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WASHINGTON: Pentagon officials sat down with a group of European diplomats in late August and delivered a stern message: The US planned to cut off some security assistance to Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, all NATO members bordering Russia.

More broadly, Pentagon official David Baker told the group, according to an official with direct knowledge of the comments, Europe needed to be less dependent on the United States.

Under President Donald Trump, the US military would be shifting its attention to other priorities, like defense of the homeland. Some European diplomats fretted that the move, first reported earlier this month, could embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin.

On Friday, they may have been proven right. Russian MiG-31 jets entered Estonian airspace for roughly 10 minutes, Estonia said, before being chased away by Italian F-35s.

Russia denied violating Estonian airspace, saying its jets flew over neutral waters. Hours later, Russian jets buzzed a Polish oil platform, Warsaw said. Last week, Russian drones were downed in Poland. The US response to those incidents has so far been muted. Trump did not address the latest incursion for several hours, before saying it could be “big trouble.”

After last week’s Polish incident, he posted cryptically on his Truth Social app: “Here we go!“
His responses appear to fit an emerging pattern.
After months of proposing both ideas to solve or intermediate some of the world’s most intractable conflicts, Trump has largely withdrawn from diplomacy in recent weeks. Instead, he has allowed and in some cases pressed allies to take the lead, with only distant promises of US help. He has increasingly turned his attention to domestic issues, like tackling crime, confronting what he calls violent left-wing extremism and overhauling a major visa program.

Returning to form

After an intense summer of diplomacy, including hosting Putin in Alaska, Trump has told Europeans they must impose punishing sanctions on buyers of Russian oil if they expect Washington to tighten the financial screws on Moscow over its war in Ukraine.

After the US president spent the first several months of his term trying to secure a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, he has lately shrugged off moves by Israel that would seem to undermine the possibility of a deal to end the war in Gaza.

White House officials protested when Israel bombed a Hamas office located in the territory of US ally Qatar but took no action. When Israel launched a controversial military advance on Gaza City, Trump did not object, even as European and Arab allies condemned the move, which seemed likely to doom peace talks.
That Trump would be wary of US involvement in major conflicts is in some ways unsurprising. He spent two years on the campaign trail arguing the nation was militarily overstretched. Political opponents called him an isolationist. But over the summer, a different Trump emerged. To the chagrin of some conservative political allies, he bombed Iran’s key nuclear sites in support of Israel’s air war in June. 

At a NATO conference in the Netherlands later that month, he indicated he would send fresh Patriot defense systems to Ukraine. In July, he intensified his threats of sanctions and tariffs targeting Moscow.
Now, analysts say, Trump is returning to form.
Aaron David Miller, a veteran US diplomat and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Trump may have simply realized the conflicts are far more intractable than he had imagined.
“He’s not interested in doing anything unless he sees that the expenditure of effort and political capital will be worth the return,” Miller said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mercurial president, exhausted diplomats

The president’s latest zig could easily be followed by a zag. In April and May, he publicly floated walking away from the war in Ukraine, only to re-engage heavily on the issue. Moreover, the White House’s disengagement has not been absolute. In recent weeks, some US weapons have begun flowing into Ukraine as part of a US-NATO security assistance initiative called the PURL program.
Still, analysts expressed concern that the mild US reaction to Russia’s latest provocations will only encourage more aggressive steps by Putin.
Further US disengagement “would lead us to more provocative actions from Putin as he sees Europe as weaker because it can be divided — especially without the US there to back it up,” said Alex Plitsas, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Several European diplomats in Washington privately expressed exhaustion at Trump’s changeable attitude on Russia — and suggested another hardening of his stance toward Moscow could lack credibility.
Over the summer, those diplomats said, the mood was notably different.
At a NATO summit in June, Trump heaped praise on European leaders and the next month repeatedly threatened Russia with direct and secondary sanctions and agreed to set up PURL. But the anti-climactic summit with Putin produced no breakthroughs and a major setback for Kyiv: Trump left the meeting saying a ceasefire in Ukraine was not a precondition of lasting peace — a position held by Putin, but not European allies.
In a testy September 4 call with European partners, Trump argued that European nations were expecting the US to bail them out when Europeans were still themselves supporting Russia’s war machine by purchasing Russian oil, according to two officials briefed on the call.
The next week, Trump told European Union officials they should hit China and India with 100 percent tariffs to punish them for their purchases of Russian oil. He portrayed such a move as a precondition for US action, one official said.
Trump’s supporters say he is only demanding that Europe stand up for its own security. But some diplomats sense a trap. Such measures would be hard to get through the EU’s bureaucracy promptly, particularly as the bloc prefers sanctions to tariffs. Two senior European diplomats in Washington also noted that Trump has recently spoken of lowering trade barriers with India.
It is unclear if Friday’s Estonia incursion will alter Trump’s calculus toward Russia. His government appeared unmoved by a letter from lawmakers in Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia last week calling for reconsideration of Trump’s plan to eliminate some security assistance.
“Many of our European allies are among the world’s wealthiest countries,” a White House official said. “They are fully capable of funding these programs if they choose.”

