Donald Trump Moves Closer to an Alliance With Russia

0:00Why can't we get AI to production? Our competitors are all ready. How do we keep data secure? AWS AI cuts through the noise. With ready-to-use agents and the broadest set of AI tools, stop overthinking. Start building. AWS AI is how. From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Donald Trump seems ready to turn U.S. foreign policy upside down by seeking what looks like a de facto alliance with Vladimir Putin against Ukraine and Western Europe. What's behind this turn and what are the chances that he can actually keep going with this and pull it off? Plus, much of France goes up in flames in a weekend of riots.

0:47We'll tell you who's stoking the not-so-peaceful protests and how they could influence the 2027 presidential election in France. Welcome to Potomac Watch, the daily podcast of Wall Street Journal opinion. I'm Paul Gigo, and I'm here today with my colleagues, Jillian Melcher and Joe Sternberg. Jillian based in London, and Joe Sternberg back recently from London and many years overseas. Let's start with President Trump and his latest turn in what he calls his effort to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. On Friday, he announced he's waiving for an indefinite period the sanctions in the Lindsey Graham bill he recently signed.

1:27This follows his deal to waive sanctions on Russian diesel oil sales, which the Kremlin uses to fund its war in Iran. And it follows the news that Ukraine's use of the Starlink satellite network to monitor Russian drones and help defend against Russian attacks was suspended. And there's mixed reporting about who is responsible, whether it's continuing or not. No one really seems to be claiming responsibility, but somebody is doing it. So what do we make of all this, Jillian? Well, I think it's a real strategic shift away from being Ukraine's partner. This is really troublesome stuff. I mean, look, under the Trump administration, we already knew that there was going to be a bit of a shift.

2:12And we've seen the U.S. go from under the Biden administration giving Ukraine weapons to defend itself to a more transactional approach under the Trump administration. All right, we'll give you these weapons, but Europe has to pay for them. This is something very different. The sanctions relief is relieving pressure on Russia at a time that the financial pressure from Western sanctions and the so-called kinetic sanctions by Ukraine were really starting to take an effect. And we know that Vladimir Putin uses energy revenue to fund his war machine. And so this is going to be something that he can use to buy and produce more missiles and more drones to terrorize Ukrainian cities and civilians.

2:51And then I think equally disturbing, hearing the reports that Ukraine sometimes in the past week has not received early notice of Russian missile launches. We don't really have a good explanation on that. Same with the SpaceX Starlink equivalent for government and military purposes being throttled. What the effect of that is, is first and foremost on civilian populations. I mean, that early warning, and I'm saying this as somebody who's had to rely on that early morning to get to a bomb shelter in time, especially in cities like Kharkiv or Sumi, places close to the border, you may have three minutes or less.

3:24So that is a critical life-saving measure. And then on Starlink access, you know, some of it is for jet drone interception, the very fast Russian new Shahids. But some of it is also for the mid-range drone missions that Ukraine has been launching on Russian positions. And we've seen that actually have a significant impact in turning the momentum on the battlefield. That is what has thwarted the Russian offenses in the past year, kept them from making advances, and is turning things in Ukraine's favor. So having that in jeopardy is significant. Right. And I think there's real cause for alarm. Wow.

3:56OK, well, that's a dire analysis here. Let's listen to Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, talk about this on Meet the Press. I don't know all the reasons why President Trump made such deals with Putin. But it doesn't look that all these steps will push us to peace. I think oppositely it will strengthen Putin in his will to occupy us. and it doesn't help at all. You see Zelensky's point of view, Joe. The president, after he announced the waiving of the Lindsey Graham sanctions for an indefinite period, got a lot of heat on the weekend from bipartisan politicians, including some Republicans.

4:50And on Sunday then issued what I think was a response to those criticisms where he said, look, I'm doing this for a very simple reason. I want to make the peace between Ukraine and Russia, and I want the war to end. And I am trying not to do anything that would push Vladimir Putin away from the negotiating table. My response to that is, you've been doing that for two years. You've been pursuing this strategy of pressuring Ukraine time and time again in the ways that Jillian described. And you've been trying to do these favors for Putin. They've been symbolic in a way up till now, right? He's, you know, the Alaska summit last year with all of its pomp and circumstance.

