WWWLD

Cheryl Rofer has a good piece about the lack of preparation for the Alaska summit, how every piece of prep that would normally happen, hasn’t. This isn’t surprising and it’s doubtful that anything meaningful will come from the summit, other than Trump looking like a fool.

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting piece [gift link] about the Ukrainian Army the other day. The net of the piece is that commanders are reverting to their Soviet-era training, so the once-nimble Ukrainians are doing stupid stuff that Russians do when they fight wars, like holding hopeless positions down to the last person, and being slow to react because leaders are fearful of the consequences of losing territory.

I’m sure Trump is getting briefings telling him that Ukraine is in trouble in the war, in part because Russia has more troops to throw into the meatgrinder than Ukraine. He also wants his Nobel Peace Prize.

But Trump is a salesman, not a diplomat. And when a salesman doesn’t know what to do, he’ll instinctively want to hop on a plane and have a face-to-face. Salespeople love grifty strategy seminars, books and media, and those expensive seminars play to the fantasy that a good salesperson can, by their very presence and ability, turn around a bad situation.

In reality, when salespeople close sales that were going to be very hard to get, it’s often by making concessions that their employers would rather not make, or, that their employers’ workers are going to find hard to implement.

So either Trump will go out and get nothing from Putin, or if he gets something, it will be something nobody wants. I guess we all knew that going in, but I think that asking what a salesperson would do in a given situation is often a good way of predicting what this unpredictable character will do.