While Trump wallows in the White House, America's allies are left on their own

While President Trump was “all by myself in the White House” over Christmas, watching the “guys out on the lawn with machine guns,” Russia’s Vladi­mir Putin seemed to be contemplating another war with Ukraine. While his top aides issued threatening statements, the Ukrainian government and some Western observers warned of suspicious movements of Russian aircraft and equipment. The Institute for the Study of War reported on Dec. 23 that “the data suggests Putin is preparing to attack.” Analyst Michael Kofman of the Wilson Center judged an invasion unlikely but concluded that “Moscow is looking to bloody Ukraine at the first available opportunity.”

So far, nothing has happened, though Russia continues to hold the two dozen sailors it captured when it assaulted three Ukrainian ships near Crimea on Nov. 25, and it is still hindering shipping to several Ukrainian ports. But Putin’s maneuvering points to how the United States’ adversaries are likely to react to the steadily increasing chaos of the Trump presidency. They will spend 2019 testing how much they can gain at the expense of a U.S. president who has sidelined most of his national security team and has been making a display of his ignorance of and disregard for U.S. interests.

If there is to be no U.S. response — and so far, there hasn’t been — Putin has reason to step up military attacks on Ukraine ahead of its presidential election in March, which he hopes will unseat pro-U.S. incumbent Petro Poroshenko. Now that Trump has declared that Iran “can do what they want” in Syria, expect Tehran to entrench more forces and missiles near the border with Israel. While the government of Benjamin Netanyahu won’t be happy with that, it has taken its own advantage of Trump’s passivity, launching what the Associated Press described last week as “what could be the largest construction binge in years” in the occupied West Bank.

China’s step-by-step bid for hegemony over East Asia will continue. Xi will quietly encourage North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to continue resisting any denuclearization deal with Trump that doesn’t include a withdrawal of U.S. forces and assets from the region. After all, he would have heard Trump say that Patrick Shanahan, the inexperienced former Boeing executive he appointed to fill in for departed defense secretary Jim Mattis, agrees with him that “we’re giving military protection to countries that are very wealthy, and they’re not doing anything for us.” In Trump’s mind, that means South Korea.

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