Lots of Epstein news yesterday—the White House’s ridiculous denials that Trump wrote Epstein a birthday letter, and the media’s bizarre failure to hold their feet to the fire about those denials—but Andrew got it all out of his system already in videos with Sarah and JVL. Other stuff today! Happy Wednesday.

Putin Attacks, Trump Retreats

by William Kristol

Less than a month ago, Donald Trump had U.S. soldiers roll out a red carpet for Vladimir Putin at Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska. The nervous American host and the confident Russian visitor met for less than three hours. Afterwards, Trump hailed the get-together with the Russian dictator as “productive,” praised Putin’s observations as “profound,” asserted that “there were many, many points” that they agreed on, and that the two had “made some headway.”

Developments since then suggest that the headway seems to have been all in Putin’s direction.

On the U.S. side, it’s been all carrots and no sticks. Trump has successfully pressured the U.S. Congress not to follow through with long-threatened sanctions against Russia. Last week, his administration announced that the United States would end a long-standing program of military support, known as Section 333, for European allies near the border of Russia.

Meanwhile, Putin has traveled to Beijing for a more extended lovefest with his fellow dictators, at which actual deals for further cooperation were concluded. And Russia has been carrying out repeated and much expanded missile and drone attacks on Ukraine, including on civilian targets. This past Sunday saw Russia’s largest drone assault so far in the war.

And yesterday, in a striking escalation, what Polish prime minister Donald Tusk called “a huge number” of Russian drones violated Polish airspace. Some were shot down by Polish and NATO air defenses.

Tusk has now invoked NATO’s Article 4, under which NATO allies are called into consultation when a member state believes its “territorial integrity, political independence or security” is threatened. The alliance will be holding an emergency meeting today.

European leaders have uniformly denounced Russia’s actions, including European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, the former prime minister of Estonia, who said: “Last night in Poland we saw the most serious European airspace violation by Russia since the war began, and indications suggest it was intentional, not accidental.” Kallas added that “Russia’s war is escalating, not ending.”

As of this morning, Donald Trump has said . . . nothing.

So Putin is attacking, and Trump is retreating. That red carpet in Anchorage seems not to have made much of an impression. Or perhaps Putin understood the gesture for what it was: The red carpet was a kind of white flag, a signal of submission and supplication.

The United States, under Donald Trump, is now weaker than it has been in a very long time. And the world is more dangerous than it has been in a very long time.

Payola Nation

by Andrew Egger

Back in 2017, four Arab nations launched a diplomatic and economic blockade against the tiny, wealthy nation of Qatar, sparking a regional mini-crisis that would last the next four years. At the time, Trump emphatically praised the action: “We had a decision to make. Do we take the easy road, or do we finally take a hard but necessary action?” he said in the Rose Garden. “We have to stop the funding of terrorism. The nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level.”

Since then, Qatar has gone to great lengths to ingratiate itself in Trump world. And yesterday, after Israel carried out an unexpected military strike targeting Hamas leaders in the country’s capital city of Doha, Trump shared a very different assessment of the nation. Qatar, he said, was a “strong ally and friend of the U.S.” He warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against further strikes there. “I assured [Qatar],” he wrote, “that such a thing will not happen again on their soil.”

Among the Arab petro-states, Qatar has a complicated relationship to the United States. The country has long maintained military ties with America: Al Udeid Air Base, located south of Doha, is the largest U.S. installation in the Middle East. In 2022, President Joe Biden designated Qatar a major non-NATO ally. But Qatar has also long been accused of spending its largesse in less savory ways: funding terror groups like Hamas and spending enormous sums on political influence efforts in the United States. Most infamously, this year, they gifted Donald Trump a plane.