Does Putin want to start a war with NATO?

**Christiane Amanpour** (0:02)
This is a Global Player Original Podcast.

**Jamie** (0:05)
Putin is not just making mistakes, he's also provoking. All he has to do, Putin, is to dare NATO to do something in Moldova or in Romania, and just dare them to respond.

**Christiane Amanpour** (0:18)
Europe feels under threat. Russia seems intent on threatening us, and it's pretty frightening stuff.

**Jamie** (0:25)
They're beginning to think that actually, the president doesn't quite know what he's doing about this, and how to actually get a proper negotiation done.

**Christiane Amanpour** (0:33)
He's running out of soldiers, he's running out of confidence in his country.

**Jamie** (0:37)
It's alarming. When do you think Article 5 gets triggered?
Hi, everyone. It's me, Christiane Amanpour, with this episode of The Ex Files in Paris. Given that it's America's 250th birthday, I decided to come here to the statue of Benjamin Franklin, who was a founding father and America's first diplomat. His great success here on mission in France was to persuade this country to support the new republic with weapons and all sorts of other help to fight off the British. It became America's war of independence. And given the fact that we are right in the middle now of a dire necessity for decent diplomacy coming from the United States, given all the wars and all the chaos that is abroad that's really shaped up under the Trump administration, we thought we'd talk a little bit about what successful diplomacy can look like. And actually, we're going to open this because it's super important with the lack of diplomacy and the clear and catastrophic, frankly, negotiating progress. All these wars that Trump said that he would finish in like a day are still raging. And I think we should discuss it because he does so much negotiating in public. He does so much truth, social instead of actually the hard work of getting the professionals to sit down and negotiate, whether it's on Iran or whether it's on Ukraine or whether it's on the Middle East, Lebanon and all these things that are kind of in weird states of stalemate, neither here nor there, and there's no end in sight. So, Jamie, it hasn't gone unnoticed that President Trump constantly tries to tell the world that it's all going well, we're going to get a great deal. If we don't get a great deal, we'll bomb somebody else. Do you remember last week he said he's going to bomb Oman over the Iran thing? He said, you know, we're going to make this deal and then we're going to get all the Arab countries, the Muslim countries to join the Abraham Accords.
Then he's saying one thing about Putin and one thing about Zelensky all the time.
What's going on? Let's face it, he has gutted the State Department and he has outsourced his negotiations to friends, whether it's Witkoff, whether it's Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, whether it's Tom Barak, who is his old friend who's now head of the Middle East negotiations. He's ambassador to Turkey and has that whole Syria, Lebanon, all that file. What is going on?

**Christiane Amanpour** (3:09)
Well, I think there's two things going on. One, President Trump has decided to use the power of the presidency to take advantage of the role the president can play on foreign policy and has tried to play a role on almost every single issue.
Because I guess he thinks this is the most exciting part of his presidency because passing legislation, getting the economy moving again is a much more difficult task. So this is his idea of fun. Remember, I remember as a young man, first hearing about Donald Trump, thinking that he could be saying he could be a better negotiator on arms control than the Nixon and Carter and Reagan administrations, thinking that he could get a better deal. And that was always his premise. But I think what we've seen both in the last term and this term is that he can talk diplomacy very well and he's very good at talking to leaders that sometimes Democrats don't even want to talk to. And he didn't mind having sessions with the North Korean leader and talking to Putin and talking to Xi Jinping without all the worries about giving these leaders too much credit or credibility, something that Democrats are often worried about perhaps too much. But then in the end, nothing much very significant happens. And I think there's two big reasons for that. One is he's trying to do too much, trying to change things too much. Number two, he doesn't have the support of allies. And it's with allies that you get the power of the United States brought to bear. And he's trying to do these things himself.