Yet, their shock is more an indictment of their impuissance than any perfidy by Trump. The more interesting question is: Will this awaken Europe from its strategic slumber?
All great powers pursue an imperial and not ethical foreign policy. Trump’s art of the deal has always been to ask for everything, judge the point at which the other party has made its final offer, and then take what he can get. Mix and match the two sentences, and we can better understand what Trump is doing on Ukraine.
Complaints about Trump upending the international order substitute a fantasy vision for reality. The rules-based liberal international order did not stop the incomprehensibly barbaric and depraved Hamas attack on Israel in 2023, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, China’s creeping militarisation of the South China Sea, the US invasion and conquest of Iraq in 2003, and numerous other examples of great powers behaving badly.
On 12 February, Trump talked to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on the phone, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told NATO leaders in Brussels that the US would prioritise domestic concerns and the China threat over Ukraine. Vice President JD Vance’s tough love speech at the Munich Security Conference, the Marco Rubio delegation to Riyadh for peace talks with Russian counterparts sans a European and Ukrainian presence, and Trump’s Truth Social spray at Zelensky followed in quick succession.
The chief three-pronged attack line against Trump’s Ukraine pronouncements are that, in ‘a terrifying echo of the betrayal of Czechoslovakia in 1938’ (Antony Beevor, The Australian), they signal appeasement of Russia and betrayal of Ukraine. This will tempt China to grab Taiwan because the US security guarantee has lost all currency. Trump’s Truth Social spray at Zelensky was a signature mix of bombast, hyperbole, and braggadocio. Millions may not have died in the war but the combined casualties do run into hundreds of thousands. Ignoring the exaggerations and narcissism, I focus on four big issues.
First, Trump has already walked back his off-the-cuff false claim on TV that Ukraine started the war. Trump’s blast at Zelensky was more nuanced: the war ‘never had to start,’ it ‘couldn’t be won,’ and it cannot be ended without the US.
There’s a continuing debate on whether or not NATO’s eastward expansion was a broken promise that provoked Putin into attacking Ukraine. I believe it was, and elsewhere have referenced the extensive documentation in support of this argument. In poking the bear once too often in the mistaken belief that Russia was defeated and diminished to such an extent that it could not and would not fight back, NATO leaders forgot the late Henry Kissinger’s sage warning that ‘No great power retreats forever.’ It is unbecoming of those who play hardball to cry when they lose. As an aside, the sight of Zelensky in his performative ‘heroic’ attire, even in the most formal settings, has also been a regular turn-off along with the insistent demand that all other countries must bend their foreign policy interests to support Ukraine.
That said, reasonable people disagree on whether Russia’s invasion three years ago was unprovoked or triggered by NATO’s eastward creep. To Westerners, NATO enlargement was a natural adjustment to the realities of post-Cold War Europe and the historical antipathy of eastern Europeans to Russia. To Russia, it was a threat to core security interests. All Russian leaders from Mikhail Gorbachev to Putin believed that Russia had consented to the peaceful terms of the ending of the Cold War on two core understandings: NATO would not expand its borders eastwards, and Russia would be incorporated into an inclusive pan-European security architecture. Americans tend to get lawyerly in response, that the informal understandings were never put in writing.
To a disinterested outsider, Russia’s hostility to NATO missiles in Ukraine bears striking parallels to the US willingness to risk nuclear war in 1962 because of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Any independent-thinking analyst should be able to grasp a direct hypothetical analogy involving China meddling in Canada or Mexico and the guaranteed robust US reaction.
The claim that the war is unwinnable is grounded in reality. Once war started, based on demographic, economic, and military power imbalances between Kyiv and Moscow, an outright Ukrainian victory on its own was a chimera. With active NATO involvement, it might have been possible, but only at the very high risk of a nuclear war that would destroy the world. Putin expected a quick victory, but Ukrainian bravery and determination under Zelensky’s courageous leadership put paid to that.
