The world’s reaction to Donald Trump’s takeover of America follows the typical stages of grief. First denial, then anger, bargaining and depression. What we need now is acceptance. This is not some burst of chaos, or the zig-zagged tides of the President’s inconsistent brain. This is a strategy pursued for ideological reasons.
This administration has been relatively consistent on its approach to Russia and Ukraine. It favours Vladimir Putin over Volodymyr Zelensky. It wants Russia to win the war and Ukraine to lose. It is prepared to attack the Ukrainian leader, intervene in the battlefield on behalf of the Russian leader, and effectively fund Russia’s war effort.
In 2002, president George W Bush coined the juvenile term “Axis of Evil” for all the countries he wanted to bomb in the wake of September 11 – namely Iraq, Iran and North Korea. But if the axis of evil truly exists, it is headed by Putin’s Russia. And the US is firmly onside.
It can sometimes be hard to distinguish the consistency because of the noise. Today, for instance, things seem marginally improved. Trump envoy Steve Witkoff has arrived in St Petersburg for a meeting with Putin after “positive” talks with Zelensky in Oslo. US intelligence sharing has now been restored, allowing Ukraine warning of ballistic missile attacks. Trump will occasionally fall out with Putin, or lose concentration. He is also vulnerable to anti-Russian Republicans who put up a rare fight on Ukrainian issues.
But when you zoom out from the day-to-day news cycle and look at the decisive structural factors, the pattern is much clearer.
Over the summer, the Ukrainian strategy had been working. Strikes against Russian energy infrastructure proved powerfully effective. The economic pressure was continuing to build, with several acute points of vulnerability. Russian morale was through the floor.
Then Trump came to Putin’s rescue. Last week, he ended an embargo on Russian fuel, creating a multi-phase plan that would pump billions of dollars into the country. This week, he suspended US sanctions passed by Congress two days before they were due to come into effect.
He said he didn’t want to “do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table”. Notice the way this works. Securing peace between Russia and Ukraine involves carrots for Putin and the stick for Zelensky. Negotiations are secured by protecting the Russian economy, allowing it to continue the killing of Ukrainian civilians.
The financial relief the US has provided will be used for the war effort. This is a country which is now on all-out war footing. Any additional revenue is going to be driven towards the war itself or the domestic conditions which make it possible. Far from opposing it, or even remaining neutral, America is funding the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The US also appeared to intervene to throttle Ukrainian access to Starshield – the satellite system used by Ukraine for battlefield communication and drone operation.
Starshield is developed by Elon Musk’s Space X, but managed by the US government. Over the ensuing days, a war of words broke out about who was responsible for this. Reuters reported that the order to limit the satellite system came from inside the White House, which Trump denied. This morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that it was Musk who ordered the slowdown following a discussion with Trump.
Trump insists that all of this is to secure a deal between Russia and Ukraine. “He could have made many deals,” the US president said of Zelensky, “but for some reason he never does.”
The deal he is referring to is for Ukraine to relinquish its claim to eastern territories, handing Russia on a plate what it could not take by force. It would betray the memory of the Ukrainian men who died fighting the Russia invasion and hand Putin a beachhead with which to continue that invasion in future.
To even talk of a deal is to fundamentally misunderstand what is happening. Russia invaded Ukraine. If it wants peace all it has to do is stop the invasion and go back to its own borders. But if Ukraine stops fighting, the consequences are of a different magnitude. It would surrender to the Russian advance. Its people would be massacred. Those left would have their culture and their language eradicated and be subsumed into the Russian landmass. It would entail the liquidation of the Ukrainian people and their national identity.
This asymmetry is so obvious that no-one should need it explained to them. And Trump, for all his idiocy, does not need it explained to him either.
We are in a battle against an ideology. Putin and Trump both share a worldview. It is of strongman leaders who have carved the world into spheres of influence. The US gets the western hemisphere. Russia gets eastern Europe.
Zelensky represents something which does not fit into the Trumpist worldview. He symbolises the pride of smaller states and the dignity of a people who refuse to be absorbed by powerful neighbours. His dream of Ukraine’s future involves its ascension into the European Union – an alliance of small and medium sized democracies which represents precisely the kind of rules-based multilateralism which Trump detests.
The US American National Security Strategy released late last year outlines the spheres of influence policy and the explicit intention of undermining the EU. The US, it said, would cultivate “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”. It does this through support for parties like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and Alice Weidel’s AfD, which both have a pro-Putin, anti-EU agenda. It is an attempt to undermine Europe from within.
The sooner Europe comes to terms with these truths, the sooner it can defend itself. We must accept what America has become as a precondition of an effective opposition to imperialism.
These events are not random. They are concerted and ideological. The White House and the Kremlin share an ideological agenda, a worldview and a geopolitical strategy. There may still be residual opposition in Washington, but the American and Russian leaders are, to all intents and purposes, on the same side.