5:42The invitation to the G20 down in Mar-a-Lago that's coming up, the G20 meeting of nations. But now we're really getting to substantive support for Russia's war. What do you make of Trump's explanation here? Does it sound right to you? Trump's attitudes on foreign policy always have a certain inscrutable quality to them. So I think we could probably drive ourselves crazy if we tried to dig too deeply into what the motivation might be. I mean, clearly he thinks of himself as a man of peace in a way he's always very eager to talk about the conflicts around the world that he has ended. And I think that there is a sense that this would be the big one if he could actually achieve a resolution here through negotiation that has eluded everyone else.

6:28You know, he would probably view that as a feather in his cap. And I am sure that he's got people within the administration who are whispering very insistently in his ear that this war going on is politically bad for him. I mean, it's significant that what we're talking about right now are energy sanctions at a time when energy prices are a big political vulnerability for Trump and Republicans headed into the midterms. And you can point out accurately that there is far from a straight line between Russian energy exports or Russian energy sanctions and the cost of diesel in the US. But clearly, someone in the administration appears to have been drawing that connection in some way.

7:11And I think that the difficulty here is that there are always multiple ways that you can end a conflict, the worst of which is generally encouraging or forcing the invaded party to just roll over. But I think that because other solutions are proving more intractable at the moment, that seems to be the thing that Trump is starting to turn to in pursuit of the quick resolution here that he thinks that he needs. We're going to take a break. And when we come back, we'll talk about whether or not Donald Trump can actually pull off this change of strategy to help drive a solution to the Ukraine-Russia war when we come back.

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8:43free expression wedged between opinion and arts. There's an option to sign up for the newsletter right at the top of our section. Just hit that button and you'll start getting the world's hardest working newsletter delivered directly to your inbox Monday through Friday. If you aren't a journal subscriber, the newsletter is free, but we are gonna need your email address. There's a lot of fun stuff in the newsletter that you can only read in the newsletter and I don't want you to miss any of it. Sign up for free expression today. We'll see you in your inbox. Welcome back. I'm Paul Jigot here with Joe Sternberg and Jillian Melcher.

9:19And we're talking about Donald Trump and Russia and Ukraine. The president, no doubt about it, does seem to put a priority on these leader-to-leader relationships with Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-un in North Korea, for example. And he often seems to me, Jillian, to equate those with actually nation-to-nation relations. He somehow elides the national interest with Trump's own sense of his personal interest and ability to get along with dictators. I don't think that's often reciprocated by the dictators based on the results that we see. I guess the question is, the president is determined to move here.

10:00Zelensky, what we heard, suggests they can't go along with the kind of terms that the president is so far dictating. So either those terms have to change or there's not going to be the settlement what the president wants. Yeah, that's right. I mean, you have to look at what Vladimir Putin is offering here. And I think it's really notable that despite Trump making these significant concessions, basically a strategic pivot in the war, Vladimir Putin has offered absolutely nothing. I can't name a single war-related concession that he's made here. And if you look at his list of demands, just for peace negotiations to begin, not even for a peace to be brokered, he wants Ukraine to give up territory that the Russians don't currently occupy and don't have a good shot at occupying.

10:45And I think one really important thing to point to right now, it hasn't gotten enough press attention, but the city of Aleksey, this is in Kurson in the southern part. It's one of the areas that Russia actually does occupy. And the news coming out of there is absolutely horrific. These are Ukrainian people that are trapped in this city. The Russians have been cutting them off from medical supply, from food. It's siege-like conditions. You've got reports of bodies in the streets, dogs feasting on them. And I think Ukrainians are looking at this and are just completely horrified and are saying if that is the kind of peace that we are being asked to accept, to give up more of our territory and more of our cities and civilians to these type of conditions, we'd rather die on our feet.

