Would Putin have invaded Ukraine with Trump in the White House?
Donald Trump is touting his presidential credentials by claiming that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if he had won the 2020 election.
This “horrific disaster would never have happened” if “I was the president”, he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida shortly after the war broke out.
“Under our administration, Russia respected America just like every other country respected America, but now Joe Biden is seen as weak,” the former US leader said. Vladimir Putin had an “affinity for Ukraine”, Trump added, but he had warned his Russian counterpart to “never let it happen”.
Trump ‘countered Russia’
A poll by the Harvard Center for American Political Studies found that 63% of Americans believed that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if Trump had remained in power. This view was held by 85% of Republicans and 38% of Democrats, according to the survey of more than 2,000 voters as Russia launched the assault last month.
Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley has also claimed that the invasion “never would have happened” under the former US president’s watch. Haley told NBC’s Meet the Press last week that Trump “countered Russia” with his White House actions, including sanctioning Nord Stream 2, increasing spending on US military and making the country energy independent.
United on Nato
The claim that Putin would not have dared invade with Trump in power has been trotted out by a string of high-profile Republicans.
But “not only does this sort of talk needlessly turn our foreign policy into a partisan issue, it is also resting on assertions that are offensively disconnected from reality”, argued Nicholas Creel, an assistant professor of business law at Georgia College and State University.
In an article for Newsweek, Creel wrote that the “only conceivable reason” why Moscow might not have invaded during a second Trump term was that with a US president “hellbent” on undermining or even withdrawing from Nato, such an assault might not have been necessary.
Trump has “never passed up an occasion to speak flattering words” about Putin, Creel added. Yet this flattery is “anything but the talk of someone who we can have expected to take a strong stance against the ruthless Russian dictator”.
The Zelenskyy evidence
Marie Yovanovitch, a former US ambassador to Ukraine, has suggested that Trump’s infamous attempts to withhold military aid from Ukraine during a 2019 phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy may have emboldened Putin.
Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/world-news/us/956093/putin-trump-ukraine