What a new book’s explosive revelations tell us about Biden, Trump, and Putinhttps://en.majalla.com/node/322725/culture-social-affairs/what-new-book%E2%80%99s-explosive-revelations-tell-us-about-biden-trump
It is a study in contrasts—and of just how dysfunctional the US political system has become, even in the conduct of foreign policy. Over the last several years, around the same period of time US President Joe Biden was confronting Russian President Vladimir Putin, his predecessor Donald Trump was secretly talking to him and opposing US military aid to Ukraine, according to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward in his new book, War.
Among the shocking new disclosures in the book, Woodward reports that Trump spoke to Putin as many as seven times after he left the presidency and that at one point in 2024, Trump told a senior aide to leave the room at his mansion in Mar-a-Lago so “he could have what he said was a private phone call” with the Russian leader.
It was not clear how many of the other calls to Putin occurred before or after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. But the disclosures raise new questions about whether the former president might have violated the Logan Act, which forbids a US citizen from communicating “without authority” from the federal government with foreign officials to “influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government” in a dispute with the United States. Such questions date back to suggestions that incoming Trump officials had contacts with Russia even before he was inaugurated in January 2017.
With the US presidential election less than a month away, the book resurrects unsettling questions about Trump’s relationship with Putin and the largely unresolved mystery of the former president’s business and financial ties to Russia.
In particular, the Woodward disclosures raise fresh questions about Trump’s well-documented deference to Putin, especially since Trump has promised to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war “in 24 hours” if elected, hinting broadly that he would do so by forcing Ukraine to cede territory to Russia and forswear joining NATO, which is partly what Putin demands.
Going back to just days before the invasion, as Russian troops were amassing on the Ukrainian border, the former president went out of his way to praise Putin for his aggression. “I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine ... as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful,” Trump told a right-wing radio programme on 22 February 2022. He also suggested that Putin’s effort to subsume Ukraine could be a model for how the United States should deal with its immigration problem. “We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen,” Trump said.
Trump's unwillingness to criticise Putin was not a one-off incident but a consistent character trait
Bob Woodward, Washington Post journalist
As Woodward writes, "Trump's unwillingness to criticise Putin was not a one-off incident but a consistent character trait." Woodward describes his source on Trump's post-presidential phone calls to Putin as a single anonymous Trump aide, but when he asked Jason Miller, the former president's top 2024 campaign aide, about the calls, Miller did not outright deny Woodward's account but said, "I'd push back on that."
Asked further whether Trump could resolve the Ukraine war with one phone call, as the former president has occasionally claimed, Miller said: "I think he could. He knows the pressure points. He knows what is going to motivate both sides, and I think he can do that with one phone call each," meaning to Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, respectively.
Woodward also quotes Dan Coats, Trump's former director of national intelligence, as saying he himself has long been mystified by Trump's relationship with Putin. "His reaching out and never saying anything bad about Putin. For me … it's scary," Coats told Woodward.
Asked to comment on Woodward's reporting, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung responded with a lengthy personal broadside against the journalist. "None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome," Cheung said in a statement, adding that Trump is already "successfully" suing Woodward "because of the unauthorised publishing of recordings he made previously." Cheung added: "Woodward is a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally, and he's slow, lethargic, incompetent, and overall a boring person with no personality."
Cheung did not mention that Trump has agreed to numerous interviews with Woodward, who is regarded as Washington's leading chronicler of presidents, going back to 1989.
According to the book, Biden swiftly directed his national security advisor, Jake Sullivan: "On all channels, get on the line with the Russians. … Tell them what we will do in response." Biden told his team to use "language that is threatening without being directly threatening," Woodward writes. "We need to open up a channel," Biden reportedly said, "not on negotiating Ukraine but on the United States and Russia avoiding a cataclysm."
US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky attend a Ukraine Defence Contact Group meeting on September 6, 2024 at the US air base in Ramstein, southwestern Germany.
In a phone conversation in October, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin warned his Russian counterpart, then-Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu: "Our leaders and your leaders have repeatedly said a nuclear war can never be won and should never be fought. This could put us on a path to confrontation that would have existential implications for you and for us. Don't step on that slippery slope."
Austin further told Shoigu that if nuclear weapons were used, "all the restraints that we have been operating under in Ukraine would be reconsidered," according to Woodward. "This would isolate Russia on the world stage to a degree you Russians cannot fully appreciate."