WASHINGTON: At one of his final rallies before the 2024 election, then-candidate Donald Trump warned that Black Americans were losing their jobs in droves and that things would get even worse if he did not return to the White House.
“You should demand that they give you the numbers of how many Black people are going to lose their job,” Trump said. “The African American population, they’re getting fired at numbers that we have never seen before.”
But with Trump back in office since January, an already fragile financial situation for Black Americans has worsened. Upset by inflation and affordability issues, Black voters had shifted modestly toward the Republican last year on the promise that he could boost the economy by stopping border crossings and challenging foreign factories with tariffs. Yet a recent spate of economic data instead shows a widening racial wealth gap.
Black unemployment has climbed from 6.2 percent to 7.5 percent so far in 2025, the highest level since October 2021. Black homeownership has fallen to the lowest level since 2021, according to an analysis by the real estate brokerage Redfin. Earlier this month, the Census Bureau said the median Black household income fell 3.3 percent last year to $56,020, which is roughly $36,000 less than what a white household earns and evidence of a bad situation becoming worse.
That creates a major political risk for the president as well as an economic danger for the nation because job losses for Black Americans have historically foreshadowed a wider set of layoffs across other groups.
“Black Americans are often the canary in the coal mine,” said Angela Hanks, a former official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Labor Department who is now at The Century Foundation, a liberal think tank.
The Trump White House stressed that some of these downward trends, such as a relative decline in Black wealth, began under Democratic President Joe Biden. It emphasized that the “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies pushed by Democrats failed to deliver economic gains.
“Despite his lunatic obsession with DEI, Joe Biden’s disastrous economic agenda reduced the Black share of household wealth by nearly 25 percent,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai. “His inflationary policies caused interest rate hikes that froze Americans out of homeownership, and his open borders policies flooded the country with tens of millions of illegals who drove down wages.”
Some Black voters see Trump’s policies as doing more to hurt than help
Some Black voters who stayed on the sidelines in 2024 feel they need to be more engaged politically.
Josh Garrett, a 30-year-old salesperson in Florida, said he could not find a candidate last year with whom he agreed. He is frustrated by Trump’s layoffs of federal workers and sees a government more geared toward billionaires than the middle class.
“I don’t understand how you could be for the American people and have Americans lose their jobs when they have families, have bills,” Garrett said.
While the financial outlook for Black Americans is deteriorating, the net worth of white households is largely holding steady or increasing, largely due to stock market performance.
Hanks notes that the “chaotic effects” of Trump’s tariffs and spending cuts are hitting more vulnerable populations right now but that the damage could soon spread beyond.
Black leaders see Trump’s policies as discriminatory based on race
The federal layoffs appear to have disproportionately hit Black Americans because they make up a meaningful share of the government workforce. The administration maintains that its income tax cuts, tariffs and deportations of immigrants who are in the United States illegally will help Black Americans, but there is little evidence so far in the data of that.
At the same time, Trump has said that he would like to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, New Orleans, Baltimore and Memphis, Tennessee — cities led by Black mayors. The president has called for redrawing congressional districts to favor Republicans, which could dilute the ability of Black voters to shape elections. He has sought to diminish the legacy of slavery and segregation from the Smithsonian museums.
“The message that they are sending is very clear: In these places, these people are incapable of governing themselves,” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said. “They are incapable of helping to solve their own issues. And make no mistake about it, it’s partly due to how we look.”
The Democrat warned that the mounting economic challenges could contribute to crime in the future, reversing progress that cities have made in recent years to lower homicide rates.
Trump might not be able to afford alienating Black voters
Black Americans are the dominant core of the Democratic base, though Trump has improved his standing with them. In 2024, Trump won 16 percent of Black voters, doubling his 2020 share, according to AP VoteCast, an extensive survey of the electorate. One of the key differences appeared to be frustration over inflation and affordability.
Roughly one-third of Black voters (36 percent) in the 2024 presidential election said the economy and jobs was the most important issue facing the country, up from 11 percent in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic was the top issue.
In a July poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, about half of Black adults (52 percent) said the amount of money they get paid was a “major” source of stress in their life right now, slightly higher than for US adults overall (43 percent) and significantly higher than for white adults (37 percent).
When it comes to incomes, some associated with the conservative movement suggest that Black households are more vulnerable because fewer of them are in married families, which generally tend to have higher incomes.
Delano Squires, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said the “connection between family structure and financial stability is one that is fairly consistent across time.”
The immediate political reality is that Trump had a mandate to improve the economy for the middle class, including Black voters. But many of those voters now see an administration more focused on deporting immigrants and expanding its own grip on power, possibly threatening Republicans’ chances of holding onto the House and key Senate seats in next year’s elections.
“We’re in a new era,” said Alexsis Rodgers, political director at the Black to the Future Action Fund. “There are people who obviously believed his promises, that Trump was going to do something about the cost of eggs, the cost of housing. They’ve seen the focus instead is on ICE raids and downsizing the government.”