NATO Secretary General Rutte meets President Trump in Oval Office July 14, 2025. Photo courtesy of NATO.
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Ukraine Gets Weapons; Russia Gets Tariffs
The big news this week was President Trump’s apparent change of heart when it comes to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine. Meeting with NATO’s Secretary General Mark Rutte on Monday, Trump announced that he had agreed to sell advanced weapon systems, including Patriot air and missile defense systems, to European countries who would then give them to Ukraine. He also announced that unless Vladimir Putin agreed to end the war, he would levy tariffs on Russia and “secondary tariffs” on Russia’s trading partners.
The move was widely hailed as a major shift in Trump’s stance. But what was behind the shift? And how real is it?
Trump is peeved
Trump’s change of heart reflects less a strategic reassessment of the war and the US role than a realization that Putin is not the man Trump thought he was. In his meeting with Rutte, Trump continued to make clear that “this is not Trump’s war.” That’s of course, besides the point. The question is whether Trump now sees the war as a strategic danger — a security threat — to the United States. And the answer for Trump is clear: No. It’s a European war that Europeans need to resolve. He’s willing to sell Europe weapons to give to Ukraine, but he is unwilling to continue providing US military and economic aid to Ukraine directly. In other words, America’s real interest is to make money on the war so long as it continues, not to end it in a way that ensures Russia’s defeat.
So why change course? As Jonathan Lemire reports in The Atlantic, the reason was personal:
The change, though, is not reflective of Trump adopting a new strategic worldview, two White House officials and two outside advisers to the president told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Trump did not develop a new fondness for Ukraine or its president, Volodymyr Zelensky. He did not abruptly become a believer in the traditional transatlantic alliances prized by his predecessors as a counterweight to Moscow. Rather, Trump got insulted.
By ignoring Trump’s pleas to end the war and instead ratcheting up the fighting, Putin has made Trump look like the junior partner in the relationship. The Russian leader has “really overplayed his hand,” one of the officials told me. “The president has given him chance after chance, but enough is enough.”
Humiliation, not strategic adaptation, best explains why he changed course on Ukraine. In fact, he said as much in his press conference with Rutte on Monday. As the New York Times recounts,
“He’s fooled a lot of people,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Putin, who launched an unprovoked full invasion on Ukraine in 2022 and escalated attacks amid peace negotiations this year, even as Mr. Trump tried to bring an end to the fighting.
“He fooled Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden — he didn’t fool me,” Mr. Trump said, seemingly sensitive to the perception that he was changing his tune on the Russian president.
But in denying that Putin fooled him, Trump of course admits that’s exactly what happened. For more than 10 years, he has praised the Russian leader as strong, savvy, smart, even a genius for seizing Crimea. For five months, he swallowed Putin’s line that Ukraine, not Russia, started the war, berated Ukrainian President Zelensky and called his legitimacy into question, and offered Putin a deal that gave Russia most of what it wanted and Ukraine nothing. And, yet, Putin kept on saying “nyet” — albeit in a friendly manner. Six calls between the two leaders changed nothing. As Trump put it, “he'll talk so beautifully, and then he'll bomb people at night.”
Less than Meets the Eye
But how much has really changed? On both sides of the equation — military support for Ukraine and economic pressure on Russia — there is less change than implied.
Let’s start with the weapons. Ukraine needs air and missile defenses yesterday. The bombardment of its cities by Russian drones and missiles is intensifying and unrelenting. Last month, the number launched at Ukraine in a single night exceeded the number it launched in 2024 in an entire month. Additional Patriot interceptors are apparently making their way to Ukraine—though these were part of the package of weapons transfers agreed to under the Biden administration (and briefly halted earlier this month).
What Ukraine needs most is new defense systems — not just interceptors. But these are in short supply, and while some European countries (including Germany and Norway) have indicated they are prepared to buy systems to give to Ukraine, no one has a clear sense of where these systems are supposed to come from. Berlin isn’t prepared to hand over any more of its own systems (having already donated three systems and deployed two to Poland). New systems are being produced, and it’s possible that systems destined for Ukraine could be made available more quickly by ,moving other customers further down the pipeline (as has apparently happened with Switzerland, which bought 5 Patriot systems). But that would still meant that months will likely pass before any additional systems are actually sent to Ukraine. Promising quick action is easy (Trump has said that “they’re already being shipped”). Delivering quickly is quite another thing.
When it comes to pressuring Russia, Trump isn’t talking about moving quickly. He’s given Putin 50 days to respond. The US president isn’t known for keeping to his deadlines, so 50 days may well be the minimum timeline for imposing new tariffs. As for the tariffs themselves, they will have very little impact on Russia, given that the US imports just $3 billion worth of goods — most, like uranium for US nuclear reactors — essential to the US economy. Trump also promised 100% “secondary tariffs” on countries that buy energy from Russia. This threat is modeled on a provision in a bipartisan Senate bill that would put 500% tariffs on good that import oil, gas, and other energy products from Russia. After Trump’s threat, the Senate held off on passing the bill, ensuring that Trump will be the sole decision maker on whether or not to implement his threats. When it comes to Russia, Trump has repeatedly threatened sanctions and tariff over the past fe months. But he has never pulled the trigger, and few think he will after 50 days, or ever.
