A Trump, Xi and Putin Summit?

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0:32From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Is President Trump searching for a grand bargain with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin? That's a question worth asking as Putin floats a possible meeting among the three to dictate Ukraine's fate. Meanwhile, this week, the president is sending his negotiating team to Oslo to meet with Ukraine's president. What to make of this swirling tempest as the president tries to force a peace in Ukraine. Today, we're bringing in our Global View columnist, Walter Russell Mead, to help you make sense of the flurry of events in global politics from Ukraine to Beijing and France.

1:11Walter, 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 of 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.

1:42So 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, I think first of all, we've got to remember that it's not just Ukraine that both that 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.

2:19And what we see is that in the last week, the president has endorsed Beebe 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 Beebe, where Beebe 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.

3:07And 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.

3:52So 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, Tarmin, I agree that there's clearly some coalition management going on. But one of the odd things about Ukraine, and I also agree with you that there's a much larger global picture and framework that the president's working from.

4:35But one of the odd things about the war in Ukraine is that, you know, the president is usually somewhat ideologically flexible and is willing to drop his strategy and change course if it's not working. But in Ukraine, we've seen 20 months or so of kind of continuous pressure on the U.S. ally of Ukraine, a reluctance to put pressure on Putin. And you can illustrate that through the Oval Office fight, through the kind of questions over why Ukraine's Starlink was slowed down. That seems to have been pretty consistent on the strategy. So my question to you is about the larger picture. Putin has suggested a meeting with Xi and Trump and Putin to sort of decide Ukraine's fate.

5:18And we know Putin has longed for a second Yalta from 1945 of kind of carving up the world into these discrete spheres of influence. So my first question is, is a grander bargain like that something in Trump's head? And then how likely do you think such a meeting like the one I described is? Well, in the first place, I would say he's also been pretty inflexible on Iran. Just remember that it's actually these things have been going in parallel tracks. And if there is some kind of a summit and in Trump's thinking, he's hoping there's some kind of trade off that if he gives Russia and China something they want in Ukraine, Maybe they'll give him something he wants in Iran.

6:03So these things actually are connected. Now, whether they're connected in reality or only in the president's mind, that is a different question. But if we're trying to understand what is he thinking and what is he doing, we have to keep these things in parallel. Will he get a summit? Very unpredictable, as is everything with this administration. There are so many open questions. If you said, OK, wow, let's have a new Yalta. Let's divide up the world. OK, who gets Taiwan? Is Trump willing to give up Taiwan? I kind of don't think so. Is Xi Jinping ready to accept some sort of division that wouldn't include Taiwan?

6:47So the grand bargain is not going to be a complete total bargain. That's not in the cards. And it may be, too, and I wouldn't underestimate these chances, that for all of them, this would be as most of Trump's summits have been with sort of top table world leaders. They've been outcomes where basically everyone got a good photo op, was able to look really good for the home audiences. So Trump goes a big three-way summit for peace. I wouldn't necessarily call that a major strategic change in the way the world works. It's just good PR for everybody. And they would all be willing to collaborate in giving each other a little bit of boost.

7:34And it makes them all look bigger than all the dwarfs they didn't invite to the party. Even the discussion of Ukraine's fate, the appearance of that being dictated by Xi, Putin and Trump, wouldn't that have rather immediate consequences for the U.S. alliance system around the world, even if it wasn't, you know, the total grand bargain. I guess maybe I'm, you know, a little less optimistic than you are on Trump on Taiwan. But what would be the effect on the U.S.? Nobody likes the phrase the global order anymore, but it does stand in for, you know, something that we have value, which is, you know, freedom of the seas, peace in the world, dealing with threats before they reach our shores.

8:14What would be the effect on that alliance network, including South Korea and Japan, if Trump were to say, you know what, we're going to sort out Ukraine's fate here at this negotiating table with Putin and Xi. Well, again, I think obviously so many things that Trump has done in the second term and in the first for that matter have shaken the alliance system in different ways. This would not be the first indication that anybody was getting that this is not a conventional American president pursuing the kind of foreign policy that they're used to getting from the United States. We're past that. So this would definitely be another step in the direction of unsettling people.

