| Donald Trump’s dramatic realignment of U.S. policy away from Ukraine and towards Russia will have consequences no one can now anticipate. We can hope they will be mostly positive. But one thing should be clear: If Trump had not done something like this, America’s Ukraine policy was steering directly towards a disaster which would have crippled his presidency early on and accelerated the decline of American power.
Ukraine and its Washington sponsor were losing the proxy war against Russia. Despite a massive investment of American money and arms, rigorous economic sanctions levied upon Russia, and the most technologically sophisticated intelligence help on the battlefield, Kiev was outgunned and outmanned; serious military analysts thought the Ukrainian army was on the verge of collapse. No one knew exactly how that might look, but Vietnam in the spring of 1975 was not a pretty sight for Americans. Even had Ukraine’s lines held for the time being, and Ukraine’s army kept losing territory at a slow pace while having increasing difficulty filling its ranks, it had no plausible path to victory. Zelensky’s only chance of survival was to draw America directly into the fight. (The third possibility, not really relevant since the first year of the war, was to defeat the ill-prepared Russian forces, a possibility which raised the very serious prospect of nuclear escalation.)
Thus a wider war or a Vietnam-style defeat were the plausible menu items for President Trump when he came into office. What he has done is to add a third choice, to say that our long-term relationship with Russia is strategically more important than the sanctity of Ukraine’s borders (which have been in flux since time immemorial) or Kiev’s desire for NATO membership. Trump has thus gotten out in front of the pending defeat, making an effort to salvage something positive—making Russia not an enemy—from a disaster that was in no way of his making.
How that will play out remains to be seen. But the dominant media treatment of Trump’s diplomacy—that it is an ignoble betrayal of democracy, the West, and freedom itself—is childlike in its simplicity. Nor does the claim that all of Europe is in a state of white hot rage against Trump stand up to scrutiny. Of course one does see part of the European establishment, the Eurocrats and Natocrats scurrying about like residents of disrupted ant hill, making promises of more money for defense, unprecedented coordination, nuclear weapons–sharing, or even nuclear arms acquisition. But there is little evidence so far this reflects a deeper shift in opinion. The desire for full scale mobilization against Russia in Europe today seems quite the opposite from the patriotic war fervor in the early months of the First World War; it is an elite-driven thing with few echoes among Europe’s people.
A telling indicator is the interview Marine Le Pen gave last week to Le Figaro, France’s leading center-right newspaper. Le Pen roughly shares Donald Trump’s national populist orientation, but couldn’t be less similar in style. Cautious and disciplined to a fault, she also leads the largest political party in France. Her social media and public pronouncements had been notably restrained since the fateful week in February when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said Ukrainian NATO membership was not on the table and J.D. Vance called attention to the increasing lack of democracy in Europe itself. Here, in what may be France’s most important establishment venue, Le Pen called for the French ruling establishment essentially to calm down. Macron, she said, was demanding that the French prepare for war—a call which the French people found “perturbing”. He seemed to be advocating that France substitute subservience to the European Union for submission to the United States. The United States under Trump, she noted blandly, has changed its direction—something which sovereign countries do. But what of the “Russian menace,” her interviewers asked.
“I agree totally with François Fillon” she responded, “fundamentalist Islam remains our primary foe…. I have proposed that NATO be transformed into an organization which can fight that…. If Russia is having trouble advancing in Ukraine after three years, there is little chance it aspires to come to Paris.”
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