The president of the United States, he used on Saturday, again, international trade as a geopolitical pressure weapon. Trump has called the rest of the countries that are part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, which is a military, non -economic alliance) to close a new round of “important sanctions” to Russia, the end of oil purchases from that country and secondary tariffs on China, the largest buyer of Russian oil. All this with a goal: to force Moscow to end the invasion of Ukraine.
“I am ready to impose important sanctions on Russia when all NATO nations have agreed to do so and have begun, and when all NATO nations stop buying oil from Russia,” the president wrote in a message on his social network, Truth, published in good morning (Washington time). “NATO’s commitment to win has been much less than 100%, and the purchase of Russian oil by some has been shocking! This greatly weakens its negotiating position against Russia. I am ready to ‘act’ when you are. Just say when.”
The announcement comes days after Russian Drones invaded the airspace of Poland, NATO member, an alliance that, by virtue of its fifth article, forces mutual help in case of unjustified aggression. The attack, minimized by Trump, which seemed to buy on Thursday the theory that was due to an error, added pressure on the president of the United States, while Warsaw demanded a blunt response. At the moment, this Saturday has been the only gesture, although shy, worthy of that name.
It is another sample of the effective character of the republican threats. Actually, the vast majority of countries in the Atlantic Alliance stopped importing Russian crude for a long time. Only two are still doing it: Hungary and Slovakia. Both have two firm defenders of the Russian Vladimir Putin and Trump himself at the forefront of their governments: the ultra -rightists and, respectively.
Trump made the campaign that took him back to the White House promising that he would end the Ukraine War on his first day in the Oval Office, promise that 237 days later he has not yet fulfilled. He hoped that his good personal relationship with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, would help him to achieve it, but he has been playing the dismissal for months and with the patience of his counterpart, who has threatened with sanctions that have not just arrived.
On August 15, both gathered in a military base in Anchorage, in Alaska, a meeting in which the US president not only took Putin out of the international isolation in which he was and forgot the threats of imposing new tariffs on Russia to force a change of idea of the Kremlin; He also gave the main claims of the Russian leader to start talking about the end of the war.
Since then, Putin has not stopped praising Trump while intensifying his war campaign. The biggest attack with missiles and drones about Ukraine of the three and a half years of war came last Sunday. All these military actions seem designed to provoke Trump to harden his position with Russia and to make it clear that Putin is only willing to finish the war in his own terms.
In his message on Saturday, the Republican president also raised a pressure gun to China, the largest importer of Russian oil in the world, whom he calls to impose a tariff “between 50% and 100%, which would retire completely once the war between Russia and Ukraine ended.” That measure, he trusts, “will help a lot to finish this mortal, but ridiculous war. China has a strong control, even domain, on Russia, and these powerful tariffs will break that domain.”
Trump has already used that same argument when he announced, the second maximum oil buyer of that origin and the one that, taking advantage of the strong discounts to which Moscow has been forced, has further shot the acquisitions since the beginning of the war. Imported products from that country suffer a 50%tax, the highest in the world together with the Brazil Tax for ideological reasons: with those fees, Trump seeks to press the Latin American country for the trial of his friend Jair Bolsonaro, sentenced this week to 27 years in jail for coup.
Russia flirts with the recession, but Putin is convinced of the resilience of his economy, and that he will allow him to continue his war adventure. An strangulation of what is left of the exporting crude business could endanger those plans.
“If NATO does what I say, the war will end quickly. If not, they are just wasting my time, and the time, energy and money of the United States,” writes the US president.
Trump’s proposals to the rest of NATO Member States arrive a few days after Moscow took another step in the climbing with. Also, paradoxically, less than 24 hours after it was known that the US and Chinese negotiating teams to try to find an exit to their hard commercial struggle.
When Trump announced on April 2 his intention to impose tariffs on dozens of his commercial partners to balance a balance, in his opinion, unfair, an escalation of rates between China and the United States began that ended in taxes of 145% of Washington towards Beijing, and 125% in the opposite direction. In May, both countries announced a truce and a reduction in 30%tariffs. That truce is pending to materialize in a more complete agreement.
