Pentagon officers met with a group of European diplomats in late August and broadcast a severe message: the US planned to cut part of security assistance to Latvian, Lithuania and Estonia, all NATO members bordering Russia.
More broadly, Pentagon Officer David Baker told the group, according to an officer with direct knowledge of the comments, that Europe needed to be less dependent on the United States. Under the command of President Donald Trump, the US Armed Forces would be changing their attention to other priorities, such as the defense of the homeland.
Some European diplomats feared that the measure could encourage Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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On Friday, they may have been certain.
The Russian Mig-31 jets entered Estonia’s airspace for about 10 minutes, according to Estonia, before being expelled by Italian F-35s. Russia denied having violated Estonia’s airspace, saying that its jets flew over neutral waters.
Hours later, Russian jets flew over a Polish oil platform, according to Warsaw. Last week, Russian drones were knocked down in Poland.
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So far, the US response to these incidents has been discreet. Trump did not approach the last raid for several hours, before saying it could be a “big problem.” After last week’s Polish incident, he posted enigmatically in his social truth: “Here we go!”
Your answers seem to fit into an emerging pattern.
After months proposing ideas for resolving or intermediating some of the most intractable conflicts in the world, Trump has widely moved away from diplomacy in recent weeks. Instead, he allowed and, in some cases, pressured the allies to take the lead, only with US help promises.
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He has increasingly focused his attention to domestic issues, such as the fight against crime, the confrontation of what he calls the left -wing violent extremism and the review of the visa program.
After an intense summer of diplomacy, including Putin’s reception in Alaska, Trump told Europeans that they should impose punitive sanctions on Russian oil buyers if Washington is expected to tighten Moscow’s financial screws because of his Ukraine war.
After the US President spent the first months of his term trying to secure a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, lately he has ignored Israel’s actions that seem to undermine the possibility of an agreement to end the war in Gaza.
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White House authorities protested when Israel bombed a Hamas office located in the Qatar territory, the US ally, but took no measure. When Israel launched a controversial military advance in the city of Gaza, Trump did not oppose, even with the European and Arabs allies condemning the action.
The fact that Trump is cautious about US involvement in great conflicts is not somewhat surprising. He spent two years in the campaign arguing that the country was militarily overwhelmed. Political opponents called him an isolationist.
But during the summer, a different Trump emerged. To the disgust of some conservative political allies, he bombarded Iran’s main nuclear facilities in support of the Israel Air War in June. At an NATO conference in the Netherlands, at the end of that month, he indicated that he would send new defense systems to Ukraine. In July, he intensified his threats of sanctions and tariffs against Moscow.
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Now, the analysts say, Trump is returning to form.
Aaron David Miller, a US veteran diplomat and senior member of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Trump may simply have realized that conflicts are much more intractable than he imagined.
“He is not interested in doing anything unless he sees that effort and political capital will be worth the return,” Miller said.
