Trump’s call with Putin will reveal if he’s a master tactician – or clueless blowhard

After humiliating Zelensky into submission, Trump briefly put the ball into Putin’s court to accept a ceasefire, writes Jon Sopel. As the two leaders hold direct talks today, we’ll find out if the US president is the chess grandmaster he thinks he is

Tuning into some Fox News coverage recently, a British commentator living in the US proclaimed that whatever the latest apparent snafu from Donald Trump, people should have no doubts. He is a chess grandmaster, the man who can see around corners, the tactician supreme.

There is another view, which is that the president is a clueless blowhard who makes it up as he goes along – a man of endless tactical manoeuvres with no overarching strategy.

When it comes to Ukraine, I can’t decide. The démarche with Zelensky in the White House was hideous; the pressure the US put on Ukraine has been so asymmetric. In a call with Putin the other week, Trump said you can keep the land you’ve got, we won’t let Ukraine join Nato, we’ll look at easing sanctions, and we’ll stop cyber-ops against you. With Kyiv, he beats them around the head and stops defence assistance and intelligence cooperation until they surrender to his wishes.

Today, Trump will speak directly to Putin for the first time since Ukraine agreed to a ceasefire and we will discover a lot more about where the power lies.

When Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, was able to announce that Ukraine had given outline agreement to a 30-day ceasefire, I thought then that there was method in the Trump madness. This was significant progress. The ball, as Rubio rightly said, had been tossed into the Russian court.

My assumption (naively perhaps) was that Russia had been kept fully appraised of the Saudi talks via diplomatic back channels and would be – more or less – on side with this. Logically, I could not see why Russia would agree to a ceasefire when they were on the up. Indeed, that seems to be the case.

I say seems to be the case because on the face of it, it looks like President Putin was rather emollient in his response. Of course, we want a lasting peace, the Russian leader said last week. And that was all of a piece with the repeated assertions by the US president that he was sure Putin wanted to end the war.

Except for one small detail: Putin said any deal would need to deal with the root cause of the conflict. And let’s not stand on ceremony; what that means is the existence of Ukraine as a sovereign nation. The Kremlin will accept a subjugated Ukraine as a vassal state with no means of defending itself and one that is economically dependent on Moscow. What it won’t have is a proud, independent nation able to determine its future. And it’s been left to Kremlin officials to make clear that it had no interest in a 30-day cessation of hostilities and would not accept foreign peacekeepers. Putin still wants to win.

Putin may have looked as though he was saying ‘da’, but you don’t need to be a Russian linguist to know it was a ‘nyet’.

So a ball that was very briefly in Putin’s court is now very firmly in Trump’s. What does he do now if he doesn’t get his way? Will he impose the hell, fire and brimstone tariffs that he’s threatened against the Russian economy? Will he turn on Putin – something he’s never done before? Is it Russia’s turn now to feel the thumbscrews being turned?

A master strategist might have seen that wishful thinking about Putin is not a good predictor of what will happen. And forgive the horribly mixed metaphor, but this chess grandmaster does seem to have a habit of snookering himself.

For further evidence, look at the dizzying array of tariffs he is imposing.

It may not be the most significant, but the proposed 200 per cent tariff on French wines and champagnes prompted a thought. Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social that “this will be great for the wine and champagne businesses in the US”. Indeed. Like the Trump Winery in Virginia, which boasts that it produces “the finest sparkling, white and red wines” that have garnered international accolades – not that there is any suggestion that Trump is motivated by gains for his businesses.

Trump promised the US economy would recover as soon as he took office. But his flips and then his flops on tariffs have simultaneously bewildered and spooked the markets. The tariffs are 25 per cent, then they’re 10 per cent. And before you know it, they’re back to 25 per cent. Automotive parts are excluded, then they’re included. It will be tariffs on steel and aluminium but only affecting Canada and Mexico. No. It’s affecting the world – the UK included.

The markets have reacted accordingly. The Dow, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq have all suffered vertiginous losses over the past couple of weeks. Trump, interviewed last weekend, wouldn’t rule out that one of the consequences of his policies might be for the US to go into a recession. Something that Trump hadn’t seemed to anticipate would be that tit would be followed by tat, but that’s what happens in a trade war.

The man-who-can-see-around-corners theory of Trump will have it that he is rebalancing the US economy and that his tariffs policy will eventually deliver massive inward investment as companies move their factories and steel plants to the US. But will Trump hold his nerve given the turbulence that his policies have created? We all know he loves the short-term dopamine hit of another surge in stock prices. There is no doubt that there are ideologues behind Trump who firmly believe in tariffs, but they are in a tiny minority. If you want a bit of additional weekend reading on trade wars, do read up on the consequences of the 1929 Smoot-Hawley Act, the last time the US went to war with its main trading partners.

One of Trump’s consistent beliefs is that free trade does America down, and he has long called for protectionist measures. The president is a man who trusts his gut instincts. But he can change his mind in a second. That gives him the tactical advantage of surprise over his rivals: they don’t know what he’s going to do next. Because invariably, he doesn’t himself.