A New Gaza plan
While indirect talks between Israel and Hamas continues, there is little sense of an imminent breakthrough. The best chance came when Prime Minister Netanyahu came to Washington last week, and talks on a ceasefire seemed to accelerate. But Netanyahu left Washington without a deal.
Meanwhile his government has hardly stood still. This week, it began discussing a new plan that would move all of Gaza’s population to a very narrow strip of land along the border with Egypt. As the New York Times reported,
According to some of the readouts of the briefing by Mr. Katz, the defense minister described the proposed new encampment as a “humanitarian city” that would, at first, house at least 600,000 Palestinians. Mr. Katz said it would later hold the entire population of Gaza, or roughly 2 million people, according to the readouts and reports. Israeli critics likened it to a modern-day “concentration camp” because its residents would not be allowed to leave the area’s northern perimeter in order to return home.
That could constitute “forcible transfer,” a crime under international law, according to a group of Israeli international law experts who wrote an open letter on the matter to Mr. Katz and the head of Israel’s military, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir.
It’s extraordinary to think that any government, let alone a democracy like Israel, could contemplate stuffing an entire population of 2 million people into an utterly destroyed area of perhaps 10 square miles. And that’s not all. The Israeli government is also talking increasingly openly about emptying Gaza of its native population. Indeed, this week Israel’s spy chief was in Washington to press the Trump administration to help convince other countries to take hundreds of thousands of Gazans, according to Axios.
The director of Israel's Mossad spy agency visited Washington this week seeking U.S. help in convincing countries to take hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza, two sources with knowledge of issue tell Axios.
The spy chief, David Barnea, told White House envoy Steve Witkoff that Israel has been speaking in particular with Ethiopia, Indonesia and Libya.
Why it matters: The Israeli government's goal of removing much of Gaza's population is hugely controversial. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government claims such a "relocation" would be "voluntary," U.S. and Israeli legal experts have labeled it a war crime.
Behind the scenes: In their meeting earlier this week, Barnea told Witkoff that Ethiopia, Indonesia and Libya had expressed openness to receiving large numbers of Palestinians from Gaza, the two source say.
Barnea suggested that the U.S. offer incentives to those countries and help Israel convince them.
Witkoff was non-committal, and it's not clear if the U.S. will actively weigh in on this issue, one source said.
Rather than detailing my own thoughts on these developments, I will leave you with the thoughts of , who wrote an extraordinary in the New York Times by Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University.
Israel’s actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.
My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.
Tariffs are Coming
Finally, tariffs. While Trump pushed the deadline for tariffs back to August 1, it is becoming increasingly clear that this deadline is real. The markets may still be banking on a last-minute taco (“Trump always chickens out”), but a growing number of people no longer believe he will chicken out.
I wrote about this earlier in the week, arguing that in the battle between Tariff Man and Dealmaker, Trump the Tariff Man will win out. But don’t take my word for it. Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator for the Financial Times, makes the same point far more lucidly — and exposes the utter foolishness of proceeding with the planned tariffs.
This administration is headed, declares the White House, by “the best trade negotiator in history”, whose “strategy has focused on addressing systemic imbalances in our tariff rates that have tilted the playing field in favor of our trading partners for decades”. In fact, there was not the slightest chance that deals could have been reached with almost 200 countries, or even 100, in a few months. Moreover, many of the US demands — that the EU should give up the value added tax, for example — are ridiculous. VAT is not a trade distortion: it applies to all goods or services sold into EU markets, as it should, in keeping with the destination principle. Above all, these tariffs would not eliminate US trade deficits anyway.
Trump’s tariff targets are increasingly coming to the conclusion whether, taco or not, there’s no real way to deal with Trump’s Washington. Take the case of Vietnam. US and Vietnamese negotiators had worked for months to get a deal that would reduce tariffs on Vietnamese imports to 11 percent. A call between Trump and Vietnam’s leader Tô Lâm was meant to sell the deal, except that Trump unexpectedly told Lâm the actual rate would be 20%, almost double. Similarly, EU negotiators thought they might have a deal that would keep “reciprocal” tariffs at 10% only to have Trump insist it had to 15 or 20%. “We don’t want a trade war,” the chief EU trade negotiator lamented. “But we don’t know if the US will leave us a choice.”
Trump, of course, thinks he is winning. And in the short run, tariffs may produce additional revenues. But in the long run, America’s trading partners will start looking elsewhere. The impact of tariffs and threats in Asia is to incentivize many to try and reduce exposure to the US market and increase trade among themselves. Same is true for Canada and Europe. And all of America’s major allies and trading partners in these regions are adopting a “de-risking” policy—aimed not just at China, but at the US as well. According to the New York Times,
Officials have even floated the idea of building trading structures that exclude the United States and China, which is widely blamed for supporting its factories to the point that they overproduce and flood global markets with cheap goods.
Ms. von der Leyen recently suggested that Europe could pursue a new collaboration between the bloc and a trading group of 11 countries that includes Japan, Vietnam and Australia, but that notably did not include the United States or China.
The two superpowers may think they run the world — but others will have a say on whether they can or will.
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