“So, Trump miscalculated in that he apparently believed it would be easy to negotiate because he thought both sides would want to stop the killing.”
Both sides did want to stop the killing, providing they got the OTHER SIDE to capitulate. Trump SHOULD have listened to Tulsi on that, rather than Lindsey Graham, who (apparently) told him that if he beat his chest enough, Russia would back down. Tulsi knew otherwise.
Trump has shifted his focus on leveraging lives to leveraging power and money. He is not going at the battle like neocons, but facing it as a leverage problem.
Trump is good at using leverage.
I see that the battlefield Trump is engaging in isn’t the one with soldiers, tanks and bombs.
He is using the leverage of money.
The battle field is the being done country by country as he gets tariff deal by tariff deal.
If this were a game of risk, you would see Trump slowly surrounding Russia country by country and aligning our power of trade with each country.
This is not the battlefield that Russia can win at. No modern country can afford to be isolated from world trade and survive without huge sacrifices.