Street art in Krakow, Poland, depicts Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meeting together with a map of a divided Ukraine behind them.SERGEI GAPON/AFP/Getty Images
It’s doubtful there has been a country in recent times as nonplussed about the bombing of an ally as Russia is about developments in Iran.
Indeed, if there has been an early “winner” of the war started by the U.S. and Israel, it’s been Russian President Vladimir Putin, who, for unknown reasons, continues to possess a strange, bewildering sway over U.S. President Donald Trump. So much so that the White House has dismissed credible reports that Moscow was assisting Tehran with intelligence information on the location of U.S. forces – details that could be used to kill American servicemen and women. One can only imagine the rage that would have been stirred in Mr. Trump had the same reports identified Kyiv as the culprit.
Certainly, the U.S.-Israeli misadventure in Iran could not have come at a better time for Russia, whose economy has been battered by its own misguided effort to take over Ukraine. The price of oil has shot up to more than US$100 a barrel (although this has dipped below that recently). As an oil-producing country – even one under sanction – Russia couldn’t have gotten more welcome news. Even better, the U.S. has lifted sanctions on Russian oil going to India, allowing it to reach that massive market without penalty.
Meantime, the war is also draining America’s stockpiles of anti-ballistic and air-defence systems, leaving less to sell to Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky said more Patriot air-defence missiles were used by the U.S. in the first three days of the Iran war than in Ukraine since 2022.
It is beyond heartbreaking to consider that the U.S. has asked Ukraine for its help in understanding how best to fight Iranian drones, something it has become proficient at in its own war. Iran has been a supplier of the armed, kamikaze-style machines being used by Russia in its attacks on Ukraine. Despite that assistance, we fully expect Ukraine will receive absolutely nothing back for its support. On the contrary, Mr. Trump has already shown a willingness to help, in various ways, Ukraine’s adversary.
On Monday, Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin chatted on the phone, and afterward, Mr. Trump said the U.S. would be removing oil sanctions that were in place on different countries, including Russia, to help stabilize global markets. He also said they might not be put back in place because “there’ll be so much peace” in the world. As Sen. Chris Coons, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said, Mr. Trump is “spending more time consulting with [Mr. Putin] than he is with Congress.”
All the abhorrent, unseemly sucking-up to Mr. Trump by people like NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte won’t change the President’s approach. Certainly, one of the most cynical, cringiest moments of the last week came when Mr. Rutte appeared on the MAGA-supporting morning news show Fox & Friends to thank “the leader of the free world” for his actions in Iran. Mr. Rutte added there was “widespread support in Europe” for the war.
Of course, there is nothing of the sort. If anything, anti-U.S. sentiment across Europe has seldom been higher. Worse, Mr. Rutte praised an American leader who recently said the U.S. “never really needed” its European allies in any of its wars, and that when they did join in, Europe always “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.” This would have come as news to the families of the thousands of Allied troops in Europe who died fighting in U.S.-led conflicts since 2001.]
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If anyone is hoping the war in Iran drags on, it’s Mr. Putin. He has always seen Iran as a bargaining chip – always dangling the threat that Russia could help Iran develop nuclear weapons if people weren’t careful. The worst outcome for Russia would be regime change in Iran. But word that a clerical body had selected Mojtaba Khamenei to become Iran’s Supreme Leader was surely a glorious symphony to the ears of Mr. Putin. The new head of the regime is said to be an uncompromising, hard-line theocrat like his father, former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the war’s first-day bombing of Tehran.
This could mean the war in Iran could go on for a while yet, distracting the world from Russia’s continuing assaults on Ukraine, with the aggressor’s war machine newly fuelled by the bounty it is now reaping from Mr. Trump’s disastrous decision to detonate a massive bomb in the Middle East.
The late U.S. senator John McCain used to say Russia was a gas station run by gangsters with an army. Perhaps that’s why the current U.S. administration gets along with Moscow so well: They have a lot in common.