However, over time, the cost to Ukraine has been staggeringly high and would only mount if the war were to be prolonged. Hegseth’s blunt message in Brussels was that any expectations that Ukraine can return to its pre-2014 borders or join NATO are ‘unrealistic:’ impossible today, implausible tomorrow, unlikely the day after. This isn’t new policy, merely a public affirmation of the reality that the perfect has become the enemy of the good in NATO’s Ukraine policy.
Second, Trump called Zelensky a dictator. US human rights lawyer Bob Amsterdam told Tucker Carlson that this ‘is an understatement.’ Ukraine is effectively ‘a police state.’ One month into the war, Zelensky suspended 11 opposition parties and nationalised several media outlets. He cancelled elections that were due last May. A 2023 State Department report on Ukraine noted ‘significant human rights issues:’ enforced disappearances, torture, judicial interference, assaults on journalists. Some of the campaign against critical media was funded by USAID. Zelensky’s poll ratings have plummeted from 90 percent in May 2022 to 16 percent last December. A Gallup poll in November found that, for the first time since the war began, Ukrainians supported, by a 52-38 margin, an early negotiated end to the war over continued fighting until victory.
Third, Trump said half the US money sent to Ukraine is missing. Vast sums of US billions given to Ukraine have indeed gone MIA. In Transparency International’s 2021 corruption index, Ukraine was ranked Europe’s most corrupt country. The 2021 Pandora Papers exposé of global corruption showed Zelensky’s close circle were the beneficiaries of a network of offshore companies, including some with expensive London property holdings. Oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, a key supporter of Zelensky’s 2019 campaign, was put under sanctions by the US State Department in 2021 for ‘significant corruption.’ In December 2023, a defence official was arrested for embezzling $40 million in a fraudulent purchase of artillery shells. The next month, Defence Minister Rustem Umerov revealed corruption in military procurement worth $262 million just four months into his job.
Fourth, Trump said the war cannot be ended without the US. Successive US presidents have demanded burden-sharing by NATO partners but have been ignored. A BBC breakdown of military aid to Ukraine from January 2022 to December 2024 inclusive shows that the US gave $69 billion worth and the rest of NATO combined – with a greater population and GDP than the US – $57 billion. A follow-up story noted that an analysis by the Kiel Institute looked at the total of military, financial, and humanitarian aid and concluded that Europe had provided more than the US, $139 and $120 billion respectively. But Trump is correct in the claim that the US gives considerably more than the Europeans in the form of outright grants.
With no discernible strategy for either victory or peace, NATO, including Biden’s US, gave enough support to Ukraine to keep fighting but not to win. It has ended up with the worst of all outcomes: hundreds of thousands of casualties, a generation of young men wiped out, economy wrecked, infrastructure gutted, and a likely worse land-for-peace deal than could have been negotiated before or in the early days of the war without the accompanying costs.
Hard military facts on the ground will determine the cartographic maps that delineate Ukraine’s new borders. That would still leave open other big questions: the status of Crimea and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine; Ukraine’s relations with Russia, NATO, and the EU; the identity of guarantors and nature of security guarantees for Ukraine; the timing of Russia’s exit from sanctions. None of this can happen without Russia and the US.
Europe’s military underspending is ‘an implied tax on the American people to allow for the security of Europe,’ then-Senator Vance wrote in the Financial Times a year ago. Trump and his cabinet colleagues have called time on American taxpayers subsidising Europe’s bloated welfare state.
The astonishing Trump-Zelensky public spat in the White House on the 28th and the roll call of European leaders lining up in support of Zelensky demonstrates the reality of donor dependency. Europeans must believe they are entitled to a US security subsidy in perpetuity while they indulge their luxury beliefs.
If the effete Europeans had taken ownership of Western support for Ukraine in a conflict at the geopolitical heart of Europe and involving their collective future, they would be in the driver’s seat in peace talks. They didn’t and they’re not. If Europeans and Zelensky reject Trump’s deal without tabling a realistic alternative, Trump can wash his hands of any further involvement and Putin can resume the war. How will this work out for Ukraine and Europe?
What of the 1938 Munich pact analogy? During the Cold War, geopolitical and economic relativities meant that ‘Globocop’ US picked up the tab for Soviet containment. It’s strategic common sense for Trump to end the war on the best terms available and shed the burden of Ukraine to Europe.