11:26Thank you very much. And I think that's something that the Trump administration hasn't come up with a good answer for, what Ukraine gets out of this. And really, it gets to a broader problem with these negotiations, which is the pressure is always on Ukraine. It's not on the aggressor. And Vladimir Putin is choosing to continue this war. So Zelensky said that he finally talked to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president's negotiators, on the telephone, floated a possible meeting with them soon. And now we get reports that Vladimir Putin has floated to the President Trump and the idea of a summit with Trump himself and Xi Jinping to settle the war with Ukraine, not part of the bargain here, not at the table.

12:10So, you know, you kind of think of historically, this sounds like Yalta after World War II, where Stalin and Churchill and Roosevelt, going to be the victorious leaders, carved up what was left of the Nazi empire and left us with a pretty big historical mess. Beyond that, the question is, Joe, you got to have Ukraine at the table here and you got to have Europe at the table because Western Europe is beyond Ukraine where Putin has his eye on and blowing up NATO. Yeah, I mean, this whole weird notion of that particular trilateral negotiation, I mean, my first thought is what could go wrong? It's just so perverse because it gives every indication that Trump has forgotten exactly what this fighting is about.

12:57I mean, the American strategic interest in this has always been stability in Europe and stable borders in Europe, particularly on the eastern side of it, where you start having an abutment between NATO allies and other countries such as Ukraine and Russia. So if you're now going to cut out the European allies who are the principal justification for the U.S. caring about the situation and also cut out one of the two parties who is doing the fighting here, and in particular the party that is doing the fighting because it has been invaded. And so, as Jillian pointed out, you're going to have to have some kind of buy-in from Ukraine in order to achieve any kind of stable resolution here, because the Ukrainians understand quite correctly that they are fighting for their country and their lives.

13:50It just baffles me what President Trump and the administration think that they would be accomplishing here? Because even if you end up with some kind of agreement out of this tripartite negotiation that there may or may not be contemplating right now, how stable is it going to be? I mean, you will are likely to end up with a deal that is not going to accommodate or account for the political and security interests of our European allies who are participants in various ways in the situation. And you aren't going to They have fundamentally reached a deal necessarily that would induce the Ukrainians to stop fighting in defense of their own country.

14:30I think that's a huge obstacle here. The U.S. political system focused on the midterm elections. You don't get a lot of Republicans certainly criticizing Trump here. But I do think that after the election, there's likely to be some significant pushback on a bipartisan basis. I talked to a Republican senator last week who was really almost angry about what the president was doing with the diesel deal and the apparent Starlink throttling. And I think there are going to be some consequences here. Now, you can't stop a president from doing a lot of these things. It can't easily stop them in any sense.

15:06But you can start to make him pay a more significant political price for that. All right. We're going to take another break. When we come back, we'll turn to the riots in France and tell you why we think these are happening, why they're getting worse, and what it has to do with the presidential election next year. If your organization isn't managing its data with every pure, then it's likely scattered all over the place. My lord, three days have I ridden to bring thee warning. The records thy great AI machine requires are strewn across five kingdoms. Yeah, the EverPure data management platform unifies data so you can always find it.

15:47No messenger needed. No more running around. Get out of the data dark ages with EverPure, a new era in data management. Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker, play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast. That is, play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast. From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Welcome back. I'm Paul Gigo here in Potomac Watch with Joe Sternberg and Jillian Melcher. All right, let's turn to the riots in France. This weekend became the worst so far with thousands of arrests and mass looting of stores in Marseille and other cities, as well as attacks on state buildings, including the historic town hall in Limoges, which was burned down, then a famous tower toppled.

16:44President Macron spoke Sunday night and urged the return to public order, denounced the violence and looting and promised to enforce order. And promptly, there were more riots after that. Ostensibly, this is about a lack of funding started with students protesting the condition of schools. But that doesn't explain why these protests are getting worse, Joe. What's going on here? Yeah, I think we're well past the point where this is about a discernible fiscal policy point, the school funding. What seems to have happened over the past few weeks is that, you know, France has this tendency to romanticize its history of street protests going back to the first revolution in the 18th century.

