The incompetence shouldn't surprise me anymore

Russia expert (and emigrée) Julia Ioffe picks apart the OAFPOTUS's clownish attempts to end the war in Ukraine one more time:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. President Donald Trump, eager to get another peace deal under his belt, sends everyone in Washington, Kyiv, Moscow, and Brussels scrambling as he announces that an agreement to end the Ukraine war is imminent. The proposal, on even the most cursory examination, is revealed to echo the Russian position, at which point Volodymyr Zelensky and the Europeans start an all-out offensive to pull the American president over to their side. The text is amended to reflect some of what Ukraine needs and wants in a settlement. This then renders it unacceptable to Vladimir Putin, and puts the peace deal Trump promised to deliver within 24 hours of taking office, 10 months ago, back out of reach.

The first time we witnessed this sequence was in February, soon after Trump’s inauguration. Then in the spring. Then again in August, in Anchorage, just ahead of the Labor Day holiday. Now, with a day to go before Thanksgiving, we’re somewhere around 80 percent through the script, though it’s pretty clear how it’ll end. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said as much on Tuesday: Given how much the plan has changed, Moscow is likely no longer on board.

In Washington—at least among the bipartisan crowd that, like most Americans, still backs Ukraine—people are alarmed. ... In Moscow, this latest round of chaos was greeted with wincing skepticism: They’ve been down this road before.

The absolute, best-case, pie-in-the-sky scenario, [a] source close to the Kremlin said, would be a peace deal by spring, following months of intense, round-the-clock work. Right now, though, that work isn’t happening. “The way it’s organized now, I don’t see a chance,” the source said. “It’s all very poorly organized. But it is what it is. It’s better than nothing.”

This is what happens when you don't believe expertise has value, and you send a real-estate developer to attempt diplomacy with one of the wiliest and slipperiest regimes on Earth.

Dan Rather piles on:

Less than a year into the second Trump term, the long view of American foreign policy, if you can even call it by such sober terminology , is a confusing jumble of transactional moves with no through line.

It’s guided by the whims du jour of our allegedly “America First” president. Even if you don’t agree with his isolationist stance, it is a definable policy, but one that he seems to have abandoned on a whim.

This president – aided by his business cronies with no diplomatic or foreign policy experience – has systematically put this country in the precarious position of being less safe than it was on Inauguration Day.

We still have more than three years to go. At least we have the possibility of electing a sane legislative branch next November.