That’s still not all. A few days earlier, Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had a phone call that both sides described afterward in glowing terms. “This was probably the best conversation in all this time, it was maximally productive,” Zelensky told his constituents. Trump framed it as “a very good call, I think a very strategic call. We’ve been helping them and we will continue to help them.”
He meant it, too. On Monday he ended the mysterious recent “pause” in U.S. aid shipments to Ukraine and ordered more defensive weapons for Kyiv. He assured Zelensky, in fact, that he hadn’t ordered the pause in the first place. That appears to have been Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s doing, a move that apparently caught the White House off-guard.
What a month for postliberals. Between this, the bombing of Iran, and the Great Epstein Disappointment, “America Firsters” are suddenly facing their roughest sledding of the Trump era. They went to bed on November 5 thinking they’d elected a geriatric Tucker Carlson and woke up this week to find they’d elected a tangerine-hued John Bolton.
Why has Donald Trump turned hawkish towards Russia?
Love is in the air.
Part of the answer has to do with the political fallout from the Iran operation.
I never believed that the president’s base would turn on him for joining a new war in the Middle East, but there are enough doves packed inside the Republican clown car in 2025 to have made the question mildly suspenseful. Trump may have regarded Operation Midnight Hammer as a test of whether populists would swallow traditional right-wing hawkery if it came coated in a MAGA candy shell.
Answer: Boy howdy, would they. A CBS News survey found 85 percent of Republicans approved of the strikes on Iran. Among self-identified MAGA Republicans, 94 percent did. If Trump had any doubts about whether his supporters would stick with him if he turned away from Russia and toward Ukraine, numbers like that must have eased them.
Another part of the answer has to do with U.S. allies practicing good policy and good politics.
The big news from last month’s NATO summit was members committing to boost defense spending from 2 percent of GDP to 5 percent by 2035. European security is now threatened from both the east and the west, by crazed Russian expansionism on the one hand and postliberal American indifference to it on the other. NATO members would have had to ramp up their defense capabilities even if Trump hadn’t spent years hectoring them about it.
But he has spent years hectoring them, and now that they’ve done it, he can count it as a major win. NATO did his bidding and, as with anyone who does so, he’s newly well-disposed to it.
Allied leaders have also been shrewd in how they’ve handled him. Zelensky has been a model of restraint since his global humiliation in the Oval Office, never letting his exasperation with Trump lead him to say something “ungrateful” that might create a pretext for the U.S. cutting off military aid. And NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has laid it on thick, praising the president’s Iran operation in terms so fulsome that Trump felt obliged to share his message with the world.
If preserving the Western liberal order requires Rutte to immolate his dignity by referring to Trump as, ahem, “daddy,” that’s a sacrifice he’s apparently willing to make. With an extreme narcissist, flattery will get you everywhere.
All told, the president has been incentivized to behave more hawkishly. Doing so has earned him new friends abroad and cost him nothing with his voters. Even for a nationalist, it must be gratifying to play “leader of the free world” now and then.
But what we’re also seeing in his irritation at Russia, I think, is a situationship gone bad.
If he wanted to, he would.
“Situationship” is Zoomer lingo for a romantic relationship in which both parties are interested but with incongruous degrees of intensity. One wants commitment, the other prefers a “friends with benefits” arrangement. Yet rather than break things off definitively and seek more compatible partners, the situation just sort of … lingers.
That’s because each party is getting enough from it to keep them invested. The “friends with benefits” side continues to receive occasional, er, benefits while the committed side receives sporadic bursts of hope that those benefits might blossom into something more meaningful. It neither grows nor ends. It just is.
Trump has spent almost a decade seeking commitment from Vladimir Putin to a U.S.-Russia rapprochement, and Putin is receptive—to a degree. He speaks with Trump regularly, politely listens to his peace proposals, teases him with sweet nothings about how good their relationship could be, and even suggests plans to meet. He’s very friendly, “very nice all the time,” as the president put it.
But he won’t commit. The New York Times reduced the problem to one sentence: “As Mr. Trump makes his frustration with Mr. Putin known, it has become clearer that Mr. Putin is prepared to risk his relationship with the U.S. president in service of what has emerged as his overarching goal after 40 months of full-scale war—achieving Ukraine’s capitulation to his demands.”
