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.
“He is using the leverage of money.”
I agree that Trump has no plans to start WW3, but he’ll find that his economic leverage is rather limited.
Look at it from the point of view of India and China. They can take one of two approaches, either crash their economy by Trump imposing 100% tariffs, or crash their economy by doubling (or tripling) the price of oil that they have to now buy on the spot market.
From the point of view of those living in those countries, it’s rather clear to me that they’re neither government is about to buckle to Trump, if they want to stay in power.
I could be wrong, and the spot price for oil may double, thanks to shutting down the 5M or so barrels per day that Russia presently exports, but then that will create some problems with the MAGA base.