Trump, missiles, and Moscow: Just how reckless could he be?: Marc Champion

Key topics:Trump allegedly asked Zelenskiy about bombing Moscow with US missilesWhite House claims Trump was only asking a hypothetical questionTrump's Ukraine policy shows reluctance to pressure Russia effectively.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By Marc Champion.There’s a lot Donald Trump has failed to do to pressure Russia into genuine peace talks on Ukraine. But it's now being reported he asked President Volodymyr Zelenskiy if he could do the one thing that nobody in their right mind would suggest: bomb Moscow, the capital city of a paranoid nuclear superpower, using US long-range missiles.The White House says Trump was “just asking a question, not encouraging further killing.” Not knowing the identities or even nationalities of the unnamed officials cited in Tuesday’s Financial Times article, it’s hard to judge motivations for the leak or why the US president might ask such a question. But given that he already boasted of threatening during his first term to “bomb the sh*t out of Moscow” if Putin attacked Ukraine, it can’t be dismissed out of hand that he was serious.I’m going to guess that Trump’s claim to have threatened Moscow — made on the campaign trail and recorded by CNN - was just one more among countless falsehoods that he’s made for political ends. In this case, it would be to prove his otherwise ridiculous claim that Russia never would have invaded Ukraine had he remained in power after 2020. And if only to sleep soundly, let’s likewise assume that whatever Trump asked of Zelenskiy on July 4, it won’t result in the US handing over state-of-the-art missiles marked for Moscow.Given its merciless pounding of Kyiv and other cities in Ukraine, Russia needs to suffer a cost that deters it from continuing its unprovoked invasion. But which cost? Trump shied away from applying much safer forms of pressure on Putin as recently as Monday, when he announced that all future US military transfers to Ukraine will have to be paid for by others (meaning that fewer weapons will be sent), and that he’d impose new sanctions to punish Putin’s warmongering only after another 50-day reprieve.And that’s when he was supposedly getting tough. Since returning to office, Trump hasn’t just refused to authorise any new aid for Ukraine, he at times interfered with the shipment of arms – including for air defence – already authorised by his predecessor and en route to Kyiv. He also gave away key Ukrainian negotiating cards before talks with Russia even began, including acceptance that the country would never join NATO.These were at best acts of enormous naivete on Trump’s part, requiring him to believe that if he made unilateral concessions to a career KGB officer who has mired himself in Europe’s largest war since 1945, the favor would be returned. Like many others, I’ve been quick to point out these mistakes, often justified by Trump and his supporters as bids to avoid World War III.In the same way, former President Joe Biden was correctly criticised for overestimating the risk that Putin would carry through with bluster about unleashing nuclear war in response to Ukraine getting supplied with conventional US weapons, from Himars multiple launch rocket systems to Abrams Tanks. All these US hesitations were misjudgments that cost Ukrainian lives.But to offer American missiles to bomb Moscow would be an altogether different matter. A success would humiliate Putin, a man who measures himself by his imperial predecessors in the Kremlin. It would expose his inability to defend even his own capital in a war he has falsely cast as collective act of Western aggression.If my assumptions and the White House spin are wrong, if Trump both said what the FT has reported and meant it, then there could be only one conclusion: That the most powerful man in the world would also the most reckless. © 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

Trump, missiles, and Moscow: Just how reckless could he be?: Marc Champion

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