The New Yorker Radio Hour
What Trump Has Got Wrong—and Right—About the War in Ukraine
Fri, 7 Mar 2025
Since emerging on the national political scene a decade ago, Donald Trump has openly admired the dictatorial style of Vladimir Putin. Trump’s lean toward Russia was investigated, it was psychoanalyzed—yet many were still shocked when recently Trump and Vice-President J. D. Vance berated President Volodymyr Zelensky, of Ukraine, in the Oval Office, and seemed to be taking Putin’s side in the conflict. When Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, one of David Remnick’s first calls was to Stephen Kotkin, a historian of Russia and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. He speaks with Kotkin again, as Trump is pressuring Ukraine to accept a “deal.” Kotkin doesn’t endorse Trump’s position, but notes that it reflects real changes in America’s place in the world and the limits of American power. “You can say that Trump is wrong in his analysis of the world, you can say that Trump’s methods are abominable,” Kotkin says. “But you can’t say that American power is sufficient to meet its current commitments on the trajectory that we’re on.”
Chapter 1: What has Trump's relationship with Putin revealed?
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. From his emergence on the political scene a decade ago, Donald Trump displayed what you could call a curious admiration for the Russian president and dictator Vladimir Putin. It was baffling and it was ominous, too. It remains so. Trump's lean toward Russia was investigated and it was psychoanalyzed.
Chapter 2: How did Trump and Vance's actions affect Zelensky?
And his affinity for Putin is as vivid as his disdain for Ukraine's democratically elected leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. So now we're reckoning with the distinct possibility that the leadership of the United States has taken a moral and a strategic turn that puts us all on the side of Russia and blames Ukraine for provoking the invasion in the first place. That's how the Kremlin sees it as well.
Over a week ago, Trump and J.D. Vance absolutely berated Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House. And then they announced a pause in military aid to Ukraine and a freeze on intelligence sharing. Those are moves that will surely hobble Ukraine's ability to defend itself. Zelensky is now trying to bolster more and more support from the leaders of Europe who met last week at a defense summit.
Chapter 3: What was the significance of the Oval Office encounter?
For more than 30 years, since I was a reporter for The Washington Post in Moscow, I've been talking about Russia over and over again with Stephen Kotkin. Stephen Kotkin is a biographer of Joseph Stalin and a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. Three years ago, when Russia first launched its invasion of Ukraine, Steve was my first call.
And this is the third time that we're talking here on the Radio Hour since the war began. Steve, let's begin with the most obvious thing. What did you make of that dramatic Oval Office encounter between Trump and Zelenskyy?
As I understand what happened based upon the commentary is that Trump's aides set up a situation where there was going to be a deal over minerals and the minerals deal was going to work because it was going to give the U.S. a vested interest in Ukraine. And in their mind, Putin was going to do the rest of the work. Because Putin is as nasty as nasty comes.
He was going to continue to overreach and behave the way he's behaving, which was going to push Trump in the direction of not just protecting the minerals deal, but investing more and more in Ukraine because Russia was nastier and nastier. Anyway, this was the plan that the aides thought they had worked out and that had been pitched to Zelensky prior to the setting.
And then what happened evidently is J.D. Vance is trying to preempt a Republican primary in 2028. And so he made some provocations and Zelensky took the bait and proceeded to stake out a position claiming that they didn't understand a deal with Putin was not really a deal with Putin. So how do you manage Trump? Trump has certain views. He's the elected president of the United States.
The aides might or might not share those views. Some do and some don't. But they're not the president. Trump is the president. So from their point of view, the minerals deal was an ingenious option. I thought the plan made sense.
You're hardly a fan of Donald Trump, but your tendency has been to try to look past or around his performances that you've compared to professional wrestling. When it comes to Ukraine and American policy, though, what's behind the performance? What do you think Trump actually wants in Ukraine? Or is that too hard to discern?
Trump's style is very off-putting. Some would say disgraceful. Trump behaves in ways that diminish American soft power, which is a usually important dimension of American power. In his mind, The means don't matter as long as you get to the ends, which is a massive rebalancing of U.S. relationships across the world.
Do you not share the view, and it's my view, that if taken to its logical or worst extent, that the events in the White House last week could... constitute a moral and strategic U-turn for the United States, which would be a disaster.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Trump's foreign policy?
So Trump is revealing and in some cases accelerating a process where America's commitments exceed our capabilities, not because we're in decline, but because the alliances that we're in are those countries, Germany, Japan, and a few others are not punching their weight. So now you can say that Trump is wrong in his analysis of the world.
