@Laxtonto’s post is good but where it errs is in ascribing entirely too much thought and agency to people like Kellog and understates the extent to which PR drives current actions of Trump, more than Biden. That’s not a critique, it’s just that intelligent people nearly always understate how truly stupid this is.
Anything you see stated by Kellog or Rubio or Waltz is just retconned justification of whatever Trump has announced. There is zero active planning or strategy. It’s all aimed at two goals of DJT: a summit with Putin and being told he “ended the war.”
Right now the Russians have suggested that both things can happen and a general outline has emerged:
1. negotiations begin
2. elections in Ukraine
3. peace deal
We seek to be amendable to this and it will result in a total Russian victory because in step two we will acquiesce— or maybe assist— to Russia installing a pro-Kremlin puppet. On the margins we may agree to further concessions in Europe.
But the point is that no one aside from Trump and Musk are acting with any agency here and they are in complete react mode.
And that is bad enough but what is worse is that there ARE some people acting with agency on other fronts. A despite the mantra of a “realist” foreign policy they are in fact behaving like wild eyed revolutionaries bent on exporting ideology. And their animating purpose is attacking liberal democracy, wherever it exists, as the primary threat to the United States’ current regime.
And in a sense they are correct, because Russia and China are happy to let Trump destroy us while liberal democratic Europe, Canada, and the Anglosphere are more likely inspire us to course correct and help us do it. In this we have internalized Putinism. The threat Ukraine posed was always ideological and not military; a free and prosperous democratic Ukraine would show Russians that it was possible.