8:57I think it'd be very interesting how the Japanese took it, for example. But I think we also should look at the fragility of the coalition behind Ukraine right now. So the favorite in the current favorite and looking even more like a favorite in France in the spring presidential elections is someone who said she'll cut off aid to Ukraine, Marine Le Pen. Friedrich Merz in Germany is at something like 8 % to 10 % in the polls. And anti-American and anti-Ukraine parties are gaining strength in Germany in ways that make you wonder how long or how strong could German support be. So there's a deep shakiness in the whole West over this, of which Trump's shakiness is in a way the most visible sign.

9:49But I think the key thing from the Trump administration to Europe all along has been, look, fundamentally, this is your problem more than it is ours. You need to get your act together to try to stop it. We would like you to get your act together, but we don't think you're going to do it. And I would say he is more convinced than ever that the Europeans don't have a plan, short or long term. And in his mind, he might contrast that with Israel, which looks like whether or not they've got a plan, they've got a will, and they're capable and ready to act in defense of what they understand their interests to be.

10:28So he may not see a lot of building blocks there. Now, I'm saying this is so I've been to Ukraine three times since the war began. I've been visiting Ukraine actually since 1990. I'm a great admirer of what the Ukrainians have done, and I hate what is happening. And I have believed from the beginning of the war that if we played our cards right, Ukraine could win this thing. But we're not playing our cards right. I think the president is at the moment not really, it seems to have given up. And the Europeans have not developed after all of these years of war and really going back to since the invasion of Crimea, Europeans have not developed what you could call a serious foreign policy.

11:14So Putin is pushing against kind of a vacuum in Europe. The Europeans are starting to increase their defense spending, but the challenge is getting that to translate into real military capability. So we have this window before that happens. We'll take one quick break and be right back with more Potomac Watch. Isn't home where we all want to be? Reba here for Realtor.com, the Pro's number one most trusted app. Finding a home is like dating. You're searching for the one. With over 500 ,000 new listings every month, you can find the one today. Download the Realtor.com app because you're nearly home.

11:52Make it real with Realtor.com. Pro's number one most trusted app based on August 2025 proprietary survey. Over 500 ,000 new listings every month based on average new for sale and rental listings. July 2024 to June 2025. This is Matthew Hennessey, the editor of Free Expression. I want to personally invite you to come check out what we're doing. Signing up for the newsletter couldn't be easier. Just go to our homepage. Directly below the Wall Street Journal logo, you'll find the magic words, Free Expression, wedged between opinion and arts. There's an option to sign up for the newsletter right at the top of our section.

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12:52Welcome back. Capitalizing on your point about having studied Ukraine and visited for many decades now. I think there's a lot of question in the United States of if Trump were to pull U.S. intelligence support and our targeting assistance, do you think the Ukrainians could hold on? What's your sense of that from your own visits to the country in recent years? I think the war gets a lot uglier. The Ukrainian side is really, I think what they look at is they don't think, OK, fine, we make a peace with Putin and it's a bad peace and we're not happy, we've lost territory, and it's just not great. We're very sad about it.

13:29I think they see that Putin is determined to destroy Ukrainian identity and to actually sort of turn Ukrainians into slave soldiers for his next push, that he really wants to turn them into the building blocks of further Russian expansion and power. And so their determination to resist, you know, not of everybody in Ukraine, because there are a lot of different people there and they have different points of view. And you're a 94-year-old grandmother and you think about war in one way, and you're a mother with a four-year-old son, you might think very differently. So there's splits in Ukrainian sentiment, but there is a hardcore and a critical mass of people who believe that this is a fight to the death.

14:16And they won't stop just because the United States tells them to. They're not going to be like the Czechs in 1938 who just quietly leave the Sudetenland when Chamberlain tells them that's what they need to do. So this, again, is the part of the problem of grand bargains here, is Trump can't give Ukraine to Putin, even if he would like to. He can make life hard for Ukraine. And for that matter, Putin and she can't give Iran or what Trump wants from Iran to Trump because the Iranians also are independent actors. So we're not in the position of Yalta where you have only a handful of powers that are capable of any action and everybody else is kind of prostrate and starving.