They’re in a situationship and the party that’s seeking commitment is exasperated, as inevitably happens in such things. Essentially, Trump has at last issued an ultimatum to his beau to choose between him and the wanton murder of Ukrainians, and Putin is choosing wanton murder.
Not only is he choosing it, he’s rubbing Trump’s face in it. Russian drone attacks on Ukraine have risen substantially since Inauguration Day, with the biggest assaults of the war coming shortly after Putin’s most recent phone call with the president. That’s how contemptuous he is of his would-be partner’s needs.
You can even hear a bit of the jilted lover in Trump’s grumbling about the “bullsh-t” Putin keeps throwing at him, stringing him along with no intention of getting serious.
I wonder if it’s occurred to the president yet that his foolish willingness to maintain this situationship has encouraged his beloved to take advantage of him.
“The Russian leader is convinced that Russia’s battlefield superiority is growing, and that Ukraine’s defenses may collapse in the coming months, according to two people close to the Kremlin,” the Times reported. Had Trump begun the peace process by pushing a new military aid package for Ukraine, brandishing a stick while offering a carrot to Moscow, the prospect of a long war might have forced Putin to negotiate. Instead the White House advertised its reluctance to prolong the conflict, encouraging the Kremlin to fight on in hopes that the U.S. might eventually cut Kyiv off altogether.
The basic problem in any situationship is that the party seeking commitment fails to set boundaries. Trump refused to set boundaries by arming the Ukrainians robustly and now Putin is walking all over him, breaking his heart.
We’ve probably also reached the stage common to all failing relationships in which one partner wonders whether he or she ever really knew the other. I wrote about that in May: Trump seems to have believed, not entirely without reason, that Putin is more mafioso than nationalist fanatic and would drop this silly Ukraine business if America dangled enough economic and diplomatic goodies at him. (That’s what Trump himself would do.) If his friend in Russia was unwilling to commit to him, getting him to do so might be a simple matter of offering more benefits.
But that rarely works in situationships. The president now seems to be facing the bitter reality that Putin really does care more about genociding Ukrainians than he does about Donald Trump’s affection. He’s never going to commit. As the saying goes: If he wanted to, he would.
So the situationship is over, then?
A rekindled romance?
Of course not. Situationships seldom formally end because they never formally begin. It’s never fully off or on so it might be rekindled at any time. The hallmark of a situationship is uncertainty.
Which is also the hallmark of Trump’s Ukraine policy, coincidentally.
It’s the hallmark of all of his policies, from tariffs to mass deportation to foreign wars. He’s erratic by temperament and a showman by nature, has a low tolerance for political pain, and seems to regard unpredictability as an unvarnished strategic asset, all of which conspires to create profound uncertainty around his next move. You never know what he might do, which is how he likes it.
His administration is also staffed by incompetents, adding an additional layer of uncertainty. Has Pam Bondi seen Jeffrey Epstein’s client list or hasn’t she? Is Marco Rubio negotiating with Venezuela on behalf of the White House or is Ric Grenell? Does Kristi Noem really want FEMA to wait days for her sign-off before rushing to the aid of flood victims? Did Pete Hegseth halt weapons shipments to Ukraine because he’s a villain or because he’s an idiot? Even when a policy is coherent, there’s a good chance that it will be carried out ineptly and confusingly.
Throw one more layer of uncertainty on top for the president’s corruption. On Wednesday he launched a trade-war blitzkrieg on Brazil by slapping a 50 percent tariff on its imports—even though the U.S. runs a trade surplus with that country. Trump is aggrieved that his friend and fellow right-wing authoritarian, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, has been criminally charged, so he’s using his “national emergency” tariff powers to try to influence the justice system there.
This is the same guy who went to Saudi Arabia a few months ago and condemned neoconservatives for imperiously lecturing foreigners on how to govern their affairs. Now here he is, not only doing the same thing with Brazilians but grossly abusing trade policy to add some oomph. Is he for or against meddling in other nations’ civic cultures? The answer, it seems, depends whether his cronies are in charge of that culture or momentarily under its thumb.
