Donald Trump’s saber-rattling, cajoling and tariff threats have proved to be ineffective bow that he has returned to Washington D.C. empty-handed after a failed summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.


According to historian Anne Applebaum, the American president is suddenly finding he has no cards to play when it comes to influencing his Russian counterpart.


In her column for The Atlantic, she suggested that Putin has no reason to deal with Trump who can’t seem to make himself criticize the Kremlin in the same way that he has criticized Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.


After the summit concluded following a very brief press conference where Trump notably had little to say, Applebaum wrote, “If the U.S. is not willing to use any economic, military, or political tools to help Ukraine, if Trump will not put any diplomatic pressure on Putin or any new sanctions on Russian resources, then the U.S. president’s fond wish to be seen as a peacemaker can be safely ignored.”


Noting that Trump’s threats against Russia never became a reality, she added the whole situation has spiraled into “tragedy and farce.”

"It was embarrassing for Americans to welcome a notorious wanted war criminal on their territory. It was humiliating to watch an American president act like a happy puppy upon encountering the dictator of a much poorer, much less important state, treating him as a superior. It’s excruciating to imagine how badly Trump’s diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, an amateur out of his depth, misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful.”


Giving Trump credit for coming away from the summit having not publicly calling for “Ukrainian capitulation, or for Ukraine to cede territory,” she added the U.S. government, after being dismantled by the Trump administration since he was re-elected, lacks the personnel to use “foreign-policy tools” to bring Putin to heel.

“The U.S. has no cards because we’ve been giving them away. If we ever want to play them again, we will have to win them back: Arm Ukraine, expand sanctions, stop the lethal drone swarms, break the Russian economy, and win the war,” she wrote. “Then there will be peace.”


You can read her entire piece here (subscription required).