Sanctions for Show, Trillions for Steel: Trump’s Dangerous Middle Course on Russia

A president who asks for a record $1.5 trillion defense budget while temporarily ending new restrictions on Moscow tells you plainly what game he thinks he is playing. He believes guns speak louder than lawyers. The Pentagon chief calls this spending a “one-time generational investment,” essential to the president’s national security priorities. At the same time, Congress has only just passed sanctions on Russia, and the president waives many of them on grounds of “national security.” This is not a pious homily about peace. It is a maneuver. He is trading the visible cudgel of law for the more silent threat of steel.

When I wrote in *The Prince* that one must look to the “real truth of a matter” rather than the imagination of it, I meant precisely this kind of moment. In imagination, sanctions are morality made concrete: they punish a rival and reassure allies. In effectual truth, they are one instrument among many, useful only as long as they serve the maintenance of the state. This president judges that a tighter embrace of Russia is sometimes safer, or more profitable, than formal hostility, and that a massive rearmament will better secure American power than signatures on punitive decrees. Whether he is right depends not on sermons, but on consequences.

His survival incentives are obvious. He must keep America secure, keep its status, and keep enough of Congress obedient that money and laws flow when he calls. The defense budget serves all three: it promises deterrence abroad and jobs at home, and it flatters the pride of a people who like to think themselves unassailable. The sanctions waiver is more delicate. It signals to Moscow that doors are not closed; it reminds allies and rivals that economic war is not the only, nor always the preferred, weapon. In my time, prudent princes sometimes reconciled openly with old enemies to isolate more dangerous new ones. But they did it with their own hands on the sword, not on the purse of their assemblies.

Here the assemblies matter. Some Republicans warn that Pentagon funds will hinge on the president “getting tougher with Russia.” Others, no longer facing the voters, feel “unshackled from their responsibility to be in lock step with the president.” This is classic mixed government: the great and the people, divided into branches, struggling over the conduct of foreign policy. In the *Discourses on Livy*, I praised Rome’s tumults because, under good orders, they produced liberty rather than ruin, as Ninian Hill Thomson rendered my argument. The quarrel between Congress and the president could strengthen the republic, if it clarifies responsibilities and forces a common line, instead of leaving policy dangling between threat and indulgence.

But this president seems to choose the middle course I most distrust. He wants the appearance of conciliation with Russia and the substance of vast rearmament. He wants to ease sanctions now while having Republicans on Capitol Hill finance his “generational investment” without condition. He wants, in short, Russia to feel special treatment, the Pentagon to feel indulged, and Congress to feel respected. Often, those who try to satisfy all these humors end by satisfying none. They pay the price of boldness with Moscow and the price of rigidity with legislators, without gaining lasting loyalty from either.

Fortune, in this, is the turbulent river I described in *The Prince*, in W. K. Marriott’s translation: she carries away all who have built no dykes in calm weather. The dyke, here, is not only metal in the arsenals; it is clarity of posture. Are sanctions the main tool, or arms? Is Russia a rival to be contained, or a partner to be courted? A state can shift course, but it cannot indefinitely threaten with one instrument while muffling another and hope to be believed. The more the president’s allies say defense funds “hinge” on Russia policy, the more his waiver looks like weakness, not cunning. Narrative, in these matters, is itself a weapon.

If he succeeds, his defenders will say he used the sanctions waiver as a lure, the budget as a club, and congressional restlessness as leverage—fox and lion in perfect union. If he fails, history will say he taught both Moscow and Capitol Hill the same lesson: that his word is soft and his coalitions conditional. I care less about his name than about the health of the republic that must live with the precedents he sets. For free states, the art is to arm strongly, quarrel openly, and decide firmly. Drifting between economic threats and military splendor, without binding the two into one clear design, is how a powerful republic discovers its strength is theatre and not command.