A Trump, Xi and Putin Summit?

Walter, thanks so much for joining us on Potomac Watch this Tuesday.

Walter, we've been trying to make sense, and we talked about this on the podcast a little bit yesterday, of what's going on with the president's actions in Ukraine.

Over the past couple weeks, the president has waived new sanctions that were supposed to take effect that Congress passed.

He has gone about that Russian diesel deal to unleash Russian diesel onto the global market.

It's hard to understand exactly what is animating this.

It's not exactly a great closing argument ahead of an election that looks to be tough for Republicans.

So how do you read this flurry of diplomatic activity around Ukraine so close to the election? And I think the latest on Tuesday is that we have Trump's negotiators heading to Oslo to meet with President Zelensky in Ukraine.

So what's the strategy behind this seemingly chaotic amount of activity involving the war in Ukraine?

Well, first of all, we've got to remember that it's not just Ukraine that both the president's thinking about and that he's being kind of hyperactive about, because there's also a lot going on in the Middle East.

Some of our listeners may remember there's actually a war going on of some kind there.

And what we see is that in the last week, the president has endorsed Bibi for reelection, which is a kind of a surprising move.

Apparently, another aircraft carrier strike group is being ordered to the Middle East, which would raise the number that are there to three.

And there was the meeting between Secretary Hegseth And Bibi, where Bibi actually, I'm told, skipped a soccer game, which would have been a kind of a big election rally to get to that.

So there must have been something going on in that meeting.

So when we think about what's going on in American foreign policy, we have to realize that President Trump is looking at a bigger screen than just at Ukraine.

And I've argued in the past that really almost since the start, maybe since the start of his second term, President Trump knows he's got two wings in his coalition.

He's got a restrainer wing that really wants him to do, you know, wants nothing to do with wars in Ukraine, nothing to do with wars in Europe, focus on the Western hemisphere, break with kind of classic post-World War II American foreign policy.

And then he's got a more hawkish kind of conventional post 9-1-1 Republican thinking, which wants a strong American presence and believes in continuing that global foreign policy that we've had since World War II.

So he's balancing those.

And to some degree, what he's done is he's given Ukraine, Russia to the restrainers, and he's given Middle East to the hawks.

And we can see he'll often balance it.

So if he's going to be more hawkish in the Middle East, he'll do something dovish, quote, on Ukraine.

Or if he's going to support Ukraine, he'll pull back in the Middle East.

He's constantly balancing, but he thinks about his coalition.

Well, well, I mean, I agree that there's clearly some coalition management going on.