About a week ago, Donald Trump was apparently feeling a bit defensive after his praise for Vladimir Putin created some political troubles for him. It led him to release a ridiculous written statement in which he suggested he was responsible for rescuing NATO.
This is, as we discussed soon after, utterly bonkers: The only thing threatening NATO’s existence was Trump himself, who not only repeatedly disparaged the alliance, but who, on several occasions, expressed an interest in abandoning NATO altogether. By all accounts, it was a plan he intended to follow through on in a second term.
It was against this backdrop that John Bolton, who served as the White House national security adviser during the former president’s term, told The Washington Post late last week that he believes Trump would’ve withdrawn the United States from the NATO alliance in a second term. That wasn’t a surprising observation, but take note of its possible relevance:
“In a second Trump term, I think he may well have withdrawn from NATO,” Bolton said. “And I think [Russian President Vladimir] Putin was waiting for that.”
Let’s take a step back to consider how a quote like this one ties into the larger context.
For Trump and his allies, it’s a point of great pride that Putin didn’t invade any of his neighbors during the Republican’s term in the White House. The Russian leader launched offenses against bordering countries in 2008, 2014, and 2022, but between January 2017 and January 2021, Putin showed restraint.
This, we’ve been told to believe, is clear proof of … something.
The standard line from the right is built on two pillars. The first is the idea that Trump was so strong and unpredictable, the Russian authoritarian was simply too afraid to provoke the Republican. The second is the belief that when the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, it signaled to Moscow that we’re weak and indifferent to international military offenses.
The former argument is so plainly ridiculous, it’s surprising Republicans would even peddle it. Trump spent four years going to almost comical lengths to make Putin happy, to the point that the then-American president’s own director of national intelligence later admitted he feared Trump had been compromised by the Kremlin.
As for the Afghanistan claim — a favorite of a great many leading Republicans — it isn’t much better. Putin’s preoccupation with Ukraine goes back a lot further than last summer. Indeed, there’s evidence that Russia began building up military forces around the Ukrainian border months before U.S. forces left Kabul.
The idea that Putin would’ve altered his yearslong ambitions in Ukraine if only President Biden had agreed to keep thousands of American troops in Afghanistan is plainly at odds with everything we know about recent events. (What’s more, if the right were serious about this line of rhetorical attack, it might lead to some awkward questions about the geopolitical effects of Trump’s February 2020 agreement with the Taliban to end the decades’ long war. Did this signal weakness to Moscow?)
So, if the standard Republican explanation is unserious, what’s the actual reason?








