Why Trump’s Team Is Right to Ask Europe to Turn Down the Volume regarding Russia
There’s an old piece of wisdom every negotiator, hostage specialist, and animal-control officer knows: you don’t poke the thing you’re trying to talk down.
According to recent reports, the Pentagon has privately been delivering that message to some of America’s NATO allies, including the Baltic states that sit right on Russia’s doorstep. U.S. officials have reportedly urged them to tone down the anti-Moscow rhetoric while President Trump works to bring the war in Ukraine to an end. Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby reportedly flagged one phrase in particular as unhelpful: the idea of Russia being “cornered like a rat.” That image wasn’t hypothetical. Estonia’s prime minister had used almost exactly that language about Vladimir Putin just weeks earlier.
Critics will call this appeasement. They’re wrong. It’s what adults do when they’re serious about ending a war.
For nearly four years, the West’s approach to Ukraine has run on two fuels: American money and European speeches. The money bought real resistance on the battlefield. The speeches mostly produced applause at conferences. Neither produced peace.
President Trump came into office promising something different: an actual end to the killing. That requires getting two bitter enemies to a table and keeping them there. Every insult hurled from a European capital makes that harder. When an allied head of government compares the Russian president to vermin, Moscow doesn’t hear “Estonia.” It hears “the West,” and the Kremlin’s hardliners get a fresh talking point for why negotiation is pointless.
Elbridge Colby understands this better than most. He has spent years arguing that American power is finite and must be spent wisely, not wasted on gestures. Asking allies to stop freelancing on rhetoric during sensitive talks isn’t weakness. It’s message discipline, the same thing any competent government demands of its own officials during a negotiation.
