In the first six months of his second term, President Donald Trump has demonstrated his love for three things: deals, tariffs, and ultimatums.
He got to combine these passions during his Oval Office meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Monday. Only moments after the two leaders announced a new plan to get military aid to Ukraine, Trump issued an ominous 50-day deadline for Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire. “We’re going to be doing secondary tariffs if we don’t have a deal within 50 days,” Trump told the assembled reporters.
The threat is unlikely to change Putin’s calculus, however, or bring the conflict to a near-term conclusion. Instead, Trump’s deadline is likely to make his own life more difficult, limiting his future flexibility, putting the settlement he craves farther out of reach, and forcing him to take steps that harm rather than advance U.S. interests.
Trump’s intention to impose “secondary tariffs” on Russia if Putin does not meet his deadline was not well-explained in his press conference with Rutte. Nor was it immediately clear if the planned punishment for Putin’s continued intransigence would include tariffs on Russian trade with the United States or “secondary sanctions” on Russia’s trading partners—or some combination of the two.
Read at Responsible Statecraft
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