s been fighting aimlessly, and that if he continues his air intrusions, whether by planes or drones, into NATO member countries, they might have to shoot them down.

He’s also said that if the Europeans will stop buying Russian oil and gas and start supporting Ukraine, Ukraine might be able to take back most of its territory lost after Feb. 24, 2022. Although, he didn’t intend Crimea or all of the Donbas.

What’s going on? What’s going on, Donald Trump came into office thinking that former President Joe Biden’s lack of a strategy, Joe Biden’s demonization of Putin, as a dictator or a murder—true, but you never really insult your future interlocutor—was shortsighted.

And because, as president, Donald Trump said: Well, you know, he went in under George Bush into Georgia, Ossetia, because Bush was mired in Iraq and projected, maybe, an image, unintentionally, of weakness. And then there was Barack Obama and the hot mic in Seoul. You know: Tell Vladimir, I’ll be flexible. Next thing you know he’s gone into Donbas and Crimea. And then with Biden, he tried to take—yeah, but he didn’t try to take it under me, Donald Trump.

And then Donald Trump said: I know Putin. He fears and respects me. So, I can cut a deal.

What Trump did not calibrate, though, very quickly, was that—in the worst mistake of his political life—Vladimir Putin went into Ukraine and he is in a slog, a morass, a World War I trench mess. He has lost over a million Russian dead, wounded, and missing or captured. And he thinks that he can wear down the Ukrainians that have one-fourth the population, one-tenth the economy, and one-thirtieth the area. And so, he will not stop.

And Donald Trump, now, has seen that, and he says to himself and to, now, the United Nations: Well, if NATO will stop buying oil and gas, I will start imposing a secondary boycott against China and India. And we will starve their income, and they’ll have to make an agreement and then all of NATO will, I guess, be self-sufficient in oil, either from the Middle East or they’ll have to develop their own natural gas, which, there are some deposits they’ve ignored in Continental Europe. And they can buy liquified natural gas from the United States. And therefore, we will starve Russia out and we will all combine and we can win.

And then he said something very controversial. He said: And they can get all the land back that they lost after Feb. 24, 2022.

As I said, I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Vladimir Putin has, as I said before, an imaginary line, of which he thinks, if he gets to this point, he goes back to his controllers, the oligarchs, the military, and he says to them: “Yes, I lost a million to a million and a half Russians. But look how much land I got. I took our borders and I advanced them, all the way here. Not just Crimea as institutionalized. Not just Donbas as institutionalized. Not just Ukraine will never be in NATO. But I’ve got some very valuable territory. And now we’ll have a DMZ, like North Korea. But I got to get a little bit more territory.”

And so, we don’t know where that land is. But when he gets to that point, then he will feel that he will not be dethroned, murdered, or replaced for the biggest blunder in modern Russian history.

But Donald Trump said something—so we don’t know where that area to negotiate is. But it’s somewhere. But then Donald Trump said, I think, wisely, he said: But we’re going to make sure Ukraine doesn’t lose. And then he said they can take, as I said, they can take back all the land. They can’t.

We saw the 2023 offensive. This is World War I. And all of the assets are on Russia’s side. And it’s trench warfare. And the last time they tried to—in this new type of drone war and artillery war—advance with armor, with American advisers who had been plotting courses of offensives, it was a total catastrophe.

They don’t have the manpower. They don’t have the wherewithal. What they do have are brilliant fighters, a sophisticated drone industry, that if they are entrenched and they can hold a line where they are and they can selectively hit oil refineries and munitions plants in Russia, in Western Russia, then they can make it so costly—in a Somme- or Passchendaele- or Verdun-like resistance—that Russia will have to come to the bargaining table.

In other words, they can bounce Russia back and back and back because Putin apparently thinks he needs more land to justify this blunder and get a piece. And if the Ukrainians can hold fast and be rearmed and make it so costly that he doesn’t get more land, there will be peace.

But please, Mr. President, let’s not get the idea that you’re going to take a country that’s lost 12 million people, who have fled the country, and its economy is devastated, and the Europeans are terrified, and think we’re going to make a huge, armored offensive and go back into all of occupied Ukraine and take it back. It’s not gonna happen. And it will end up like the disasters of World War I. And the trenches are something like Stalingrad.

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