The ‘useful idiots’ from America whom Putin is playing like a flute

I am sure President Donald Trump and his envoys to Russia, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, sincerely want to stop the killing in Ukraine, but they are failing and will continue to fail as long as they persist in their naive view that this is just a big real estate deal and that their backgrounds in real estate give them an advantage. It is utter nonsense on multiple levels.

For starters, yes, you could say that Russian President Vladimir Putin is in the real estate business in Ukraine, but not in the way Trump or Witkoff or Kushner have been in the business. Putin is in the real estate business in Ukraine the same way Adolf Hitler was in the real estate business in Poland. Hitler coveted territory not to build a hotel or housing for profit to benefit the local residents. He, instead, coveted real estate to fulfill a nationalist fantasy. Ditto Putin. He has shown no interest in the welfare of Ukraine’s people.

In that kind of situation, having a bunch of “real estate deal guys” as America’s negotiators is a liability, not an advantage. You want a Henry Kissinger or James Baker-type statesman who understands the difference between real estate and war and peace. Real estate is a positive-sum game: Both sides can profit from a well-struck transaction. And that is the goal. In war and peace, when one side holds fascist views and is the clear aggressor, and the other side holds democratic views and is the clear victim, you are in a zero-sum game.

Or as Ronald Reagan famously put it when asked how the Cold War should end, “We win, they lose.”

Reagan understood that real estate deals are purely over value (price per square foot) and interest rates. He understood that war-and-peace deals are about advancing and preserving moral values and strategic interests. And you don’t compromise on those with a fascist aggressor. We waged three wars, including the Cold War, alongside our allies in Europe to preserve the spread of our shared democratic values and our shared interests — namely, that no major power in Europe that did not share those values could be allowed to dominate the Continent.

I can think of no other American president who would have acted as if America’s values and interests dictated that we now be a neutral arbiter between Russia and Ukraine and, on top of that, an arbiter who tries to make a profit from each side in the process — as Trump has done. This is one of the most shameful episodes in US foreign policy, and the entire Republican Party is complicit in its perpetuation.

I also can think of no other US foreign policy leader who would have said about Putin what Witkoff said about this dictator whose political rivals often end up dead, who engages in vast corruption for himself and his cronies and who does everything he can to undermine free and fair elections in America and the West: “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy.”

Russian Communists had a term for foreigners who held such views about their leaders: “useful idiots.”

You can imagine this retort from JD Vance isolationists: “Hey, Friedman, you and your pals just want to drag America into endless wars.

Nope, sorry, you have the wrong cowboy. I have written since the first weeks of this war, and repeatedly thereafter, that it is only going to end in, at best, a “dirty deal.” Russia is too big compared with Ukraine, and its willingness to fight on dictates that ending the war will require Ukraine to make concessions. Sad but true — and most Ukrainians will tell you the same today.

But as I wrote last month, there is a huge difference between a “filthy deal” that maximizes Putin’s interests, profits and ability to restart the war at any point of his choosing, and a “dirty deal.” A dirty deal would allow Putin to keep the territory he’s already stolen, but with Western military forces on the ground inside Ukraine that ensure he could never restart the war, except by going to war with all of the West; it would ensure that Putin’s ill-gotten gains were never blessed with formal diplomatic recognition that would reward the acquisition of territory by force; and it would ensure that Ukraine could maintain whatever size army it needed to defend itself and could become a member of the European Union (though not NATO) whenever it was ready. That kind of dirty deal would secure Ukraine’s and America’s core interests and values.

JD Vance isolationists retort: “We don’t have the ability to pressure Putin to agree to such a dirty deal, and we don’t want to be in a nuclear war with Russia, thank you very much.”

The reason you can’t pressure Putin is that you don’t know what you’re doing, and you have a president who lurches back and forth, making different policies on his social network feeds and then requiring the Pentagon and the State Department to adjust on the fly. There is no policymaking process, and there appear to be at least five people acting as the secretary of state: Witkoff, Kushner, Vance, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll and some guy with the official title, Marco Rubio.

What would any normal American president be doing now? He would start with the understanding that negotiations in any realm — real estate or geopolitics — are always decided by one thing: leverage. Whether you are buying a hotel or trying to halt an invasion, you want maximum leverage so your profits or interests and values are maximized in the final deal.

In real estate, leverage is measured in how much money you have on your side. In diplomacy, leverage is measured by how much military force you can bring to the battlefield; how much economic isolation and pain you can inflict on your opponent; and, last but certainly not least, how much you can turn your opponent’s population against its own leadership to force it to change course.

And what has Trump done by those measures? He has halted all US funding for Ukraine to buy US arms, he has refused to give it access to crucial weapons like our Tomahawk cruise missiles that could really hurt Putin close to home — and that the Europeans would pay for — and he has bald-faced lied that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that started the war and that Ukraine’s leader, not Russia’s, was the illegitimate dictator. He also quite publicly told Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that “you don’t have the cards” without America’s help in the fight against Russia.

What if Trump behaved like a stately American president, acting on America’s interests and values? He wouldn’t be telling the brave Ukrainians that they have no cards; he’d be dealing them cards to maximize their leverage while loudly telling the Russian people that they have no future — because Putin stole all their cards.

What would that sound like? It would sound like this:

“Hey, Putin, while you were invading Ukraine to play out your historical fantasy that Mother Russia rightly owns Ukraine, the rest of the world was participating in what will likely be called the greatest technological revolution in human history: the AI revolution. Where is Russia in that? Let’s check Stanford institute’s Global AI Vibrancy rankings.

“Is Putin’s Russia in the Top 10, where it belongs with the United States and China? No. Well, surely it’s in the Top 20! Nope. It has to be in the Top 30! Well, yes; it just sneaked in at No. 28. Far behind Luxembourg at No. 12. Luxembourg’s population? About 680,000. Russia’s population is roughly 144 million — now minus the estimated quarter-million soldiers Putin sent to their deaths on the Ukraine battlefield and at least 100,000 technologists who have fled Russia since Putin started the war.

“To the Russian people, let me offer an analogy: It is as if James Watt just invented the steam engine that helped launch the Industrial Revolution and your czar said, ‘No, thanks; we’re doubling down on horses.’”

Putin is a towering fool who will be remembered for a war against Ukraine that made Russia an energy colony of China and an AI footnote to Luxembourg.

Yes, Putin likes to show off his hypersonic missiles. I wonder if they work better than the main launchpad Russia uses for sending astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station; that launchpad collapsed last week, after the launch of three astronauts. It means Russia has “lost its ability to launch humans into space, something that has not happened since 1961,” according to a Russian space expert quoted by The New York Times.

The Russian threat to Ukraine will not end until Putin is gone. But getting rid of him is the job of the Russian people. The job of an American president and vice president — if they know what they are doing — is not to tell Ukraine’s president that he has no “cards.” It is to increase the pressure on Putin by, among other things, telling the Russian people — every day — that their leader is stealing all their cards and all of their futures and all of their children’s futures.

That is how we increase our leverage to get a dirty deal, not a filthy deal.