The air at Joint Base Andrews felt thick with the weight of the news. President Donald Trump, surrounded by a knot of reporters, had just finished a series of phone calls with European leaders, their exasperation over Moscow’s latest aerial assault on Ukraine palpable even from a distance. The images of Kyiv’s government headquarters ablaze flashed across the screens of the reporters’ phones, a grim counterpoint to the late afternoon sun.
“It’s such a horrible waste of humanity,” Trump said, his voice a low rumble. He wasn’t speaking with a fire-and-brimstone tone, but with a weary frustration. “I’m not thrilled with what’s happening there, I will tell you. Nobody was tougher on Russia than me, but this… it’s just a mess.”
His comments were a carefully calibrated mix of self-assurance and sober reflection, a display of his belief that he, alone, could untangle a conflict that had consumed years of diplomatic effort. He had, after all, “settled seven wars” in his first term, and this one, he had initially believed, would be the easiest. He still maintained, with a businessman’s unshakeable optimism, that it would “get settled.”
Hours later, back at the White House, the conversation turned from diplomatic weariness to economic strategy. A reporter, perhaps sensing the shift in mood, asked the pointed question: was he ready for “the second phase” of sanctions?
Trump’s reply was terse and decisive: “Yeah, I am.” He didn’t offer details, but he didn’t have to. His Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, had already done the talking, floating the idea of “secondary sanctions” on countries that continued to buy Russian oil—a move designed to “collapse” the Russian economy.
This was the Trump doctrine in action. For him, a geopolitical problem was, at its core, a financial one. He saw the world through the lens of a dealmaker, where leverage was measured in tariffs and trade deficits, and pressure was a matter of turning off the spigot of cash. It was a philosophy that had defined his career. His strength lay in his expertise with financial instruments—the very nature of which made him a master of economic pressure, not political coercion.
He would use a tariff to force a nation to the table, not to dictate its internal political structure. He would float a new sanction to make an enemy’s economy scream, but he would not, and likely could not, compel a change in ideology. His tools were those of a businessman: direct, transactional, and blunt. The idea of collapsing Russia’s economy to bring Putin to the negotiating table was not about a political overthrow; it was about forcing a change in behavior through financial pain.
In a different era, a president might have used back-channel diplomacy, covert operations, or soft power to encourage a political shift. But that was not Trump’s way. His business acumen, a formidable asset in trade disputes and corporate takeovers, was also his greatest limitation in this new kind of geopolitical warfare. The problem was not the Kremlin’s political system, but its military aggression. And for that, Donald Trump would use the only language he truly knew: the cold, hard currency of economic warfare.
Trump floats new sanctions after Russia’s largest air assault on Ukraine
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