We have all watched the shocking press conference with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance ambushing Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the oval office last week. The meeting occurred at the end of a series of meetings that Trump had with European heavyweight such as French President Emmanuel Macron and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who tried to undo the damage made by the corrosive speeches given by JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference and Pete Hegseth at the NATO meeting in Poland.
It is patently obvious that the US administration is now an enemy of Ukraine, and will soon leave it without any support, either financial or military, leaving the weight of the “security guarantees” for Ukraine to the Europeans only. In a tweet following the meeting, Trump had the audacity of saying that Zelenskyy “feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations” with Russia. The outcry of disconcertment and disdain for this posture (coming even from fellow Republicans such as Liz Cheney and Antony Scaramucci, or Russians such as Garry Kasparov), which most feel symbolises the end of the current world order, is such that is not worth adding to it further.
Needless to say the only beneficiary in all this is China, and, by extension, Russia. What China and its allies couldn’t possibly anticipate was that Trump would actively work to weaken the US sphere of influence by dividing its own camp – the West – with his aggressive stance on Europe and his lenient posture towards Russia, on the Ukrainian war and in other matters as well.
Some clever analyst wants to make a parallel between what Trump is doing with Russia and what Nixon did with China, with Nixon’s 1972 trip to China. On that occasion, Nixon aimed at separating the weaker partner of the Communist bloc (at the time represented by China) from the major partner (the Soviet Union). The trip was a success, as China embarked on a series of economic reforms that eventually led the country to become the second largest economy in the world, outpacing the Soviet Union, which meanwhile collapsed in 1991. In effect, the US and China had become major trading partners until the US started perceiving Beijing as a geo-strategic rival, and Cold War 2 begun.
According to some, Trump would now be trying to do the same: detach the junior partner of the new rival bloc (in this case Russia) from its larger ally (China), by showing that Russia can still find friends and allies on the other side of the fence. We believe this is an over-indulgent interpretation of Trump’s recent moves regarding the war in Ukraine, and trans-Atlantic relations more generally.
Here are some major differences. When Nixon went to China, in 1972, Communism was still perceived in large swathes of Western society, especially in Europe, as a “liberation” force for the masses. China was perceived with sympathy (as some of the crimes of the regime didn’t emerge until many years later) and most people were willing to give this gigantic country, humiliated for centuries, a helping hand to get it out of its backwardness. China was perceived as not aggressive, and definitely not as a threat to the global or, thder and international peace. Trump’s position towards Russia comes at a very different stage. Russia is currently one of the most hated and feared countries in Europe and in many other parts of the world, after its brutal and unprovoked aggression against Ukraine. Putin is considered a war criminal with an arrest warrant pending from the International Criminal Court. Nobody in Europe, apart from Hungary’s Orban, would want to be seen with him or shaking his hand. Bringing him back into the international community would be akin to asking Hitler’s Germany to join the United Nations after the concentration camps of WW2.
It is obvious that Trump’s decision to give Putin all he could possibly ask for from the negotiations (namely Ukraine not being in NATO, Russia keeping all the territories gained since February 2022, no US troops to patrol the new borders, military expenses for NATO countries reaching 5% of GDP, thus weakening EU societies), will only embolden Putin, and convince him that – from now on, and certainly for as long as Trump is at the White House – the best course of action is to continue destabilising Europe with renewed territorial disputes. Quite a track record for Donald Trump’s first month in office, in this second term that will seem endless to many people.