15:06And so you divide them up any way you want. The superpowers aren't as super as they were in the winter of 1945. And that means, again, because if Trump really could deliver Ukraine on a platter to Putin, well, Trump could ask for something very substantive in return from Putin, like Iran on a platter. But if nobody can give that, then everybody, you know, then then the value of the whole meeting is less to everyone. And this is why I really wouldn't be surprised if the main outcome of such a meeting, if it even happens, would just be PR handshakes all around. And aren't we cool? We're the big powers and other people aren't.

15:54To your point about as a practical matter, Trump can't force Ukraine to stop fighting. He would also, you know, own whatever happened afterwards if there were these awful scenes of Ukraine's front lines breaking. He would own the political consequences of that in the United States. My question on the domestic politics in the U.S., again, I think ahead of this two weeks from an election, it's odd to me as a message to go with Russia accommodation as a kind of closing argument. Do you think that any of the kind of behind-the-scenes Republican frustration with the president's handling of the war in Ukraine, is that ever going to become a larger issue for the president?

16:34I mean, he is two weeks from being something of a lame duck if he loses Congress. But so far, we're only seeing criticism from Republican lawmakers who are retiring or are not particularly influential on the president's thinking. Do you see the Republicans acting as a check on what the president can do in Ukraine? Or is that simply untenable, given the president has so much control over foreign policy? I think it's very hard for Congress to act in a way to stop a president from doing something that he doesn't want to do, you know, to stop a president doing what he wants to do, or even more stopping him from stopping something that he wants to stop.

17:14So very difficult. And all the polls show that support for Ukraine is popular and popular among Republicans in some ways, even more popular among Republican voters than it is among Democrats. But at the same time, it reminds me of sort of, you know, you would always hear back in the day when climate change was the big issue. All of these people would come at you showing all these polls in favor of climate change, you know, of doing a lot more about climate change. But in reality, that never translated into the kind of big policy changes people wanted. Because while you may say to a pollster, yeah, I want us to, you know, save the planet.

17:58I don't want my utility bill to go up, et cetera. And so I think the support for Ukraine is it is not energizing huge numbers of voters or influencing the way that they vote. So I guess the flip would be that you can't really win an election on foreign policy, but you can't lose one. Right. I mean, it seems, you know, things voters are not animated to your point about exactly what the outcome is in Ukraine. But the Iran war is hurting Trump a hundred times more than the war in Russia. Let's just be clear. And this actually is the initiative that's popular with GOP hawks. Sure. And so it's the combination, I think, in some ways that, you know, his coalition management strategy has him backing the unpopular side in Iran and the unpopular side in Russia.

18:54And I think that combination is more damaging to his standing than if he at least embraced the popular side on one of the two. Yeah. And I understand the argument about the voter frustration in Iran. It's undeniable. But if you look at the president's approval rating chart, it's not easily discernible where the Iran war starts. So I'm curious, how much of that do you think is about the president's management of the war and the public's inability to kind of discern where he's going? Unlike Ukraine, his arguments there have changed at times. He wanted a ceasefire and he said, look, only bad people in bad faith want to continue this war.

19:30And then he shifted back to this longer term pressure strategy. How much of that is that the public doesn't know what to make of it? I would say it's much more this. What the public hates is high gas and high diesel prices. That's what the public hates. And it sees inflation was already a problem. This is making everything worse for farmers. Fertilizer prices are up. Diesel prices are up. And in a vague way, OK, the Iran war has made all that worse and so on. But it's not people reading his arguments about the Iran war and disagreeing with this or that. It's what's been killing presidencies for 50 years, high energy prices.

20:13And that, I think, is more than specific elements of the policy. But for a lot of people, starting a war that you don't immediately win and then have like a lot of headlines every day about how oil isn't getting out of the Strait of Hormuz or diesel isn't or whatever, and that's causing a price spike. And you see the price spike every time you go to the pump. That is, I would say, far more damaging to Trump and Republican prospects than anything connected with anything that's happening in Ukraine right now. Just that's how voters vote. Now, where do we go after the midterm? What happens? I don't know.

