Former CFR President Richard Haass commented Monday on MSNBC, about President Trump’s post expressing dismay that Vladimir Putin “has gone absolutely CRAZY!” “He’s in a long line of American leaders who have gotten this wrong and somehow think that personal chemistry or personal relationships are really critical,” Haass said. “FDR did it with Stalin. George W. Bush did it with Putin.” “They’re never critical,” he said. “What this shows is we’re being played.”

WILLIE GEIST, MSNBC: This is Vladimir Putin knowing what he has in Donald Trump-that Donald Trump hasn’t put any real pressure on him, that he can kind of act with impunity, as he’s begun to do now with these drone strikes and missiles shot at civilians inside of Ukraine. A fascinating dynamic here between President Trump and President Putin, where you have Donald Trump saying, I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin. I’ve known this guy a long time, to which everyone in the foreign policy community says: this is exactly who Vladimir Putin is and always has been. The response from the Kremlin is that Donald Trump is just being emotional. They’ve used that word a couple of times now. What’s going on here? RICHARD HAASS: Donald Trump is not the first American leader to exaggerate the importance of his personal chemistry with a Soviet or Russian leader. FDR did it with Stalin. George W. Bush did it with Putin. And so forth. So he’s in a long line of American leaders who have gotten this wrong and somehow think that personal chemistry or personal relationships are really critical. They’re never critical. And Trump should have learned that-not just with Putin, but with, say, the leader of North Korea or with China. There’s a limit to what personal things do in diplomacy. What this shows is we’re being played. Putin’s uninterested in a ceasefire. He wants to continue prosecuting the war for the simple reason that he thinks he’s winning, even though what he’s gaining is marginal. The real question, by the way, is how we respond to it. The option out there in the Senate is secondary sanctions. The problem with those is, historically we’ve tried them before, and you end up having a massive friction between the United States-and in this case it would be India, Turkey, and other countries like China-rather than with Russia. They tend not to work as decisively as people want. The real question — and this administration is not talking about it. It seems unwilling to do it, is to help Ukraine and to basically give Ukraine the arms it needs. Not to liberate every square inch of territory, just to defend itself. To send a message to Putin that more war isn’t going to be the answer. One other thing: it was really interesting, a report by the new chancellor of Germany talking about taking off range restrictions. The assumption in the Trump administration is that if we end arming Ukraine, that will weaken Ukraine and that somehow this will bring the war maybe more to a close. Actually, just the opposite. We are going to lose any leverage or influence. So what you’re actually going to see is something of an escalation of target selection and the war. The scale or scope of the battlefield is actually going to widen rather than shrink if the United States distances itself from Ukraine.

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