17:30And so I think that there is sort of this element of street protest and even rioting being part of the political culture in a way that would seem very foreign to Anglo-Saxons in Britain or the US. You know, so that's part of the background here. And that certainly inspired the earlier stages of this. And And over time, a part of it has become that it is fun for the rioters. I mean, France has huge problems with unemployment, particularly youth unemployment. So you have a suspicion that a lot of these people who are rioting don't have much else to do with their time. And we shouldn't underestimate the fun aspect of doing something that's transgressive in this way and socking it to the man by rioting in the streets.

18:18And then on top of that, you have this layer where clearly politicians and parties of the left and the far left have concluded that it is advantageous to them politically, or at least they believe that it is, to continue stoking these tensions. And so I think in that sense, the rioting is now becoming bound up in this looming fiasco of a presidential election that they are due to have next year. and the jockeying that's going on around who is going to be the winner, the loser in the race for second place to run off against the Marine Le Pen and the insurgent right in that election. And so in general, my sense of the rioting now is that we've reached a point where it is basically about everything.

19:06You know, it becomes harder to point to any one specific thing that the rioters are looking for that is stirring them up. They're against the status quo and they're trying to shake things up. It's the tender, the dry tender of potential major shakeup politically. I think that's the larger undercurrent here is that you have this volatile period in French. Well, for two things. One, it's the failure of the state, okay? It's the failure of the state to be able to deliver basic services because so much of its money goes to pensions and to welfare and to transfer payments. and jobless benefits. And the taxing ability of the state is pretty much at the limit, given how much of the private economy the state takes.

19:52But they spend so much money on these transfer payments that the state can't do basic things like provide for education, provide for defense, provide for public security like it should. Okay. So you have that as a backdrop. And then you have this presidential election that's looming. And Macron, the president, preaching the end of his two terms, he's essentially a spent force, Julian. His coalition has collapsed, can't achieve anything in the National Assembly, which is stymied on even a budget, basic budget for the year. And the left and the right both see an opportunity here to be able to succeed Macron as president.

20:31Marine Le Pen, who has competed in the past presidential elections, is now the favorite in the polls. The National Rally Party, you know, if that would continue, she could become president. And then the left, I think, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the indomitable France party, sees an opportunity, if he can consolidate the vote on the left, to be able to sneak into the final two in the runoff. And maybe then, you know, think, okay, people won't vote for Le Pen, they'll vote for me. And the left sneak into power. I think this is the kind of the volatile political environment we're in. Yeah, you're absolutely right.

21:08I mean, you saw Melanchon this week going out and participating in the protests, faulting the police for unleashing on the protesters, which is an interesting term when you have protesters literally going to small businesses and smashing their windows in. I would argue that as a time to unleash and probably a lot of French feel the same. And I I mean, one thing about Le Pen and National Rally is that they've run on a law and order campaign. And they're also, you know, the undercurrent of this is the tensions in France around immigration. And somebody was observing that they've seen a lot more pro-Palestinian flags at these protests and riots than French flags.

21:48So I think, you know, France's presidential elections are unusual in that they have this two-round system. The way it's been described to me is in the first round, you vote with your heart. in the second round, you vote with your mind because it's narrowing the field down to two candidates. And I think what Melenchon is trying to do is say, we're going to cue Marine Le Pen up for a victory in the first round based on all these things, but we're going to run the 2024 playbook, which is when the National Rally Party gets a bump in the first round, we're going to start talking about fascism and the rise of the extreme right and all those other things.

22:21And that's something that France actually is pretty phobic about. But unfortunately, Montalegre Manchon is an equally radical figure. I mean, he is to the left of Bernie Sanders. He's got an awful economic record, but he's also a really anti-American guy. And I think you're absolutely right to point to the broader societal frustrations here. I mean, I think part of what's getting lost in this is French youth do have a reason to be really upset. Their future is being robbed from them. If you look at pensions, it's consuming 14 % of the French economy. Total public spending now, 57 % of GDP, and you've got age-related benefits accounting for 40 % of those public expenditures, growth at about 0.4 % for this year.