20:58But Trump clearly, on, as I said in the beginning, Trump, we talk about Trump as a consummate opportunist, but on Russia policy and Iran policy, he has stuck to his guns, even in the face of unpopularity and blowback. There's something happening there that's real. Stay tuned. We'll be back with more Potomac Watch. Philip Morris International's ambition is to replace cigarettes with smoke-free alternatives for legal age consumers, and the company is leading the smoke-free transition around the world. Since 2022, it has made U.S.-related investments of over$20 billion, the majority directed to both acquiring and further investing in U.S.

21:41manufacturing, commercial rights and infrastructure, and U.S. jobs, including the acquisition of Swedish Match, which generates the large majority of its revenues in the U.S. Discover more at PMI.com forward slash progress. Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker. Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast.

22:07From the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. And we're back with more Potomac Watch. I'm chatting today with my colleague, Walter Russell Mead. Again, capitalizing on your globetrotter life, Walter. I do want to ask, too, about the Ukraine issue is often considered kind of an isolation. OK, there's a war in Ukraine. We need to manage it, but not really appreciating the larger potential for that war to spill over into Europe in ways that it really already is through increased kind of drone incursions into NATO territory. What's your sense of how prepared European capitals are for that?

22:44And is it true to some extent that Putin has already escalated with Europe in a way that is noticeable on everyday life? That is how it looks to me from my seat. Yeah, look, you know, the sort of catastrophic political, and I think we have to say moral weakness of the European political class has been sort of a dominating and growing element in world politics for a long time. I mean, arguably, you could say in 1910, European countries control something like 80 % of the surface of the world and the resources and that the most sustained trend in international affairs since then has been the continuing erosion of Europe's absolute and relative power in the world, caused by a mix of really bad ideas that Europeans have embraced, ranging from fascism and communism to sort of goody two shoes, global cosmopolitanism, you know, all of which were ineffective in different ways.

23:44And then the divisions among Europeans themselves so that the French and the Germans just think differently about things. And it's very hard to corral all the cats into a disciplined regiment that could act as a group. So all of these things are happening, which is extremely dangerous for the American alliance system because the erosion of European power makes the West much weaker. Even if the United States on its own were doing strong, the deep and profound erosion of Europe, it makes the West less of an effective force internationally. And the problem for America, if you think of world politics as kind of like a multi-party parliamentary system, the problem is that our coalition allies, the Europeans in particular, have just gotten wiped out in the last election and don't have many seats.

24:44And so even though we've got about the same number of seats we've had, we don't have a majority anymore with them. And so how do you find some way to get things going? In a sense, you can't work with them and you can't work without them. So this is the problem, I think, that was haunting American foreign policy before the Trump administration. They've chosen a fairly radical path of trying to deal with it, one that, you know, so far, I think we have to say the success is mixed, is the, you know, a grade of incomplete so far. But the problem is bigger than what the Trump administration or the Biden or the Obama administrations have done.

25:29The problem lies in this European kind of fecklessness. And Russia is a realist power. Putin sees that weakness. Now, for any Russian nationalist, including Putin, the idea has always been that Russia's place is at the heart of European decision making. I said this before, but in the 19th century, if, I don't know, the Grand Duchess of Parma died and a new successor needed to be appointed, there'd be a Congress of Europe to decide who that would be, and Russia would get a vote. The European Union is a machine for keeping Russia out, and to some degree the U.S. as well, out of European decision making.

26:13Putin hates this, and not only him, but Russian nationalists generally consider it a total affront. And furthermore, they believe that the Europe is far too weak to be able to insist on that on its own, And that the only way it's able to do that is if the U.S. is backing not just NATO, but the EU play to keep Russia out of European affairs. And what they sense is that progressively, the U.S. is less and less interested in that. And Europe is, instead of responding to that weakening of will on the American part by increasing its readiness and so on, is actually just remaining as kind of feckless and hapless and divided as ever.

