The Trump-Putin Summit, With Michael Kimmage

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the Trump-Putin Summit.
With me to discuss what we learned from the meeting President Donald Trump hosted with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska is Michael Kimmage. Michael is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America. From 2014 to 2016, he served on the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State where he held the Russia-Ukraine portfolio. Michael is the author of four books, the latest of which is Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability. He writes frequently on the war in Ukraine. His most recent piece in Foreign Affairs with Maria Lipman was titled "The Limits of Putin's Balancing Act." Michael, thank you for coming back on The President's Inbox.

KIMMAGE:
Jim, it's great to be back with you.

LINDSAY:
Michael, as we are talking here right now, President Trump is meeting at the White House with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and a group of European leaders. They are discussing the results of the Alaska Summit. So this is an evolving story and no doubt more bits and pieces are going to come out over the next twenty-four hours. But I'd like to sort of drill down what we know right now about the summit, and perhaps we could begin by talking a little bit about what we know was established at the summit, what they said and what actually came out of the meeting.

KIMMAGE:
In some ways, I think we know with greater precision what was not established at the summit last Friday, not to confuse it with the meeting that's ongoing in Washington this week with Trump and Zelenskyy and European leaders. So going into the summit last Friday, very high profile event, President Trump had been seemingly committed to a ceasefire and had suggested, I think even within twenty-four hours of the meeting, that if it didn't come to pass, harsh consequences would be imposed on Russia. And we know objectively, and President Trump has since elaborated on this, that just doesn't apply, that the U.S. is in fact not driving for a ceasefire, but seems to be going for a root and branch solution to the problem of the war, whatever it is. And it's quite a precipitous shift from the framing of the meeting as it happened just a few days before it took place.
It's not clear what, if anything, presidents Trump and Putin agreed to. There's no sense of sequence or timeline. Certainly there's no sense whatsoever of Russian concessions, and of Russia being asked or being forced to meet Trump's terms. In fact, we don't really know what Trump's terms are, if anything, and we could go into the symbolism of the meeting, which I think is in the end secondary. If anything, Trump emerged the meeting more committed to placing pressure on Ukraine. So it's an atmospheric shift in the entire conversation, not exactly about the war, but about the diplomacy concerning the war, to the detriment of Ukraine's prospects. And it's rather startling to behold because it seems so out of sync with the three, four weeks leading up to the summit.

LINDSAY:
Okay, there's a lot there to dive into. Perhaps we can begin, Michael, with the question of the symbolism. As I was reading the newspapers last week and watching cable television and checking in on X, what I heard a lot of people talking about was that the meeting was a victory for Putin even before it began, that the mere fact that the American president would have the Russian president who is an accused war criminal on U.S. territory gave Vladimir Putin a big win. Do you agree with that assessment?

KIMMAGE:
I think there's truth in that, and it's a transatlantic problem because most leaders of Europe are not willing to travel down that path with President Trump. So not only is it a legitimization of Putin as such, it's something that's going to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its allies. But I might add something to this conversation, which I think has been rich and useful about how quickly President Trump was willing to create very welcoming conditions for President Putin indeed on American soil in Alaska, no less, whatever that means. I still can't figure that out exactly.
But I think that there's something in effect worse than that that happened last week, which is that Russia is really not doing particularly well in the war. It's not gaining meaningful amounts of territory, its economy is deteriorating, it's suffering enormous deaths and casualties. And I think not only did Trump legitimate the Russian war effort by not criticizing it, by not treating Putin really as a pariah, but he implied in some ways that Russia has an upper hand with the war, that it's Ukraine that needs to figure things out because it's the weaker country as Trump puts it, and it's facing this insuperable, inconquerable enemy.
And I'm not predicting Russia's imminent defeat or even medium term defeat in the war, but to my mind the trend lines of the war are quite different from how the summit presented them. And that seems to me more than just a missed opportunity, it seems a wrongful framing of the war that makes the whole job of supporting Ukraine that much more difficult. So I could care less in the end about photographs of American soldiers rolling out the red carpet. For Putin, I think that that's a blip, that's a meme, but I care a lot about the narrative of the war, and I think the White House got it wrong last week.

LINDSAY:
Let me draw you out on that, Michael, because I've also read a lot that the Russian army is in fact making progress along the front lines, is paying a very high price for it. But just last week there was a great deal of concern about a potential breakthrough in one of the cities that had long been held by Ukraine, as I understand it was an important logistical point, but your take is that the war isn't going well?

