By now, most observers are probably familiar with how the game is played: Donald Trump is asked for his position on an issue. He dodges the question by saying he’ll make an announcement “in two weeks.” And then he waits for everyone to forget about his self-imposed deadline.

Where’s Trump’s health care plan? It’ll be ready in “two weeks.” What about a possible minimum-wage increase? That, too, will be unveiled in “two weeks.” On everything from tax policy to infrastructure, immigration to reproductive health, the president’s detailed solutions are always just two weeks away.

Just in recent days, Trump said to expect a “conclusive ending” to the crisis in Gaza in two weeks, progress on White House renovations in two weeks, and in case that weren’t quite enough, revitalized public safety in the nation’s capital in two weeks.

It’s against this backdrop that the Republican offered a familiar timeline for his policy toward Russia and Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

“I’ll know in two weeks what I’m going to do,” Trump told reporters late last week.

At the same White House event, a reporter asked about a possible deadline for Putin. The American president responded that he’d give his counterpart in Moscow “a couple of weeks.”

A day earlier, during an appearance on a conservative radio show, Trump said, in reference to the war in Ukraine: “I would say within two weeks we’re going to know one way or the other.”

In case this isn’t obvious, let’s not forget that in late May, amid countless headlines about how angry Trump was with Putin, the Republican president signaled he was prepared to change course in two weeks.

He did not change course in two weeks, and Putin’s military offensive in Ukraine only intensified in the wake of Trump ignoring his own deadline — again.

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I’ve struggled to keep up with just how many times Trump has threatened Putin with consequences, giving the Russian dictator new deadlines and ultimatums, only to back down in every instance, but the list is not short. Indeed, late last week, Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, told Politico that Putin “is just laughing” as the White House meanders from one failure to the next.

In Barack Obama’s second term, the Democratic president warned Syria’s Bashar al-Assad not to use chemical weapons, warning that this would cross a “red line.” When the Syrian dictator did it anyway, Obama went to Congress to authorize the use of military force. Lawmakers ultimately balked at the request.

This, more than a decade later, is still seen in some political circles as one of Obama’s most important foreign policy failures — an assessment that has never made sense to me — and the quintessential example of an American president failing to follow through on a threat.

But in 2025, Trump is writing his own far more humiliating chapter to a related story. Indeed, imagine if Obama had given Assad two weeks to end the war in Syria, drawing a line in the sand. And then imagine if Assad ignored the warning, at which point Obama shook his fist and made new warnings, again and again, without any follow-through whatsoever.

If that happened, Obama would certainly deserve scorn and mockery — but this hypothetical scenario isn’t what happened with Obama and Syria. It’s what’s still happening with Trump and Russia.