You can say that Trump's methods are abominable, but you can't say that American power is sufficient to meet its current commitments on the trajectory that we're on. And we didn't even get to the fiscal situation.
I'm speaking today with Stephen Kotkin, whom I've known for a very long time. He's a superb historian of Russia, and he's a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
On Radiolab, a story about how the country's most brilliant doctors did exactly what they were supposed to do.
And wound up killing 20, 30,000 people or so before it was over with.
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Chapter 5: How does the war in Ukraine affect American power?
The question we'll ask is, how did this happen?
Yeah, that's not the right question. The question is, why would they do such a stupid thing? Yeah, that is the question, isn't it? Yeah, that's the question.
Find out on How to Cure What Ails You from Radiolab. Listen where you get podcasts or on the WNYC app.
How is Vladimir Putin reading this situation? How is he watching Washington, and what does he want?
Russian grand strategy for, I don't know, three centuries, take your pick, has been the following. West decline, West decline, West implode, West collapse, and then we'll survive. That's Russian grand strategy. Things are bad in Russia. They're horrible in Russia. But hey, if the West defeats itself, then Russia will be okay. So this is your fear.
This is what you're talking about, that Trump is doing Putin's work for him. My argument is that that might be true, but I wouldn't trade U.S. power for Russian power in any dimension. And I wouldn't necessarily trade our political system for their political system because the voters punished the Democrats in the previous election big time.
And they're going to punish anybody else who's incompetent, fails to deliver and wrecks either our institutions, our economy, inflation, the stock market. Americans hate war. And they hate losing war even more than they hate war. So, you know, Trump is playing with fire here. And also, politics is much shorter than the longer-term trajectories I'm talking about, though.
You not only follow the statements and thinking of the Russian leadership, but you're reading every day sources like Signal in Russian. And what does that tell you?
That they're hoping that this... abominable war ends.
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Chapter 6: What are the potential outcomes of the Ukraine conflict?
They think Russia is on a failed trajectory, that Russia has mortgaged its future, that Russia's militarized economy is not sustainable, that the banking system is basically a fiction now because they've made massive loans to the military-industrial complex that are never going to be paid back. There is almost no investment in the civilian economy.
And so let's end the war in Ukraine and have a rapprochement with Europe. Russia's never been prosperous without a deep and multilayered relationship with Europe. And so those people are kind of what we call internal defectors. And they make up a significant part of the security and military establishment. But they're not going to go out on a limb in a situation where there's nothing on offer.
There's no sanctions relief on offer to them. There's no protected exile, government in exile offered to them. Nothing's on offer to them except support for Putin or a bullet in the neck.
How do we reach such people and who are they? In other words, they're embodied by who exactly?
So the KGB brought Gorbachev to power and Gorbachev gets inserted into the leadership because the KGB is worried about the trajectory of the Soviet Union and the widening gap in capabilities with the U.S. and others. These are the hard men of the regime did this. And so these people exist. Now, you're going to tell me that they're hard to find.
Well, we recruit them to be information suppliers to us. If we can recruit them to supply the same information to the CIA that I read on the telegram and signal channels every morning, maybe we can recruit them to form some type of pressure group, fly them to Warsaw, fly them to Helsinki, link them up with each other.
figure out how to build political pressure against the Putin regime to show that there are alternatives, which are Russian nationalist patriotic alternatives, to rescue the country from its current trajectory. Now, even if it doesn't work, it puts the pressure on the regime to come to the table and say, I'm going to preserve the regime over continuing the self-defeating war.
But wait a minute. Some would say, Steve, let's get back to real life here. Real life is Donald Trump is the president of the United States and his affections are almost personal toward Vladimir Putin. That when he speaks of Russia, he doesn't speak in the complexities that you've mapped out. He likes the guy. He has an affinity for the guy.
He feels much closer to him than not only Volodymyr Zelensky, but conceivably the leaders of Western European nations.
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Chapter 7: How can political pressure influence the war's resolution?
Now, again, Trump was elected in our system, rightly or wrongly. There isn't a mirror on the planet big enough for the Democrats and the left to look into to see all the ways that they elected Trump. This is what we have.
And so there are people in the Trump administration who are highly qualified on the national security side and who understand these issues at least as well, maybe better than I do. But again, we have this larger problem where there's not enough American power in the world.