KIMMAGE:
I think so, and I think it's very important to have a broader view of the war, to drive the point home. And this is a simple claim about wars, but deeply, deeply relevant to where we are at the moment. And the simple claim is that wars are composed of a military side and a political side. This is definitely a political war for Russia in that if we think back to the February 2022 invasion, there was an effort to decapitate the Ukrainian government and to unseat Zelenskyy and to put a stooge in of some kind, or perhaps even to turn Ukraine into a colony of Russia's. That was the expansive thinking back at the beginning of the war. And I would say that not only has Putin not achieved that in the last three and a half years, I think he's rendered that whole project impossible because of the kind of war that he's fought, the number of civilian deaths, the brutality of the Russian occupation, the extreme efforts at Russification.
I think it means that for the eighty percent of Ukraine that's under Ukrainian control, and maybe next year it'll be seventy-five percent or even sixty-five percent, but it's not going to be twenty percent under Ukrainian control for the foreseeable future. But for all of those people, there's going to be no appetite whatsoever for conceding to Russia's political demands. What their means are militarily is up for grabs and it's a difficult moment for Ukraine, they have a manpower crisis on their side. Russia has been gaining incrementally. The military picture is not particularly comforting at the moment for Ukraine, but the politics of the war have completely not gone Russia's way.
And I think it doesn't matter at this stage how many bombs Russia drops on Ukraine and whether they get this or that amount of territory on the Donbas, they've created for themselves the conditions of an unwinnable war. So that's a hard story to tell under the rubric of headlines, it's a hard story to make news, but it's an extremely important story. I'm just very frustrated about the White House for not getting any of that across over last week because the world was paying attention and Americans were paying attention, and I think we got the wrong narrative at the wrong moment.

LINDSAY:
I think this is where a lot of the talk about the meeting being a symbolic victory for President Putin has come from and has allowed him to portray himself as being in a stronger position than he otherwise would be. And certainly for Putin at home, it puts him in a better public relations spot even though the war at a minimum is incredibly costly to Russia. I'll note the Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this weekend that the United States estimated that the Russians lost twenty-thousand soldiers in the month of July alone. That's a very large number of troops to have lost.
But I have to ask the flip side of the question, Michael, and that is to what extent do you think Putin is susceptible to pressure? If I understand the White House's or President Trump's approach, he thinks he's going to get further offering carrots to Putin than sticks, even though he took a short detour down stick lane over the last three weeks. But again, there are a lot of people who say given mounting debt, given falling oil prices, given the cost of blood and treasure that Putin actually is vulnerable. Other people say whatever the price Putin is willing to pay the price. How do you assess those arguments?

KIMMAGE:
Right. I think we have to be very precise about what it is that we're driving for. And if we have a binary and simple notion of victory, where there's a parade at the end and a great conference and everything is wrapped up and finalized, if that's what we're driving for, I think we're going to end up being disappointed even if we could double the sanctions and double military support to Ukraine and do a lot of things that Kyiv would want us to do. If on the other hand, we're able to maintain what I think is the correct strategic posture, which is closer to containment, which is in the interest of the European countries to contain the spread of Russian military power, and I would certainly argue that it's in the interest of the United States, then it becomes much more a matter of the creation of dead ends for Russia over the longterm.
And one aspect of that dead end is the economic aspect that Russia has lost its natural trading partner, not the U.S., but Europe. Huge setback for the Russian economy by any standard of measurement. And the technology transfer, another thing's that come with that. Another dead end has to be the military side where, yes, Russia may gain territory. Let's recall that Russia for the last year has been fighting for the town of Pokrovsk in the way that a year ago or a year and a half ago Russia was fighting for the not town, but city of Bakhmut, but still I think it was a population of eighty-thousand before the war. And Russia is expending, as you say, enormous amounts of blood and treasure for these strategically meaningless gains. And that constitutes another dead end.
And it may be that all of this becomes relevant when Putin leaves the scene because Putin is fanatically committed to pursuing this war. I don't think that we can really do much to change that calculus from the outside, but if Russia is boxed in and can acknowledge these dead ends under different leadership, then I think we're going to get somewhere. And I think that should be the benchmark. So not complete victory, not complete victory by any means in the short term, but much like at the beginning of the Cold War under different circumstances and on a different scale, a strategy of containment. And there every sanction matters and every weapon that's sent to Ukraine matters as well. Even the smallest contributions are still contributions in that regard.