When Shoigu responded that he didn't like being threatened, Austin countered: "Mr. Minister, I am the leader of the most powerful military in the history of the world. I don't make threats," according to Woodward's account. Two days later, Shoigu called back and falsely claimed the Ukrainians were planning to use a "dirty bomb," which the United States believed the Kremlin was putting out as a pretext to deploy a nuclear weapon. "We don't believe you," Austin said, according to Woodward. "We don't see any indications of this, and the world will see through this. … Don't do it."
Shoigu responded, "I understand," according to the book. Woodward also corroborates other accounts, including a book published by CNN's Jim Sciutto in March, The Return of Great Powers, that previously reported Biden sent other emissaries as well, such as CIA Director Bill Burns, to warn the Russians and enlisted the help of major nations—especially Russia's No. 1 partner, China—to discourage Moscow from using nuclear weapons. (During a visit to China in late April, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken praised Beijing's "important" influence in "moving Russia away" from the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, even as Blinken harshly criticised Beijing for assisting Russia in other ways.) As Woodward recounts it, Colin Kahl, a senior Pentagon official at the time, later described that period in the fall of 2022 as "probably the most hair-raising moment of the whole war."
It was also a moment when Biden—to a degree not fully disclosed previously—may have proved his mettle as a world leader, one that was reminiscent of nothing so much as President John F. Kennedy's stand against Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. It's noteworthy that Woodward also quotes Biden as being critical of the president he served as vice president, Barack Obama, suggesting that Obama's relatively mild response to Putin's partial occupation of eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014 had been a terrible mistake. "That's why we are here. We fucked it up," Biden reportedly said. "Barack never took Putin seriously. … We gave Putin a license to continue! Well, I'm revoking his fucking license!"
In the two and a half years since Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden has often been criticised for temporising over his response and failing to offer the Ukrainians sufficient defensive weaponry quickly enough. He has hesitated in sending first-generation main battle tanks such as the M1A1 Abrams, long-range precision artillery, and fighter jets such as the F-16—though ultimately he has done so. And in October 2022, after Ukraine had launched its successful Kharkiv counter-offensive, Biden warned Americans of a potential nuclear "Armageddon," saying it was the first time since the Cuban missile crisis that there had been a "direct threat" of nuclear weapons being deployed.
An American soldier walks past a line of M1 Abrams tanks, Nov. 29, 2016, at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, US. officials say the Pentagon is speeding up its delivery of Abrams tanks to Ukraine.
At the time, some people were sceptical, especially inside Ukraine, about whether Putin was bluffing. But Woodward's citation of US intelligence estimates—which proved to be strikingly accurate about Putin's intentions before he invaded—is eye-opening. And more recently, the Russian leader has spelled out with more specificity what might trigger his use of tactical nuclear weapons, especially as Ukrainian forces have advanced into Russia's Kursk region. In September, Putin said a nuclear response might be justified if the West allows Ukraine to strike deep inside Russian territory with Western long-range missiles that would need Western satellite and targeting support.
The degree to which Ukraine has fought off Russia's advances, causing hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties, is also very worrisome in view of another conversation that Woodward recounts between U.S. Gen. Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his Russian counterpart, Gen. Valery Gerasimov. Asked to state the conditions for a Russian use of nuclear weapons, Gerasimov responded that one of them involved "the right to use tactical nuclear weapons in the event of catastrophic battlefield loss." Milley responded at the time that "none of those conditions are going to obtain."
But they could before long.
Thus, the world now has a better idea why Biden has acted as he has, even as questions about Trump's relationship with Putin only grow. During his rise in national politics, Trump has repeatedly denied that he has any personal connection to the Russian leader that might suggest Putin has any leverage over him, even as he has refused to criticise Putin.
Yet, in recent years, both a Justice Department investigation led by former FBI Director Robert Mueller and a bipartisan report by the then-Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee detailed extensive ties between Trump associates and Russia and identified a close associate of former Trump 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort as a Russian intelligence officer. The Mueller report concluded that it could find no grounds to charge Trump but also said it could not exonerate him.
Woodward reports that Putin said at an economic conference in Russia in September: "Mr. Trump says he will resolve all burning issues within several days, including the Ukrainian crisis. We cannot help but feel happy about it."
Other investigations and news reports have detailed how dependent Trump's failing businesses had grown to become on financing from Russia and former Soviet republics before he ran for president.
