Trump

Most experts now agree that it was the NATO push into Eastern Europe that aggravated the Russians and the threat of inviting Ukraine into NATO was the red line that led to Putin's decision to invade Ukraine. Many experts feel that Trump would have stopped NATO. Here is an article from New Yorker Magazine from 2019. After Toobin rants on about how terrible Trump was he adds. Even so, there is one element of Trump's thinking that should not be associated with the falsehoods he perpetrates, because it usefully challenges what has become a stalemated American policy toward Ukraine. According to Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker, President Trump realizes that attempting to seek to bring Ukraine into the Western orbit through NATO membership has been counterproductive. Indeed, that American policy, as developed by President George W. Bush and then sustained by President Barack Obama, has managed to help inflame U.S.-Russia and Ukraine-Russia ties without making life better for the people of Ukraine. It is reasonable to assume that had Trump been elected he would have opposed the entry of Ukraine into NATO which might very well have avoided the war in Ukraine.