LINDSAY:
Let's talk a little bit about President Trump's switch from pushing for a ceasefire to trying to get a final settlement. First, can you help me understand why it is that Ukrainians and the Europeans have been pushing back on that switch by Trump? Why is it that they see it as being important to get a ceasefire before you begin negotiations?

KIMMAGE:
Right. I think some of it is just a testing of Putin and is there any willingness of Putin to follow through on what he commits to? So if you make it about one hundred percent peace, you're asking for so much more than you would be then asking for a ceasefire. So in the matrix of sort of confidence building measures, it makes a kind of sense to start small. But I think that there's a philosophical reason behind that, that we've had so much difficulty with Putin with so many different agreements and consultations and diplomacy. So much of it has failed in the past that you might inevitably want to start small. But behind that I think is something else, which is that Putin's demands when it comes to the European security architecture are fundamentally unacceptable to Ukraine. And they're fundamentally unacceptable to, let's say, seventy percent of Europe.
Obviously Europe is a heterogeneous place and Slovakia and Hungary have a different reading of the war than France and Germany do. But still there is a European consensus that it's not going to be possible to roll back the existing NATO alliance, which I suspect would be a Russian demand if you're going to get to root causes, as the Kremlin calls it, of the war. Demilitarization or the rendering of Ukraine as a neutral country, I think would also be a Russian demand, completely unacceptable to Ukraine. And I suspect, and this may even have been discussed last Friday in Alaska, that Russia would love to see the United States scale back its military presence in the Baltics and across the NATO member states, or to reduce troop numbers or to reduce military assets to a degree that's maybe what Secretary of Defense Hegseth wants to do on his terms. But from a European vantage point, and I think in the end from an American vantage point as well, the America that we have at the present moment, that too is going to prove unacceptable.
So if you're opposed to going for the big questions, there's a certain appeal in saying, "Let's go for everything and really resolve it." But if you're opposed to going for the big questions, it's because you acknowledge from the beginning that Putin's reading of those big questions, and there's ample evidence for this. We could go back to the beginning of the war and all the ultimatums that Putin put forward that they're just not going to work. And not only that final point to make, if you indulge your adversary in absurd and unacceptable expectations, to a degree, you're honoring and legitimating those expectations, which is half the problem of the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska. It doesn't mean that you're going to concede, but even to legitimate them is to put you on track to have the wrong conversation and to put Russia in the wrong framework. And there are a lot of dangers there as well.

LINDSAY:
Do you think, Michael, that Trump can wind the clock back, move away from what appears to be his acceptance of a final deal and refocus on a ceasefire, or has that ship sailed?

KIMMAGE:
No, I think with Trump the ship never sails or the ship sails in circles. And so where we were on the campaign trail was a twenty-four-hour end to the war. Where we were in the spring was a holding pattern where often Zelenskyy was the villain. Where we were in the summer, it was another kind of holding pattern where Putin was the villain. And where we are now is anybody's guess. To give the argument it's due, Trump is masterfully flexible. And there are conflicts in the world, but that really has helped him. I think Armenia-Azerbaijan, Trump served in that conflict as an intermediary between two parties where there's been thirty years of conflict and tension in ways that were very disadvantageous for Armenia, but to which Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed Trump was able either to put a Band-Aid or to put a real solution onto the conflict and to make it a matter of his personal, charismatic diplomatic presence. And whether it sticks or not, it's definitely an achievement for the White House. And interestingly in the context of our conversation, Jim, it's an achievement that's pretty annoying to Russia.

LINDSAY:
Yeah, I was going to say it came at Russia's expense.

KIMMAGE:
Yes, it's operating with an ally or, "ally," of Russia, Armenia. It's inserting the United States into Russia's near abroad as Putin would put it. And it's really sidelining Russia in a part of the world where Russia has had a prominent presence for a very long time. So all of that is interesting, and I think that that's a testament to the at times attractive nature of Trump's fluidity and flexibility and the protean nature of his presidency and of his character. But that's the best I can do to justify this approach because the problem with Russia, I find with Trump going back to his first term, is that he has no real agenda. He has phrases, he has gestures, he has instincts, he wants peace, he wants a working relationship, he wants to avoid World War III, all the things that sound fine as campaign promises, but they're impossible to translate into real policy.

