AA Edit | Trump’s Russian Diesel Betrayal
It is clear Mr Trump will sacrifice any principle at the altar of convenience to try and protect the slender majority his party enjoys in the US Senate and House of Representatives when a third of their seats go to the midterm polls on November 3
Spotting a leading contender for an Ig Nobel prize for hypocrisy will not be a hard task. The US President Donald Trump eminently qualifies for it after initiating a deal to lift sanctions and let Russia supply diesel. The ink is hardly dry on Lindsey O. Graham’s Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 that Mr Trump signed off on which, if applied, could see the US levy a tariff of up to 100 per cent on countries like India and China that have been buying Russian oil and gas.
It is clear Mr Trump will sacrifice any principle at the altar of convenience to try and protect the slender majority his party enjoys in the US Senate and House of Representatives when a third of their seats go to the midterm polls on November 3. That he would speak to one of the US’s biggest rivals to plead for three lakh tonnes of diesel so domestic prices can be brought down before the elections lays his action open to ridicule.
India was the big scapegoat against which Mr Trump wielded the big stick as he rewrote the regulations for new H-1B visas, armed his administration to levy fees of $1,00,000 on students and suspended mostly Indian IT companies from the PERM (program electronic review management) to stop the route to getting US green cards for employees. And now he is to buy diesel after berating China and India for buying Russian energy and so funding the war on Ukraine.
Republican lawmakers are talking of a bipartisan bill to block the move to lift sanctions on Russian diesel. This may be symbolic but points to the kind of contradictions that a whimsical President is prepared to rain down on his nation as he yo-yos from one position to its exact opposite while grappling with the effects of the war on Iran that he began at Israel’s behest.
So embarrassing is a deal with Russia at a time when it is attacking the Ukrainian capital and other cities with renewed vigour and is threatening Europe with military action that it militates against any clear American thinking on strategic geopolitics. And Mr Trump has the effrontery to rebuke Ukraine for striking at Russian oil refineries while calling for Volodymyr Zelenskiy to be replaced as its President. Far from saving the world from wars, the Nobel Peace Prize wannabe is just opening more avenues for escalating conflicts.