Rory Stewart

Actually, something has been lost.

This delusion since November that Trump can be pushed over to the European position and isn't actually on Putin's side in this conflict has had a huge cost.

And the cost is because Europe had it in its head that there's no way that Ukraine and Europe can win without the US.

So the only game, even if it doesn't work, is to try to keep the US in the game.

And its delusion that maybe the US is ultimately on Europe's side has actually meant that we have not stepped up with our financing, haven't developed a system for defending the Ukraine independent of the United States.

And actually, worse than that, Ukraine has been firing a lot of American missiles, which it probably would have kept in reserve if it had known that the US was going to

stop the future weapon supply.

So we're actually in a weaker position now in November in negotiating with Russia than we would have been if we'd been clearer in January that Trump was not on our side.

If in January we had said, okay, basically this guy is on Russia's side,

We can keep talking to him, but we need from this moment to put a rocket up our whatever and completely transform our defense security funding policy towards Ukraine.

Which is kind of what Sikorsky was saying.

Because the end of the story is always going to be the same, which is a moment is going to come where the United States.

at best will walk away, but more likely will say, we're not providing key weapons, we're not providing intelligence and security, and we might even go so far as to sanction the Ukrainians because we want to force the Russian position.

And at that point, we're not ready.

And we should have been getting ready since January for that.

And there's a small subtext here also, which was he was supposed to put on enormous sanctions on November 22nd, which he never did.

On China?

I think this is part of a general pattern.

one of the reasons that Trump has lured us into this false sense that maybe the US is on our side is that in many occasions since January, Trump has signaled, I'm going to sanction Russia.

I'm going to put secondary sanctions against, indeed, Turkey.