Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine isn’t going well, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian says that’s because he listened to Trump and thought NATO didn’t have the resolve to stand up to him.
Historian Anne Applebaum said Wednesday on CNN that Putin has long wanted to weaken the NATO alliance, and Trump’s feckless actions and policies led him to believe the Western powers wouldn’t be willing to defend Ukraine:
“Yes, I think Putin was listening to Trump’s denunciations of NATO and he imagined NATO was permanently divided and wouldn’t be able to unite again. I think he didn’t count on what the sight of tanks rolling across a European country would do to people in Germany, people in Italy, people in France, people in Europe, and of course people in the United States.”
However, NATO is now being tested, Applebaum noted, and the alliance is proving to be more than equal to the task:
“It reminds everybody of a part of the European past that we hoped would never come back and NATO was encouraged to prevent. You have seen a really remarkable shift all across Europe as Europeans do now what should have been done some months ago, which is to reinforce and rearm Ukraine.”
Putin has overplayed his hand. And that could well cost him the war in Ukraine, as well as his position of power and his life.
