Foreign policy has never looked this prehistoric. The cartoon sets the stage with Trump on one side, Putin on the other, and Ukraine flattened between them. Trump, ever the dealmaker in his own mythology, dangles a slab of cheese branded “peace” as if a caveman can be tricked into dropping his bloodied rock. His other hand grips a crude bat labeled “More Tariffs,” because in this version of world order, trade wars double as real wars, and diplomacy is a gag prop.
The Theater of the Absurd
Inside the cave marked “Russia,” Putin isn’t rendered as a chess player or calculating tyrant—he’s a hairy, stone-age brute, gnawing on conquest like it’s raw meat. The choice is deliberate. This isn’t high strategy. This is blunt, primitive violence packaged as foreign policy. Ukraine, bloodied and collapsed, isn’t even drawn as a nation anymore. It’s a corpse on the cave floor, collateral damage in a cave dweller’s tantrum.
Trump, meanwhile, stands outside the shadows looking less like a statesman and more like a pitchman selling miracle glue on late-night TV. His answer to Russian aggression is simple, maybe too simple: bait with cheap promises, swing the tariff club if things get dicey, and call it leadership.
The cartoon makes the exchange look transactional—peace as a commodity, blood as the price of doing business.
Punchline Written in Blood
The gag line, “So simple, even a caveman could do it,” nails the absurdity. Policy reduced to slapstick; geopolitics treated like a marketing campaign. But behind the joke, the humor rots.
The casualty here isn’t just Ukraine sprawled in red; it’s the idea of seriousness in confronting violence. When “peace” becomes bait and tariffs pass for strategy, the world’s ugliest war gets framed as something a caveman could solve.
That punchline doesn’t land with a laugh. It lands with a thud.
