Paul Kengor: Why didn’t Putin do this under Trump?

Trump supporters are pounding their chests over what they believe is a rhetorical question: Why didn’t Vladimir Putin do what he’s doing in Ukraine when Donald Trump was president?

It’s a fair question that fair-minded liberals ought to ask. In fact, one of them, Bill Maher, raised it: “If Putin thought Trump was really that supportive of him, why didn’t he invade when Trump was in office? It’s at least worth asking that question.”

It is indeed. The last time Putin took a bite out of Ukraine was in 2014, when Barack Obama was president and Joe Biden was vice president. He’s at it again, but far worse. I never thought he’d actually invade Kyiv.

So, 2014 and 2022. It doesn’t take a mathematical genius or Henry Kissinger to figure out that Putin refrained from invasions during the Trump presidency. And I’m hardly a Trump apologist, recently here expressing my loathing of a Trump-Hillary 2024 “Dumpster Fire 2” rematch. In fact, I wrote against Trump throughout 2016, warning that electing him would be bad for NATO and good for Putin.

And yet, Putin largely behaved himself under Trump. Why?

We don’t know all the reasons. Putin isn’t going to sit on a couch and sob a pile of psychobabble to Oprah Winfrey. But generally speaking, and I say this as a student of international relations: Perception matters in international relations.

Everyone knows this. It’s why even CNN liberals had a cow over Biden’s debacle in Afghanistan last July. Everyone knew Biden’s failure not only sent a signal to the Taliban and ISIS but to the likes of Putin and Xi.

Going back to 2014, Putin plowed into the Crimea not long after Obama’s infamous open-mic moment telling Putin lap-dog Dmitri Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility” after the election. A grinning Medvedev greedily replied, “Yes, I tell Vladimir!”

Vlad listened. Putin, nurtured in the KGB, respects strength and preys on weakness.

A president who under­stood this was Ronald Reagan. “If you were going to approach the Russians with a dove of peace in one hand, you had to have a sword in the other,” said Reagan. “We had to bargain with them from strength, not weakness.”

And yet, that was not what Barack Obama did. Obama approached Putin with a dove in one hand and a bouquet of roses in the other. And Putin exploited it.

Fast forward to the Trump years.

Liberals portrayed Trump as a belligerent nutcase, not to be trusted with his itchy finger near the nuclear button, even as Trump as president rarely used military power. He actually got along with crazy Kim in North Korea, albeit spouting outrageous statements gushing about the little dictator. What Trump achieved in the Middle East, with multiple Arab nations recognizing Israel, was tremendous. It would have earned a Democrat the Nobel Peace Prize. But liberals instead framed him as a wild man.

Well, that probably had an unintended positive effect in deterring someone like a Vladimir Putin.

Whatever Putin’s reason­ing, it is undeniably striking that he didn’t seek to annihilate Ukraine under Trump. For four years, he hit the pause button. Now, his troops are ripping it up. That fact shouldn’t be shrugged off by Trump haters.