23:03If I were a French youth, I'd be asking where my future is here, and it might make me pretty angry. Well, how do you see this playing out, Joe? For more months of instability here, the next year's first round election is in April, followed by a runoff in May. And are we just looking at this kind of continuing turmoil off and on for the next few months until the election? Yeah, buckle up, because I think that, you know, as a practical matter, the first problem is, can the authorities get back control of the streets? So, I mean, right now they're starting to attempt enforcing curfews. But I think the A background part of this is that over recent years, I think that a lot of segments of French society have completely lost respect for the authorities, particularly the police, because you have just waves and waves of national strikes and protests of one form or another.

24:00And you have the situation where the president right at the top of it, Emmanuel Macron, has completely lost political authority. You know, as you pointed out, Paul, he's a spent force at this point. So I think that the immediate question is going to be whether under these circumstances, the authorities actually can get control of the streets. Now, assuming that they succeed, and human history suggests that even the most vigorous rioting does burn itself out after a while, you know, I think that you can still expect that there's going to be a lot more of this unrest. I mean, one point to consider here is that we are talking about how there are going to be two rounds of this presidential election, which is true if you look at the constitutional process.

24:44But I think that there is a danger that the left then tries to create a so-called third round of the election in the streets after they have elected a new president. And, you know, I think that what I worry about is whether the far left is discovering anew in this episode that they can actually impose a form of rioters veto on the ability of a future government to act. You can argue about whether that would be so much of a danger if Marine Le Pen and the national rally do end up winning the election in that second round because they are much more of a law and order party. They would have more of a mandate than Macron does.

25:22They might be less squeamish about using police power than Macron has been to date. But it is still a danger, and I think that it's a real problem for France moving forward.

25:40right now. It is still, last I looked, the second largest economy in the European Union. So it is too big for any of us, for the Europeans or for America as a trading partner and strategic ally, to have this kind of unrest and instability trundling along indefinitely. Well, the U.S. president, Donald Trump, says it's all about immigration. They've let in too too many Muslims and so on, people who hate French society. J.D. Vance, the vice president, said basically the same thing. You alluded, Jillian, to the fact that there were a lot of Palestinian flags at these protests. And of course, some look at the attacks on symbols of France, like city halls and statues, as an attack on Western civilization by forces who have entered the country without assimilating into the country's norms and values.

26:35There is some of that here, no question about it, but I'm not so sure that is the trigger for these recent events so much as these larger problems we discussed. Yeah, I definitely think that it's the economy and it's France's welfare state and profile here. I mean, I will just tell you anecdotally, one of the most interesting experiences I've had while being out here, I was in Marseille and I actually ended up hiring a translator and going up to the Benus. Those are the heavily immigrant neighborhoods during the 2024 elections and talking to people. And it was interesting in those immigrant neighborhoods, first of all, seeing that there were among first generation immigrants, some shy national rally supporters who were looking at the crime situation saying, I don't want my immigrant kid getting sucked into this.

27:19So that's a layer of complexity there. But the other thing I heard a lot was that the U.S. is very good at assimilation because you believe in values to become an American. What it means to be French is a little bit more complex. And I was hearing a lot of frustration from those people saying, you know, we don't know what the French dream is and we don't know if there is even a viable path for us to be French. And I think that as France is dealing with this crisis, if it wants growth, that will need immigration at some point. But thinking about how to assimilate and how to create a French identity that is accessible is also an important part.

27:51All right. We'll leave it there today. Thank you, Joe Sternberg. Thank you, Jillian Melcher. Thank you all for listening. We're here every day on Potomac Watch. Hope to have you with us tomorrow. If your organization isn't managing its data with Everpure, then it's likely scattered all over the place. My lord, for three days have I ridden to bring thee warning. The records thy great AI machine requires are strewn across five kingdoms. Yeah, the Everpure data management platform unifies data so you can always find it. No messenger needed. No more running around? Get out of the data dark ages with Everpure, a new era in data management.