LINDSAY:
And some of them are at odds with other goals.

KIMMAGE:
Yes. And they can be lots of contradictions in there. And contradictions also on the global stage that what Trump wants to do with Iran is very much at odds with what Russia would want, and it's going to lead to friction there. And U.S.-China is also another area where things are never going to align with Russia. So there are those kinds of contradictions, but if you don't have an agenda, it's impossible to realize one, and it can't be done on the fly. The issue is too complicated, it's too difficult, and I don't think, unlike Armenia-Azerbaijan, where you have these two heads of state who go to Washington instead of flatter Trump and in a way fall over themselves to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize, you're not going to get that with Russia, and you're not going to get that with Ukraine either.
These are countries that are in the midst of a longstanding and terrible conflict. And it doesn't matter how charismatic Trump is or what his personal investment is in the conflict, if he's not able to really follow through on the diplomacy and move them forward, it's all going to be a footnote or a sideshow at a certain point. I think Trump is vastly overinflating what he's personally capable of accomplishing with this conflict. And at a certain point that's going to be impossible to ignore or impossible to deny.

LINDSAY:
Michael, so far you've flagged two significant changes that came out of the Alaska summit, one being Trump's change from pushing for a ceasefire, the position supported by the Europeans to say, "We're just going to begin negotiations and reach a final settlement." Second change was that going into the meeting, President Trump seemed to be putting the onus on President Putin, pressure on the Russians if they didn't produce something to his liking, he was going to hit hard with sanctions both directly on Russia and on other countries. But there's a third change that seems to have come out of the summit meeting, and that is the Trump administration now seems open to what it is calling a NATO-like guarantee for Ukraine. Help me understand what that means, because I saw Steve Witkoff, President Trump's envoy for all occasions come out on Fox News this weekend and talk about it. It's not where I thought this administration was going, so help me work through this.

KIMMAGE:
Yeah. And to make our job even more difficult, Jim, there's the implication coming from the Trump administration that this was exceeded to or approved by the Russians last week, which at the very least I would like to see that in writing.

LINDSAY:
Yeah, that would mean a change on Putin's part.

KIMMAGE:
Yes, a kind of revolutionary change that goes against the entire texture of the war on the Russian side, which is all about controlling Ukraine and eliminating Western influence from Ukraine. But the world is a surprising place, and maybe that's the rabbit that Trump pulled out of the hat last week, but I'm deeply, deeply skeptical that that's the case. Now, here too I'll try to give a positive interpretation of what the Trump administration is up to and then a more critical interpretation. I think that there is an interesting and maybe even wise realization on the Trump administration's part that if they are really to do diplomacy in this situation, if they're going to really negotiate as opposed to simply supporting Ukraine for the long haul, that it's better to be perceived as a, "honest broker," that it's better to be in between than as simply a partisan of Ukraine, which is not with the Trump administration it's going to be regardless.
And so as a kind of opening gambit, as a basic approach, it does have a degree of logic to it that you give Putin the meeting in the U.S., you greet him warmly, you make a certain concession to his vanity and to Russia's pride, which is certainly an important force in Russian foreign policy. And at the same time, you give something to Ukraine, so they're going to have to give up land, the land swaps that Trump was speaking about before the Alaska summit, but seems to have now downplayed in recent days. Ukraine is going. To have to give up land. Russia is going to have to stop the war and to make it all work, we'll put security guarantee on top. Each side will get something and you'll have a deal at the end.
So if it would all transpire that way in the end, maybe you could see this as something of a roadmap for the situation. But the problems are manifold, this is my more critical understanding of all of this. If you're going to talk about a real security guarantee for Ukraine, my presumption is that there would be months of negotiation among the European countries together with Ukraine, with NATO, which can't be extracted from this conflict because it's there as a part of the region. You come up with a plan, you think about what you can commit. Is it going to be troops? Is it going to be something else? Is there going to be a huge aid package for Ukraine? Are there be collective work on Ukraine's air defenses and all of that?
And then you present that to the world as the security guarantee that's going to be given to Ukraine. And even there, I would have doubts that all of it would come to pass and that we're really ready to go down that path of what the west has never quite been willing to do for Ukraine, which is to really put itself on the line for Ukraine's security. But if that were the real approach, I think it would have to be worked out meticulously over the course of months. And instead what you get, what you've gotten all along with this from the Trump administration, which is diplomacy on the fly, phrases that are inserted into the public conversation by social media that change hourly, weekly, daily, and that therefore I think in the end have very little meaning.
So it costs Trump nothing to say he's going to give a security guarantee, Article-Five-like security guarantee to Ukraine, but it seems so incredible, so hard to believe that in the end it just feels like another Trumpian phrase. It's another part of the media spectacle, but it's not a real part of the negotiations.