And hard choices have to be made, not because America's in decline, but because 40 years ago, 30 years ago, the G7 was 70% of the global economy, and now it's under 40%. The plan was for the rest of the world to rise up in the American-led order, and it worked. And now we're not ready for that success.
You mentioned in passing what I think is a big theme of yours, and that is whether or not the United States is in decline. It's been axiomatic from time to time for decades now that the United States is in decline and that somebody else, most recently China, is the ascendant power. I want to ask about that, and I also want to ask about how China is watching the U.S.-Ukraine-Russia drama.
China's a really impressive country. Now, they went into the tank around 1800 for 170 years. That happens to coincide with the rise of America to superpower status. So the world before 1800 was a China-centric world. The Europeans bought in. The British... took over India. Nobody ever managed to take over China, but China got roughed up by the imperialists. The U.S.
rose in that world until China started to come out of the tank in the late 1970s, but especially in the 90s and 2000s. And now for the first time in recorded history, China and the U.S. are powerful at the same time. And so now you look and see that there's this U.S. dominated world order.
Now, China's not going to like that, and they're going to behave in such a way to push against that to shape the world order, not for U.S. interests, where China's a junior partner, but for China's interests. So the irony for China is now they want to push the U.S.-led order first out of East Asia, and then we'll see the appetite grows in the eating.
But that's been the basis of their success of coming out of the tunnel. If the Chinese lose the U.S.-led order, you know, be careful what you wish for. What is their pathway forward for continued prosperity? And who supplies the global commons? Who defends the global commons on which everyone's prosperity, world trade and security depend on, right? So that's the world we're in now.
And they're looking at Trump and they have no idea what's coming next. They don't know. They're off balance because of Trump. Remember, Putin thought Trump was going to deliver everything to Russia in his first term, and Trump was much harder on Russia than Obama was. So you tell me that you can predict what's going to happen, Trump, vis-a-vis China, and I'll crown you king of the world.
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Chapter 8: What are the prospects for Russia's political future?
That's not necessarily an excuse for incompetence, violation of the law, Or anything else. But we have this inbuilt radicalism now where you win an election by 10,000 votes in some state called a swing state. You get a 50-50 senator close to it and you decide to reinvent the American system. whether you're going to do Green New Deal or whatever.
And then the other side wins, also by the skin of its teeth. And it comes in and it decides it's going to reinvent America again, you know, because otherwise we'll lose our country. We clearly need to get back to something where we have the berserk because that's just inherent. and who we are as a nation and a people.
But we also have a middle ground where common sense prevails, where coalitions are necessary, where legislation passes not with 51 votes, but with 70 votes, or not with 219 votes, but with 300 or 400 votes, right? It's not going to be easy and simple because the media environment has been radicalized. We went through this when radio was invented.
People thought it was the end of civilization because they could just broadcast anything into people's living rooms and nobody could stop them. They could broadcast New Yorker Radio Hour with some bozo sitting in the Hoover Tower at Stanford University in the middle of Silicon Valley and nobody could stop them. But we mastered radio as an open society. We got Roosevelt.
Same thing happened with TV, which was even worse because it was not just voice but images. And it was the end of civilization because you could show anybody and you could deceive and it wasn't the truth and nobody could stop them. And we got Kennedy and then Reagan. Now we have the social media, which is much, much more radical and disruptive because everybody is a publisher now.
Everybody has a megaphone now. Everybody has a podcast and a newspaper and a magazine. If it's not called The New Yorker, it's called something else. And it's been massively destabilizing. And we're worried that the authoritarians are gaining the upper hand, just like happened with Mussolini and Goebbels and radio, just like happened with television.
And it turned out we mastered and assimilated those as a free society. Now we have to do the same with social media. It first produced Obama and then it produced Trump. And so how do we keep a free society while assimilating this massively disruptive technology? I don't know the answer to that, but I believe that, you know, in the short run, we're all dead.
China attacks, Russia attacks, Iran gets the bomb. But in the long run, we're good because we have the better system. We have corrective mechanisms. We have a free and open society. We got a judiciary that still works. And we can do this because we've done it before and we've come from depths. I mean, the Civil War. Andrew Jackson.
There's a lot in American history that is not necessarily optimistic for the future. And yet we made it through to the other side. And it's quite possible we'll make it through the current epoch that we're in. And certainly I wouldn't bet on the authoritarians in the long run, even if the short run can be very messy and maybe worse than messy.
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