Trump’s evisceration of the Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelenskyy on live television has drawn a great deal of ire from the international community. But distasteful as it was to watch, it was not as irrational as many people seem to think. This was not just an American president forgetting his dignity in public and behaving like a playground bully. Yes, it was that too, but it also makes strategic sense .
To begin with, Trump is something we haven’t seen since perhaps Warren Harding’s day: an old-fashioned American isolationist president. We tend to forget that the USA was isolationist for most of its history. Harding himself sold the abandonment of Woodrow Wilson’s internationalist politics as a return to “normalcy”. And his economic csar (later president) Herbert Hoover declared that “The business of America is business.” (i.e. making money, not making the world safe for democracy). Roosevelt took America back to internationalism and this time it lasted for decades because of the idealogical conflict between the capitalist USA and communist Russia. Now that impulse is spent.
Secondly, Trump likes and admires Putin. After all they have a lot in common. Both are oligarchs, crooked businessmen, rich, amoral and physically vain. Both bitterly oppose the modern “woke” consensus. Putin rides around stripped to the waist and boasts of wrestling bears. That’s exactly the kind of thing that appeals to Trump. Also, he owes Putin a favour. Without the Russian disinformation campaign in 2016, Trump would probably not have won the election; it was a very close run thing as it was. And without those four years establishing himself in the role of president, he might not have won the more complete victory in 2024.
Thirdly, Trump utterly despises Western Europe. He sees the Europeans as effete, cowardly and culturally bankrupt, much the same way in fact as Putin sees them. Things have changed since the cold war. As long as the Soviet Union existed, capitalist America and communist Russia were idealogical enemies sparring for control of the world. And obviously if there was going to be a final nuclear showdown, America wanted it to be in Europe and not over American skies. That was why US presidents all supported NATO with a heavy financial input. It was in their national interest to do so.
But now communism is dead and America is no longer in danger from Russia. So why should they spend so much money (or indeed any money at all) on protecting ungrateful Europeans? Trump sent J D Vance to tell Europe that from now on they’re on their own. Either they spend enough of their own money to pay for their own defence, and develop a sufficiently muscular patriotism to raise their own armies, or Putin is welcome to have them and do what he likes with them.
Trump can afford to behave in this way because he knows that Putin has no ambitions to conquer America. What Putin most wants is Ukraine (which he still sees as “Little Russia”), the Baltic states and (probably) Poland — everything that the tsars had. In addition he would quite like to have the countries that formed part of Stalin’s empire though they are probably less important to him. If Western Europe fell into his lap as well, I’m sure he wouldn’t say no to the gift, but I doubt very much if he would want to pay the price for them that he is paying for Ukraine.
As for Trump, he sees China, not Russia, as the present-day existential threat to the USA. They do have a vigorous and all-consuming ideology and it isn’t communism, it’s old-fashioned Han Chinese imperialism. Because he anticipates an eventual showdown of some kind with them, he would like to peel Russia away from her alliance with China. Giving her a nice big juicy Ukrainian bone to chew would perhaps keep her busy — and grateful. Maybe to the extent of letting Trump gain access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals.
In short this isn’t Chamberlain and Hitler in Munich as many people seem to think. It’s Ribbentrop and Stalin in Moscow: two gangsters who know exactly what they are doing, dividing the coming spoils.
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