Where Trump really chickens out? Russia
Trump has been threatening sanctions for months. Putin has caught on to the charade.
Traders embraced the “TACO trade” earlier this year—Trump always chickens out—after President Trump backed down on some of his worst tariff threats. If Trump’s tariffs sent markets reeling, it was a safe bet that Trump would cancel, reduce or postpone the import taxes, lest investors blame him for a stock selloff.
While it’s a fun meme, it isn’t isn’t really true that Trump always backs down—not tariffwise, anyway. Trump has raised the average tax on imports from 2.5% to about 17%, with American importers paying an extra $20 billion per month or so in customs duties. It’s more like Trump has dialed tariffs up and down to find levels markets can live with.
Where Trump has repeatedly backed down, however, is in his confrontations with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the war in Ukraine. Much as he promised tariffs while running for president last year, Trump famously vowed that if elected, he’d end the Ukraine war in one day. Discount the hyperbole, and Trump’s point was that he’d bring fresh problem-solving skills to the three-year war, the biggest in Europe since World War II.
Trump seems to be the only person surprised that Putin didn’t change his mind and retreat from Ukraine after Trump replaced outgoing President Joe Biden in January. Since then, Trump has admitted he was a “little bit sarcastic” about promising to end the war in a day, then set a six-month timeline for a peace deal. Trump and his aides have met many times met with Putin and with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss a cease-fire. Trump’s moonshot was an August meeting with Putin in Alaska, where the Russian leader disembarked from his jet onto a red carpet.
Net result? The war is bloodier and riskier than ever. Russia has been blitzing Ukraine with record numbers of missiles and drones and making territorial gains along the battle lines in eastern Ukraine. Russian drones strayed into Poland on September 10, with NATO jets scrambling to shoot them down. On September 14, a second NATO nation, Romania, reported a Russian drone in its airspace. Rather than relenting, Putin is intensifying his siege of Ukraine and trolling NATO in the bargain.
Trump is getting a little fed up. On July 8, Trump said he was “not happy with Putin … He's very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.” Since Putin wouldn’t consider a cease fire, Trump said he was considering sharp sanctions on Russia.
The next day, Russia launched what at that point was its largest aerial bombardment of Ukraine to date. Five days later, Trump threatened “severe tariffs” if Russia didn’t agree to a peace deal within 50 days. On July 28, Trump said he was “disappointed” with Putin and was shortening his sanctions deadline to 10 to 12 days. Then came the Alaska summit, which Trump may have thought would get the deal he wanted. It didn’t.
Trump’s conciliatory Russia strategy is now merging with his wrong-headed trade war. In August, Trump raised his “emergency” tariff on India from 25% to 50%, the additional 25 points meant to punish India for buying Russian oil. If India stops, the tariff would drop back to 25%. But India isn’t in a mood for Trump’s bullying and has been showing greater solidarity with China and Russia as a rebuke to Trump.
Trump now wants European nations to impose tariffs as high as 100% on imports from India and China, to put their own pressure on those two countries to stop buying Russian oil. But Trump is just about the only world leader with any fondness for tariffs and there’s no chance Europe will take up this idea.
After Russian drones flew into Poland, Trump talked up sanctions again, saying on Fox News, “it'll be hitting very hard with sanctions to banks and having to do with oil and tariffs also.” That has become his go-to refrain, but if Trump were serious, Russia would be feeling a lot more pain than it is.
A bipartisan bill in Congress would impose punishing sanctions on countries that import Russian energy or help Russia produce energy. And if Congress passed the bill with bipartisan support, it would be much more potent that Trump imposing sanctions unilaterally (or calling on other nations to do so).
But Trump hasn’t even said he supports the bill, even though he refers to it in his don’t-you-dare warnings to Putin. So Republicans who control Congress are trying to bring him around. For now, without those sanctions, the sum total of Trump’s pressure on Russia is a tariff on imports not from Russia, but from India. All of Trump’s other Russia threats have been hollow.
Nobody knows this better than Putin. The Russian dictator excels at crossing red lines and daring western leaders to do something about it. Trump fancies himself a similar risk-taker, but Putin knows otherwise. And he doesn’t care if Trump is disappointed.