I have been reading and watching as the second Donald Trump presidency moves toward a showdown between the powers bestowed on the executive branch by the Constitution and the authority of the Supreme Court. Trump, I have been told, will soon be off to Rome for a yet-to-be-announced state visit with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a right-wing politician who has been one of his closest supporters in Western Europe. She is scheduled to meet with Trump tomorrow at the White House. During the past week with officials who know about peace talks concerning the Ukraine War. I have previously written here about those talks with perhaps more optimism than was warranted. Fearful of a disastrous defeat in Ukraine, Europe has rallied behind Volodymyr Zelensky, the embattled Ukraine president whose most recent visit to the White House ended in abject humiliation that won him sympathy from many observers. Trump sees Russian President Vladimir Putin as the kind of a guy he can do business with. I was told that there have been talks with Russia about the prospect of the Trump family building a major beach resort in Crimea, which Russia has occupied since 2014, in the aftermath of a settlement along with a similar facility in Russian-occupied Donbass province in Ukraine. The United States would drop all of its sanctions on Russia and once again become a purchaser of Russian gas and oil and would perhaps finance the mining of rare earth minerals in Siberia. The talks, which were depicted to me as a key element of an earlier possible agreement between Russia and Ukraine, have, from Trump’s point of view, gone nowhere as NATO and the European Union vowed more political and military support for Ukraine while both sides have continued firing rockets and missiles at military and civilian targets. But the entrenched ground war that at its peak led to more than ten thousand casualties a month on each side has slowed down. Russia’s exhausted frontline troops are continuing to make inroads across the long Ukraine front, but the ground war, I have been told by a knowledgeable American official, will not be the deciding factor, as long as an increasingly anxious Europe does not decide to send military forces from NATO and elsewhere to Ukraine. “That,” the official told me, “Russia will not accept.” I was told that both sides are still talking with senior Trump aides present. Some sessions have taken place in Saudi Arabia. The goal, the official told me, was to “end what everybody says is a militarily destructive war.” One reason for the inability to achieve a settlement, the official told me, is the widespread hatred of Putin in Europe. He is seen by many in Western Europe as someone “who will show up in sheep’s clothing, but he really is the Devil.” Mark Medish, a Democrat and a Washington attorney of Ukrainian descent who has run the Ukraine desk for the National Security Council and served in a high Treasury Department post similarly told me that European are not monolithic: “You have a Calvinist-crusader band from the Baltic and Nordics to the Dutch and Brits who are consumed by Russophobia, with some rustication, as they are bearing the brunt of miscues—hybrid warfare by other means. On the other hand, there is a band of largely Catholic-Orthodox pragmatists in the south of Europe—not peace at any cost but they are skeptical of the escalatory zeal of the northern hawks.” Medish, who has informally advised the EU on intelligence and political issues, added: “Apart from places like Hungary, the Euros are almost all united in their shock at Trump’s naked pivot against Kiev and the EU toward Moscow.” The official who is advising the Trump administration told me, however, that the “Saudi government wants it”—a settlement—“to happen and not only because it would be good for the world’s oil market” in terms of increased production. “But Europe does not want this to happen. They are fighting this tooth and nail. Trump is telling the Europeans to ‘take it or leave it.’ He thinks it’s going to be great for the European economy.” The official praised the willingness of the Saudi leadership to get involved in European diplomacy. “The world is changing and nobody is noticing it,” he told me. “Europe is bankrupt, and the Saudis are the future.” The Saudis, he told me, have realized that they had to join the modern world. “This started years ago, and the Saudis no longer walk around in robes and live in tents.” (The current leadership also has been accused of murdering an internal opponent.) Throughout our talk, the official focused on the inability of the European leadership and the Western media to think beyond its instinctive hatred of Putin and its continued opposition to a settlement that would leave Russia in control of vast chunks of Ukraine that it has occupied. A political scientist who studies postwar Europe told me that the argument for aiding Ukraine in carrying on the fight with Russia is based not only on a shared European contempt for Putin, but also as a shared hostility to Trump. “Europeans are afraid of Russia,” the expert said, “and Russia does not want Ukraine to be a free country.” They also are afraid of Trump “because he is close to Russia and he will sell Europe down the river . . . to get what he wants from Putin. “Why is Trump so willing to weaken Europe to placate Putin?” the expert asked. “Trump wants to make a deal with Putin and Europeans don’t believe America will come to Europe’s defense if Putin invades a neighbor. Trump has been in power for only two and a half months and Europeans have all changed their plans on the assumption that Trump would veto any planned NATO deployment.” All of this leads to a series of questions to which there are no answers at a time of White House chaos and bellicosity. Will Vladimir Putin continue or escalate the war against Ukraine if he does not get what he wants in the current peace talks? Does he believe Trump will support him, or at the least look the other way, if he does so? Is America really ready to go to war against NATO? Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Seymour Hersh, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. © 2025 Seymour Hersh |