27:00I mean, they're obviously, you know, the Scandinavians are doing things, you know, not everybody in Europe is in this basket, but sort of collectively, the whole is less than the sum of the parts. So Putin sees absolutely no reason to stop pushing. And I don't think we should expect him to stop. Well, Walter, you've been generous with your time. I want to wrap up here with just a quick question for you and referring our listeners to your column today, which was on the situation in France and what you describe as a generational divide in global politics. I'm wondering if you could elucidate on that what you mean by a generational divide.

27:35And is there any reason to think that Gen Z is perhaps unique in world politics in the sense that, you know, every so often these generational divides come on and then young people tend to get older? But what do you see here that you characterize as that generational divide in the world? Well, first of all, this is going to make a lot of Gen Z or Zoomers very unhappy, but there's no generation alive now that they are more like than the baby boomers. They are the absolute mirror images of the baby boomers. A generation which thinks it's the first post-American generation, more secular than any other generations, have discarded all that racist claptrap that all the other generations had.

28:17And, you know, is facing a new world in a new way. Post-American generation. Congratulations to you all. Sometimes we want to pinch their little cheeks. It's so cute. But we wisely don't because they like, you know, our slogan when we were that age was don't trust anybody over 30. And we were very, a large generation, which has comes in a period of prosperity and then has to go out and make its living in a more difficult time. generally speaking has a chip on its shoulder. But look, to get to reality here, these days, you've got two phenomena happening at once. Number one is the cultural difference between generations or the technological difference is growing.

29:01Somebody in Gen Z grew up in a world that I only encountered at 50. And cell phones, social media, all of this stuff, algorithms that are created by super geniuses with the sole purpose of rotting your brain, all of those things are natural parts of the environment to them. They're kind of afterthoughts in a way to people that are older. So your idea of the world that you live in and what that world needs, what the big problems are, is more different from older generations than in stabler technological times. But at the same time, in part, thanks to the same technology advances in medical care and so on, the old folks are hanging on longer than ever.

29:48So we've never had a political class as old as this, you know, with so many people in their 70s and 80s. Business too, by the way. So the gap between the 70 somethings and the 80 somethings that are running the show and the instincts and the priorities of people that are in their 20s and 30s and don't see when, if ever, they're going to get a shot are very tough. And by the way, youth is impatient and old age tends to be greedy. So it's an ugly mix. Then I think you can throw into this another element of demographic change, which is more felt in some countries than others. But in a place like France, it's very real.

30:32The population is stagnant or shrinking, which means the younger generation is numerically a smaller proportion of the population. And so it's going to have a harder time taking power in politics. It's going to be a smaller vote. Young people don't vote as often necessarily as older people do anyway. But on top of that, the numbers are smaller. And also as consumers, if you're a smaller share of the consumer market, the sort of economic and business world adjusts to your preferences more slowly than if like the American baby boomers, you're this maximum generation. People talked about like the pig and the python as the baby boomers.

31:17So the world is less responsive to these younger generations that are numerically smaller, but politically alienated and economically AI, rising geopolitical tension, to a generation that's been taught to value safe spaces. And let's do jazz clap because we don't want anybody to be upset. All right. Now Trump is president. There's war in Russia. There's war in the Middle East. Xi Jinping might take Taiwan. There's inflation. Where's the safe space? The answer is there is no safe space anywhere. And so you have a generation that is naturally and appropriately concerned about the future and doesn't have a lot of faith in the old people who seem to have gotten us into this mess.

32:08By the way, except for your extremely wise and cogent Global View correspondent who sees it all and has infinite compassion for you young people. Well, thank you, Walter. We appreciate you coming on today on Potomac Watch. Philip Morris International's ambition is to replace cigarettes with smoke-free alternatives for legal age consumers. And the company is leading the smoke-free transition around the world. Since 2022, it has made U.S.-related investments of over$20 billion. The majority directed to both acquiring and further investing in U.S. manufacturing, commercial rights and infrastructure, and U.S.

32:44jobs, including the acquisition of Swedish Match, which generates the large majority of its revenues in the U.S. Discover more at pmi.com forward slash progress.