Washington licks Putin’s boots

The desire to humiliate America motivates our enemies in the Middle East and Africa; it inspires China, which believes it is the Middle Kingdom between heaven and earth, above all others; and it is often as intense, if less hostile amongst our allies in Europe, where once-great powers have been eclipsed by American economic, strategic, and cultural authority. It is the fate of the giant that everyone wants to pull him down.There is, however, no person on the planet who wishes to humiliate America more than Vladimir Putin does. Russia’s Cold War defeat at the hands of the U.S. galls the Russian tyrant as painfully today as it did when it happened, 37 years ago. The world has moved on since then, but the Kremlin kleptocrat cannot get past it.Putin laments the break-up of the Soviet empire as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” and he is manifestly and ruthlessly trying to put it back together in Ukraine. The desire to avenge Russia’s defeat and to humiliate the Cold War victor energizes and animates Putin all his waking hours. The very strength of his desire is a good reason that he should be denied any taste of that sweet and low pleasure, schadenfreude. Yet we gave him precisely what he wanted when Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s special envoy to Moscow, paid Putin a groveling compliment, telling him, “You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian; you are a humanitarian also, sir.”It was excruciating to listen to. Witkoff slobbered on Putin’s boots in gratitude after the former KGB officer released Stephen Hubbard, an American teacher who’d been held hostage on spurious charges since 2022. Trump and Vice President JD Vance defended Witkoff’s comments as simply an empty formality, a saying of something nice after Putin had agreed to an American request.But it was much more than that. It was an act of degrading subservience and looked like what it was — America stooping in self-abasement before a tinpot dictator. This posture of submission is not, to put it mildly, one for the world’s greatest power to adopt on any occasion. A simple “thank you” would have been sufficient and all that was deserved on this occasion.Given that Witkoff represents Trump, however, there is a way in which the humiliating flattery was apt. For Trump has been groveling, too, in a repeatedly frustrated and forlorn, but never abandoned, hope that Putin would reward him with a Ukraine peace deal that he could trumpet as an achievement.THE GOP’S NOT SO GREAT COMMUNICATORSWitkoff’s self-abnegation on behalf of America was perhaps more striking but was no worse than Trump’s recent acts of appeasement. It was indeed not nearly so bad. For Trump has invited Putin to shoot his cuffs at the G-20 meeting at Mar-a-Lago, eased sanctions on Russian diesel oil exports, postponed the imposition of other sanctions, and appears to have stanched the flow of satellite data to Ukraine that helps Kyiv shield itself from attacks by Putin’s war machine.If Trump is going to retreat and appease and suck up to Putin like this, one can, one supposes, hardly blame Witkoff for doing so, too.