LINDSAY:
Michael, am I correct in understanding the notion that there will be a NATO-like security guarantee to mean that the Europeans, in theory, would provide the security guarantee not NATO, and in particular there will not be United States troops in Ukraine?

KIMMAGE:
I think that's all correct, but if you dig into the European debates about this, and it's understandable, I think from their point of view that they're not comfortable pursuing what could be described as escalatory measures vis-a-vis Russia unless there's something of an American backstop. So it might mean European troops on the territory of Ukraine, absolutely it wouldn't be a NATO operation and there's just not the political will for that and the Russian response to that could be very severe, but there has to be some in-tandem operation and a high degree of trust on the European side that if they start to wade further into this war, which carries lots of risks, Russia's by no means a trivial or small adversary. It's a formidable one with all kinds of missiles pointed at European capitals that the United States would be there to make it all work and to provide a deterrent threat to Russia when it comes to Europe.
Because if Europe would enter into the war in some way and then Russia would threaten some kind of escalatory set of measures toward Europe, the deterrent force there would not be the Europeans, in the end it would be the United States. And so I think the agonizing dilemma of the Europeans is that they might even be ready for something like that at the moment, but Trump makes it awfully difficult.

LINDSAY:
So if I'm hearing you correctly, Michael, what you're suggesting is that at the end of the day, the Europeans are going to balk because they can't count on the United States standing with them because President Trump is, as you say, enormously flexible in the positions he takes.

KIMMAGE:
I think that's the bottom line. Poland and the Baltic States and some of the Scandinavian countries I think might be willing to travel down this line and let's just think forward six months if there would be big gains on the battlefield, if the U.S. would start to pull out of the war and not do intelligence sharing and targeting with the Ukrainians, all of which is in play as we speak. I think it's not impossible that European countries could change their calculus. I don't think that it would be the southern Europeans, and it might not be France, Germany and the UK, but there are Europeans who feel so strongly about this war that they might change their approach to it.
But if we're going to talk transatlantically, which is very important because the more transatlantic the effort is, the more successful it will be, it has to be a joint U.S.-European project, and there has to be some commonality of vision. And what's frustrating to observe is that it just seems unachievable with Trump who's, after all, waging tariff wars against European countries and whose vice president went to Munich in February of this year and said that the real problem in Europe is not Russia, it's cultural polarization or democracy deficit within Europe. And I think that just inserts ambiguities into all of this that I would suspect for Europeans are insurmountable.

LINDSAY:
Michael, you mentioned Trump talking about land swaps. Best I can tell he never laid out what he meant by land swaps. I understand what the Russians would want for a land swap, they want territory they claim, but have not yet conquered. It's not clear what territory Trump had in mind in terms of what the Russians would give to the Ukrainians. Do you think this land swap talk is off the table right now or is that going to come back?

KIMMAGE:
I hope it's off the table because it made a degree of sense twelve months ago when Ukraine had held territory in Russia, Kursk region of Russia. And there you could envision as a kind of termination of the war that Ukraine would hand territory back to Russia and Russia would hand territory back to Ukraine. That seems to me a swap that would be conceivable in Kyiv. And so land swaps of a different kind under current conditions seem to mean that Ukraine just gives up territory of its own. I don't know under what conditions, those haven't been spelled out, in perpetuity, with the recognition of the United States, as a kind of armistice. It's very hard to say.
And then there's this chaotic story which is too difficult to really piece together at the moment in terms of reporting, but you see the elements of it out there, which is that Russia wrote into its constitution that four regions of Ukraine are actually Russia. So this is Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk. I think that there was a concession or seeming concession offered to Steve Witkoff in Moscow that Kherson and Zaporizhzhia could be off the table, and so it's just going to be land swaps that give Russia control of all of eastern Ukraine, the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, which Russia controls, I don't know, seventy, eighty percent of at the moment.
And so that was the Russian concession that maybe generated the summit in the first place, but it's not a concession of all at all on Russia's part. What it is that land grab that Ukraine would have to concede, which would make Ukraine much more difficult to defend. So these land swap terms and questions are so strange coming out of the White House, and so obviously unacceptable to Ukraine, and I would imagine to any of the serious European countries supporting Ukraine, that it seems like a perplexing nonstarter at the start of all these conversations.

