The General, the Philanderer, the Thug, the Crook, the Janitor, the Peanut, the Actor, the Blatherer, the Creep, the Moron, the Librarian, the Blowhard, the Zombie, and the Blowhard again. This is either the weirdest set of tarot cards in existence, or someone telling the fortunes of an empire which is crumbling.
When Donald Trump met with Vladmir Putin at the weekend, I thought that it was because Trump intended to give away some kind of magic beans in exchange for ten minutes of kudos. Instead, he achieved precisely nothing but Putin learned first hand that the Blowhard is actually incapable of achieving anything. This is excellent news for the little Russian man as it means that he can and will go about his business in Ukraine unimpeded.
We have now learnt that this week, the President of Ukraine Vlodomir Zelensky will have an audience with Trump and on this occasion, instead of merely being a punching bag so that Trump can look impressive in front of the hand-picked media scrum in the White House, he will be bringing the most important leaders in NATO.
The next meeting that Zelensky will have with Trump, reads more like the starting squad of a football match than anything else. This time, the group will include:
Zelensky, Von der Lewen, Merz, Macron, Meloni, Stubb, Rutte, and Starmer. To include leaders from both the economic left and right, is one of the strangest set of leaders to voluntarily arrive at the White House in a very long time; which suggests to me that at least in theory, that this time around, NATO has grown a spine and is prepared to tell the Blowhard man-baby that they have had enough.
The problem for Mr Trump is that he wants to be friends with Mr Putin; not because he thinks that normalising relations between the two nations will bring about peace and prosperity but because Trump is a thug gangster and game recognises game.
The problem for Mr Putin is that even though he wishes for a return to the Russian Empire of old (of which the USSR was just a front company), he has constantly failed in his objectives.
Putin has failed to demiliterise Ukraine and has failed to neutralise much less defeat the Ukrainian military. Putin has failed to enact regime change in Kyyv and has failed to remove Zelensky. Putin has failed to exact full control over most of Donbas; which is the objective of this current wave of military nastiness. Perhaps most worrying of all, Putin has failed to stop NATO from enlarging, as both Sweden and Finland joined in 2023; which now means that Russia actually shares a land border with NATO.
Exactly who Trump thinks that he's acting for in the next meeting with Zelensky is unknown but what we do know is that if things transpire in a certain direction, then Ukraine will finally join NATO and Trump will be forced to make a decision about whether to pull the United States out and make his friend Vladmir Putin happy, or if he has to eat humble pie and finally actually admit that Ukraine is a sovereign nation in its own right.
Perhaps it is a good thing that there was no announcement of a ceasefire, no announcement of sanctions, and no other announcements of grand but otherwise useless nature.
Because now as it stands, European nations are rightfully and justly wary of anything that Mr Trump has to say because it was highly likely that both Ukraine and Europe could have been cut out of a deal cooked up behind closed doors by the world's biggest nuclear powers; and that simply should have never been thinkable at all.
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