While this might sound good, it is in fact another way for Trump to do nothing against Putin while passing the buck onto others. He is correct that Europe got too gleefully in bed with Russia on energy and appears to be doing the same with China on trade. He is also right that buying Russian oil , whether it is by India, China, or Europe, supports the Russian war machine. He is also on the mark by demanding the purchases to stop and for more sanctions to be imposed. So where’s the catch? The catch is that the conditions he’s listed as necessary for him to do anything are unlikely to be met anytime soon and he knows it. For example, take “all NATO nations stop buying oil from Russia.” The EU has already been phasing out purchases of Russian oil and is on track to fully stop them next year. Yes, it takes a while to unwind the deep reliance on Russia that we’ve repeatedly talked about. Moreover, Hungary is in an even worse shape in that regard and despite just recently so m signing contracts for alternative supplies, it has repeatedly requested exemptions from this timetable, with the EU granted (as did the US, for oil related financial transactions). Neither Hungary nor Slovakia have evinced any desire whatsoever to side against Russia, and given how decisions in the EU are made, this has been an ongoing problem. Trump knows all of this — the EU leaders who came to Washington had him call Orbán to tell him to drop his opposition to Ukraine’s EU membership, for example. So he knows that unanimity is very unlikely, and that at best we are taking another year before the full stop of Russian oil is implemented. By setting this as a condition for US action — a totally unnecessary one as he can literally just greenlight the sanctions package that has 80% support in the Senate — Trump is in effect pursuing his do-nothing strategy of delay and blame shifting. The issue with the tariffs on India and China is similar. After the initial escalation and retreat by Trump, the tariffs have settled at around 35% for now (it’s a bit complicated because there are several rules that apply to different products) and implementation of higher tariffs has been repeatedly delayed. I would be surprised if the US went higher given the havoc that the initial increases wrought domestically. The US did impose a 50% tariff on India about two weeks ago but is also in negotiations that will likely reach a deal that would have them reduced. The EU doesn’t usually impose across the board tariffs and prefers to deal with specific products. For China, it does have some anti-dumping measures but, as I’ve repeatedly said, it is too open to China, whose exports to the EU have increased dramatically in the wake of the trade war with the US. The EU has indicated some readiness to improve on that but, in their usual way, also said it would take a while to coordinate and craft appropriate responses. While this is upsetting, there’s no reason to demand that the EU does more than the US (50-100% tariffs) as a precondition to act. Moreover, the EU is far more dependent on trade than the US, so one cannot expect it to start trade wars willy-nilly, especially when the mercurial Trump administration can change policies in any direction almost on a whim. Demanding that the Europeans do something that we are not doing as a precondition to us acting when Trump has shown no consistency or follow through is a bridge too far, and I believe Trump knows this and exploits it to get cover for his refusal to sanction Russia. I hope the Europeans work out a compromise with the US that would be sufficient to overcome this recipe for inaction. But then maybe we will see Trump giving Putin another two weeks. The hope here is that Ukraine’s own oil sanctions that it’s imposing on Russia by attacking its energy infrastructure will bear fruit faster than the pathetic Western leaders who seem more interested in meeting in large rooms and passing the buck among themselves.
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