LINDSAY:
Michael, I have a sense we've almost come back to square one on this issue for the Trump administration with President Trump reverting to what had been his early, let's say, February-March approach to the war, putting the blame or the onus on Ukraine. He went on Truth Social and said his advice to Ukraine was simple, make a deal. Russia is a very big power, Ukraine isn't. What happens to Ukraine if President Trump decides to wash his hands of the matter? And also, can he afford to wash his hands of the matter?

KIMMAGE:
Yeah. To answer the second part of your question first, a basic recognition on the Trump administration's part that if Ukraine were defeated in this war, that the consequences would be very, very bad for the Trump administration. Maybe it's a fear that it would be—

LINDSAY:
Politically bad?

KIMMAGE:
Yeah, Afghanistan redox with the images and the TV images. But I think even beyond that, the kind of instability that it would sow with the millions of refugees in a part of the world that is very important for the global economy and the American economy, that this is objectively undesirable. So Trump vacillates and does this and does that, his messaging changes, but I think that there is a baseline recognition that Ukraine really shouldn't lose this war, and that is a constraint on the part of Trump who does at times wish to float free from the conflict. But Trump is Trump and he's an emotional man, and his mind can change quickly, and it's certainly thinkable that he could pull the United States out of the war. It's been threatened, it happened intermittently over the course of the last couple of months, and would be consistent with much Trump messaging.

LINDSAY:
I would take it though that the fact he hasn't taken the United States, not that he hasn't cut off U.S. aid entirely to Ukraine, that he's not eager to do that at a minimum. Is that a fair read?

KIMMAGE:
That's my instinct, that he's not eager to do it. But I do want to just outline without being too alarmist, but outline what I think would be the really grave consequences of that. So one would be on Ukrainian morale, which is not great at the moment, and Ukraine just faces a long steep struggle against Russia. So to do that without the world's biggest superpower would be that much more difficult and the course of the war, we saw that when there was the withdrawal of targeting back in the spring, that it actually did have a material and pretty quick effect on the course of the war, and it's something that would change the nature of the war.

LINDSAY:
Let me jump in here though, Michael, because I could imagine some people saying the United States should get out, and if this is a big deal, the Europeans not only should step in, they will step in because it's in their interest to do so and our being willing to be there saves them from that. Is that right, wrong?

KIMMAGE:
I think it's wrong probably. I think that there just isn't enough time for Europe to recalibrate in a way that would help Ukraine through, yes, maybe in some ultimate sense. Germany has committed itself to half trillion euros of defense spending, and that's going to come online at some point. The will is there, in a way the money is there, but the time is not. But the other concern I would have if Trump were to withdraw, on the European side, is that European countries would begin to hedge. So you begin to wonder in Europe, what does Europe look like if Ukraine loses and Russia is on the march? And I think that would be an incentive on the part of many European countries to form a separate peace to concede, in a way to pursue a policy of appeasement toward Russia because they would feel that it helps them to save their skins.
I think with the U.S. on the side of the transatlantic coalition, there's very little risk of that, and you see noises from Budapest and from Bratislava, but you don't see real actions. Without the United States, I think that that would happen. So not only is there a big timing question for Europe or a timing problem, there's a European-unity question or European-unity problem that's always there, but it would become acute if the U.S. were to withdraw. And would Russia be skilled at exploiting the fears that it was consciously sowing in these populations? Absolutely. That's in a way what Russia is best at doing. Russia's not great at winning wars, but it is good at regional intimidation, and you would just see immense amounts of that.
So, the U.S. is not the absolutely pivotal factor in this war. U.S. soldiers are not in Ukraine, and Ukraine has many supporters that are not the United States. And yet it is this big block in the Jenga architecture of Europe, and you take that block out and you could see a dozen ways in which the tower would collapse.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up this episode of The President's Inbox. My guest has been Michael Kimmage, professor of history at Catholic University of America. As always, Michael, delight to chat.

KIMMAGE:
So great to be with you, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And leave us a review, we love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's episode was produced by Justin Schuster with recording engineer Bryan Mendives and director of podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay, thanks for listening.