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Now President Trump has gone too far.
Last week, he committed more foreign policy heresies than any U.S. leader ever has, slamming Ukraine’s popular president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a dictator; bypassing Ukraine and the rest of Europe in seeking a separate peace with Russia; and all but endorsing a neo-Nazi party in Germany’s elections, thus casting doubt on America’s commitment to Western security and values.
On Monday, he went a step beyond what even many of his critics had imagined possible: He took Russia’s side in its war with Ukraine; he fully accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s view on what the war is all about.
His drastic departure from 75 years of U.S. foreign policy took the shape of a triple whammy.
The first step came when the United Nations voted on a resolution condemning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. This was a nonbinding resolution taken up by the General Assembly to voice support for the war-torn country on the third anniversary of Putin’s assault. Trump’s delegate to the U.N. opposed the resolution. The U.S. did so with just 17 other countries, including such redoubtable Putin allies as Hungary, Belarus, North Korea, and Nicaragua.
The second stroke came when the U.S. delegation put up its own resolution calling for an end to the war but not calling out an aggressor. European nations successfully offered three amendments, one of which named Russia as the aggressor. The resolution, as amended, easily passed, as did the earlier measure, but the United States abstained.
It is one thing to desire some sort of rapprochement with Russia in order to calm global tensions or to form a common bulwark against Chinese expansion. I reject this idea for a few reasons. Putin has no interest in easing up on his own imperial fantasies; it’s naive to believe he would join the U.S. in an alliance against China, his richest, most reliable supplier of technology. In any case, Russia, a declining power, has little to offer us in any such alliance. Still, this is a view—held by the likes of Elbridge Colby (who has been nominated as undersecretary of defense for policy) and John Mearsheimer—that people can argue about.
There is nothing to argue about the fact that Russia is the aggressor in its war against Ukraine. Putin launched this war back in 2014, when he annexed Crimea and sent special forces to arm and assist separatist militias in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, for the clear purpose of eventually annexing that territory as well. (This was no minor skirmish; more than 14,000 people were killed in that war’s first eight years.) When he expanded this into a multipronged invasion of all Ukraine, he did so—he openly said as much—for the purpose of wiping out Ukraine altogether.
And yet here was the Trump administration refusing to back a U.N. resolution—even an explicitly toothless resolution—calling out Russia as an aggressor.
Then came the third whammy, later on Monday, at the White House, during a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, who was visiting to discuss European policy on Ukraine. Asked if he would call Putin a “dictator,” Trump declined to do so, saying, “I don’t use those words lightly.”
Yet it was just one week ago that Trump leveled the D-word against Zelensky, on the grounds that he hasn’t held elections for six years (even though Ukraine’s constitution forbids elections under martial law, which had to be declared because of Putin’s invasion) and that, meanwhile, his popularity had dipped to 4 percent (when, in fact, independent polls show his favorable ratings as 57 percent—about 10 points higher than Trump’s rating in the U.S.). Putin, of course, has held rigged elections, murdered rivals and critics, suppressed free speech, and committed many other acts common to dictators—including some that compelled the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant charging Putin with war crimes.
What the hell is going on?
Some have long suspected that Trump is a Russian agent. I tend to doubt this—though, as I’ve had the occasion to write twice in recent months, he wouldn’t be behaving much differently if he were. A more plausible explanation is that he simply admires strongmen and wishes he were one.
In a Fox News interview in 2018, Trump said of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, just after the two held their first summit: “He’s the head of a country, and I mean he is the strong head. … He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.” Similarly, just this past October, right before the election, in an interview with Joe Rogan, Trump called China’s Xi Jinping “a brilliant guy. He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist, I mean, he’s a brilliant guy”—the suggestion being that controlling so many people with an iron fist is an impressive thing, which only a brilliant guy could pull off.
Trump wants to be that brilliant guy with an iron fist. He has demonstrated in his first month back in the White House that he has no particular attachment to democratic processes at home, no special love for democratic leaders abroad. He finds the processes annoying and the binding commitments of an alliance way too costly.
His attitudes align well with the crudest version of Realpolitik theory, which contends that values hold no place in the shaping of foreign policy and that great powers are entitled to control vast spheres of influence.
One of many problems with this view is that one country’s sphere of influence might be seen by others as imperial expansion. A delicate balance of power might be one outcome of such a world; cataclysmic wars might be another.
In any case, Trump is on the verge of alienating America’s oldest, richest, most reliable allies in Europe. He might, in fact, have already have plunged off the cliff. The day after his Christian Democratic party won the plurality in Germany’s election and he seemed sure to be its next prime minister, Friedrich Merz told a TV journalist:
For me, it is an absolute priority to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible, so that we achieve independence from the U.S. step by step. I never thought that I would ever need to say something like that on television, but after the latest statements made by Donald Trump last week, it is clear that the Americans—at any case these Americans, this administration—mostly don’t care about the fate of Europe one way or another.
Merz said that before Monday’s U.N. vote and Trump’s joint press conference with Macron—events that have no doubt hardened his sentiment.
Trump may believe—he says as much—that the United States doesn’t need allies, that we can go it alone, especially with a brilliant leader like him at the helm, making transactional deals with one friend or foe at a time.
“We have a big, beautiful ocean as a separation,” he proclaimed at his press conference with Macron. The ocean truly provided that separation in the decades just before and just after the onset of the 20th century—a span that Trump now regards (absurdly) as a golden age of peace and prosperity. The illusion shattered with the eruption of World War I. In its aftermath, many Americans, yearning to escape the dread of Old World power politics, wove a dream of isolation, which set off the catastrophe of World War II.
If Putin has a taste for fine Champagne, he must have uncorked a few bottles in the past few weeks, gleeful that his mad dream of restoring the Russian empire might come true. (If Trump lets Ukraine go and severs America’s security arrangement with Europe, what’s to keep the Baltics, Poland, and more from rolling under Russia’s armored caravan or submitting to its blackmail?) Xi is closely watching for any lessons he might apply to fulfilling his own dream of reconquering Taiwan. Kim might be mulling the prospects of forcing the unification of Korea—to which South Korea’s leaders are already thinking about whether it’s time to build their own nuclear deterrent as they watch Trump fold up America’s security umbrella.
Serious dynamics are at play. Trump may be blithely unaware of them, and his team of security advisers is as inexperienced a gaggle of lapdogs as the United States has, quite possibly, ever seen. A handful of people in Congress and the executive branch have the knowledge—and, if they mustered the courage, the ability—to help put a stop to this. History holds its breath.
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