Alerted in late December to U.S. plans to seize the sanctioned Marinera/Bella 1 cargo ship as it transited the Atlantic Ocean, Moscow allowed that vessel’s crew to reflag the Marinera as Russian. The Russians then let it be known that they had sent a submarine to escort the vessel. The implication: If U.S. forces moved to seize the Marinera, a U.S. Coast Guard vessel trailing, it might be torpedoed.
President Donald Trump rightly rejected these threats by ordering the Marinera to be seized, which it was by Navy SEALs without incident on Tuesday.
Forgetting its former submarine threats, the Kremlin responded to the seizure with qualified complaints.
“No state,” the Russian Transport Ministry said, “has the right to use force against vessels duly registered in the jurisdictions of other states.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry was harsher, lamenting “a gross violation of fundamental principles and norms of international maritime law and the freedom of navigation. This constitutes a serious infringement upon the legitimate rights and interests of the shipowner … We consider the threats of legal action against them on absurd grounds by U.S. authorities to be utterly unacceptable.”
While other Russian nationalist commentators and politicians hyperventilated, the Kremlin clearly wants this controversy closed and out of the public eye.
Put simply, Trump won this standoff.
It’s clear Trump is emboldened by the stunning U.S. military operation to capture former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. And while Trump should be careful not to assume that the military represents an easy, decisive tool for all national security problems, he should also take heed of Russian actions here. Because those actions underline that, while the Russians revel in testing the limits of Western resolve, Russian President Vladimir Putin is no fool. He is highly unlikely to escalate in situations where noncritical Russian interests are at stake, and the United States remains resolute.
Trump’s predecessor sometimes failed to recognize this reality. Indeed, former President Joe Biden would have backed off from seizing the Marinera were Russia to have let it be known that a submarine was approaching the vessel. Consider how Biden responded to similar threats during his presidency.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has regularly deployed fighter jets to aggressively intercept American and British spy planes and drones operating over the Black Sea. In September 2022, a Russian fighter pilot who was confused about his orders fired two missiles at a British spy plane. Fortunately, the missiles misfired or missed. In response, the British escorted future spy flights with their own fighter jets.
Biden adopted a less courageous response. He ordered manned U.S. spy flights to keep their distance from Russian-occupied Ukraine. Later, in March 2023, Russian forces destroyed a U.S. drone, valued at $18 million-plus, over the Black Sea. Again, Biden chose weakness. He ordered drone flights farther away from Ukraine. He thus limited American interests in supporting Ukraine’s defense in overdue deference to Russian intimidation. The Russians pushed, and Biden retreated.
True, Trump does not always exemplify how one should deal with Putin’s brinkmanship games.
On the contrary, Trump remains obstinately convinced that Putin is open to meaningful compromise on Ukraine and other international matters. Trump fails to realize that while case-by-case cooperation on certain issues, such as arms control, is possible, Putin is a KGB-trained manipulator who revels in pretending to seek meaningful compromise while actually pursuing a foreign policy designed to maximize Russian interests at the expense of all others, including the U.S.
In ideology and in action, Putin is a highly determined, capable, and aggressive U.S. adversary. Indeed, Putin even breaks his word on arms control agreements where he believes that he can get away with doing so (as he has done on nuclear weapons in Space, intermediate-range ballistic missiles, and chemical weapons).
Still, Trump should take this win for what it is: proof that he can stare down both Putin’s surface-level complaints and his more ominous threats below the surface. Just as the president rightly responded to Russian nuclear threats by announcing he deployed two ballistic missile submarines toward Russia, Trump likely responded to Russia’s submarine threat in quiet confidence that the American submarine almost certainly following that submarine could sink it if necessary.
If he is to successfully convince Putin to accept a peace deal in Ukraine that is viable for both Ukraine and Russia, Trump will have to take stock of his success this week.
After all, any viable peace deal will necessarily involve security guarantees for Ukraine, including the deployment of European peacekeepers. Only those guardrails will give Ukraine the confidence and Russia the obstacle to ensure any peace is lasting. Putin knows this, of course. Hence why Russian officials are now screeching complaints about the security guarantees, involving European peacekeepers backed by America’s commitments, that Western powers have agreed to as part of any peace deal.
WHAT WILL TRUMP DO IF IRAN MASSACRES PROTESTERS?
Trump will very likely need to increase sanctions and, via the provision of longer-range weapons to Ukraine, escalate Ukraine’s military pressure on Putin to get him to accept a security guarantee-enabled deal. Just as Putin only accepted the U.S. seizure of the Marinera because he knew that the costs of resisting that seizure would far outweigh the benefits of doing so, Putin will only agree to a credible peace if he believes that the costs of rejecting it will outweigh his discomfort in accepting it.
Trump holds the cards; he needs only play them.