All of this uncertainty has crashed down on the heads of Ukrainians, for whom the stakes of American inscrutability are unusually high, and it’s been further complicated by Trump and Putin suddenly being “on a break” in their situationship. Nancy Youssef considered the consequences in a piece published Wednesday in The Atlantic:
Like their corporate counterparts trying to prepare for tariffs, Zelensky and the Ukrainian military are struggling because they don’t know what U.S. policy will look like. Military planners and former U.S. officials who have worked on weapons deliveries to Ukraine told me that sudden changes create a series of logistical, political, and military challenges that could hamper Ukraine’s grip on its territory as it battles a larger, better-armed foe.
…
Without a clear picture of the assistance it’s getting from what has been its single most important backer, Ukraine can’t design its war plans or effectively respond to attacks. That’s a perilous situation to be in at a time when Russia is dramatically scaling up the quantity of missiles and drones it’s launching Ukraine’s way.
European sources have described a “feeling of whiplash” to Politico after watching Trump go from dove to hawk on Russia. Reportedly the Ukrainians have sought clarity from Hegseth but can’t get in touch, and aren’t sure that he could speak authoritatively for the White House even if they succeeded. Other sources complained that they can’t tell if the institutional balance of power in the administration now lies with friends or foes of Kyiv. “As a result, governments are preparing for multiple scenarios,” Politico reported, “making it difficult to design any Ukraine strategy while Trump’s foreign policy appears to change at a whim.”
No one is willing to bet on sustained American support for the Ukrainians because that’s not how the president operates, and it’s really not how situationships operate. No one believes he’ll relinquish his romantic dream of putting the Cold War to bed and brokering an alliance with Putin. In fact, when he un-paused the latest weapons shipment to Ukraine a few days ago, he authorized only 10 Patriot missile receptors rather than the full allotment that had been scheduled. “This isn’t my war,” he has reportedly told confidants, refusing to take ownership of it by arming Zelensky to the teeth.
His hawkish turn of late is probably best understood, then, less as an enduring strategic shift than the foreign policy equivalent of trying to make Putin jealous. Forcing the Russian to consider what he’s lost by squandering his opportunity to commit to Trump and America might, in Trump’s mind at least, cause him to have a change of heart.
It won’t—if he wanted to, he would—but you can’t reason with infatuation, which is why situationships happen in the first place. All it’ll take to get the president back on the hook, I suspect, is Russia agreeing to a new round of talks, the diplomatic version of flowers and candy. It’s the bare minimum, but Trump is invested enough that that’ll probably suffice.
A toxic relationship.
One would think hawks in Congress would want to end this situationship and force him to break up permanently with Putin.
They could do it. Legislation that would impose steep secondary sanctions on countries that buy Russian oil, most notably China, is in the works as I write this. Trump would be powerless to undo those sanctions once they became law—ideally.
But get this: According to the Times, the legislation was rewritten recently at the White House’s request to “give Mr. Trump wide discretion in determining how and when to enforce the financial penalties on Russia.” In other words, knowing that policy uncertainty is crippling Ukraine, and having just watched the president abuse his tariff authority in grotesque new ways in Brazil, Congress’ solution to the situationship is to … cede even more control to Trump over relations between the U.S. and Russia.
They’re not going to force a break-up. They’re going to supply the president with more “benefits” to offer his beau, in this case in the form of sanctions relief, in hopes of getting him to commit.
One would think hawks might at least insist on pairing a new grant of discretionary authority for the White House with a new military aid package for Kyiv to enhance the stick-and-carrot dynamic. If the goal of all this is to get Russia to value a relationship with the U.S. more highly than killing Ukrainian children, making the latter more costly for Putin would help.
But no, another “large” weapons package for Ukraine is unlikely, according to one Republican senator. Sanctions will be the president’s only stick, and if implementing them poses as much risk to the global economy as some experts think (one imagined “a meltdown in global energy markets or a worldwide recession owing to a tailspin in global trade”) then Trump will assuredly TACO his way out of doing so lest they do any damage to his economic legacy.
Real leverage for Zelensky would require an America where Congress isn’t in its own toxic relationship with the president, one that veers periodically from extreme sadomasochism to outright abuse. We chose not to have a country like that last November. If we wanted to, we would.
