The Chinese have a saying, “May you live in interesting times”. It is meant ironically. Today we are living in such “interesting” times with Donald Trump’s second accession to the American presidency. While most attention has been focused on his dramatic and draconian moves to deport the eleven million undocumented immigrants and reduce the Federal Bureaucracy, it is his intervention into the Ukraine-Russia War that has the potential to be a game-changer in international relations.
After the end of WWII in 1945, with the “allies – including the USSR – defeating Germany, by 1946, Winston Churchill defined the communist USSR as the new threat to a peaceful world order. He declared that “an iron curtain has descended across the (European) continent.” Three years later, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) – with Germany as its linchpin and the US in the forefront – was formed in Western Europe to stop the “Red Menace” across the “Iron Curtain”, then represented physically by the Berlin Wall, after the Soviets’ Warsaw Pact with its allies in Eastern Europe to counter NATO.
Fast forward to 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, the USSR under Gorbachev accepted its defeat, and in 1991 collapsed back into Russia when the Soviets became 14 independent states, including Ukraine. The raison d’etre for NATO had by then been dissolved, even as the US defined its new threat as coming from a resurgent China. Russian President Boris Yeltsin attempted a democratization internally, within a free-enterprise economy combined with rapprochement to the west. Evidently, there was a verbal agreement for NATO not to expand into the former Soviet states, but after a regime change in Ukraine that the west supported, the new president, Zelenskyy, applied to join the military alliance.
Russia under Putin claimed the West acted in bad faith to promote what he saw as an inexorable encirclement of Russia by a growing NATO. In 2022, Russia followed up its 2014 annexation of Crimea to prevent Ukraine access to the Black Sea by launching what it defined as a “special military operation” to “denazify” the Ukrainian Army in Eastern Ukraine, which borders Russia. That operation has now dragged on for three years, with the West especially supplying Ukraine with weapons. The US, which under the Biden Administration had defined the war as due to Russian revanchist expansionism, had shipped in some US$60billion of arms, along with several hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of other “aid”.
Trump, as he had promised before his inauguration, wanted an end to the Ukraine war, and he had been consistently critical of Europe for not doing more to ensure that outcome. He initiated direct talks with the Russians towards that end, and it precipitated a harsh retort from Zelenskyy because he was not invited to the talks. Trump responded in a vicious takedown, dismissing Zelensky as “a modestly successful comedian” and a “dictator without elections”, who had “talked USA into spending 350 billion dollars, to go into a war that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a war that he, without the US and “TRUMP”, will never be able to settle.”
Most critically, Trump discarded 75 years of America’s involvement in Europe to declare that “this war is far more important for Europe than it is to us – we have a big, beautiful ocean as separation.” He warned Zelenskyy that he had “better move fast” to reach a deal with Russia, “or he is not going to have a country left”. European leaders were stunned, and are hoping this was only a demonstration of Trump’s negotiation style, in which he takes extreme and even outrageous positions from which he would later retreat when his real objectives are met. Lending some credence to this view is the fact that Trump has demanded a 50 percent share from the proposed exploitation of Ukraine’s rare earth metals and other minerals that might amount to US$500 billion.
There are evidently two lessons to be learnt from this episode: firstly, a Rubicon has been crossed by the US towards European security; and secondly, that Trump’s art of the deal can be very bruising on the other party.