The geopolitical landscape has shifted. Trump is realigning US policy to the new contours. Allies and adversaries alike should get used to it. If there’s a hungry bear prowling in the woods beyond Europe’s backyard, it’s time for Europe to lock and load.
In speaking truth to smug complacency at the Munich Security Conference, Vance’s core thesis was that the growing divide on free speech was undermining the shared democratic values as the foundation of the US–Europe security relationship. Just as important, exiting the net zero death cult, ending the gender fluidity fantasy, abandoning DEI and antiracism insanity, severely curbing mass immigration, and reclaiming pride in the accomplishments and achievements of Western civilisation and culture, would do more to end European deindustrialisation and impoverishment, attenuate social divisions, restore cultural cohesion, and rebuild national self-confidence, resolve, and the foundations of military power than whining about Trump putting US interests ahead of European ones.
The abandonment of Israel by Western governments, including Australia, piling pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make concessions instead of backing Israel to eradicate the evil that is Hamas, has been a more unforgivable betrayal of Western values and interests.
The US has become an overstretched superpower no longer able to police all regions of the world. Unless someone can offer a convincing case to a rightly sceptical American and global audience that Uncle Sam can continue to deal with all threats simultaneously, it makes strategic sense for Trump to try and offload the burden of addressing Ukraine to Europe, or else to end the war on the best terms available and escape the trap of the sunk cost fallacy.
For Australian interests, prioritising China is the great imperative. The Ukraine war pushed Russia into a de facto ‘no limits’ alliance with China, reversing the singular achievement of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger more than fifty years ago. The Wall Street Journal reported on 21 February that one major calculation behind Trump’s embrace of Putin is ‘a strategic desire to drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing,’ both of which have long been trying to curb US dominance of the international order.
Elbridge Colby, nominee for undersecretary of defence for policy, tweeted on 16 December that the US ‘needs to face the fact that we can’t do everything in the world. And that we are way behind on the primary issue facing the country from a geopolitical perspective, which is China dominating Asia, and we are not gaining in Asia by spending in Ukraine.’ Would any Australian disagree?
Zelensky and NATO leaders are rattled. The trans-Atlantic alliance is at risk of rupture. Russia’s isolation is at an end. Minds should turn to how best to boost Ukraine’s deterrent capabilities and address the underlying causes of the conflict so that external security guarantees lose salience. That requires a new European security architecture in which Russian and US participation are prerequisites. Unpalatable but unavoidable.
To return to Trump, recall the apocryphal story of Churchill saying, ‘You can always rely on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.’ In point of fact this seems to be a variation of a remark by former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, which itself had different formulations but the gist remained the same; his ‘conviction that men and nations do behave wisely when they have exhausted all other possibilities.’ For three years, Zelensky and NATO have done everything to resist and repel the Russians from Ukraine, but in the process, they have ceded yet more territory. Trump, who in his first term famously became the first president in office in recent memory not to begin a new war, is trying to put a halt to the meat grinder of a war.
Similarly, it is easy enough to denounce Trump’s coerced minerals deal as an example of bullyboy neocolonialism. Yet, half the revenues from developing the mineral resources will be paid into a jointly owned fund that will invest in the country’s ‘safety, security and prosperity.’ This does give the US a material stake in a peaceful future with secure borders for Ukraine. As always, only history itself can answer whether Trump ends up on the right or wrong side of history.
Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University. This article was sourced HERE
Complaints about Trump upending the international order substitute a fantasy vision for reality. The rules-based liberal international order did not stop the incomprehensibly barbaric and depraved Hamas attack on Israel in 2023, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, China’s creeping militarisation of the South China Sea, the US invasion and conquest of Iraq in 2003, and numerous other examples of great powers behaving badly.
On 12 February, Trump talked to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on the phone, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told NATO leaders in Brussels that the US would prioritise domestic concerns and the China threat over Ukraine. Vice President JD Vance’s tough love speech at the Munich Security Conference, the Marco Rubio delegation to Riyadh for peace talks with Russian counterparts sans a European and Ukrainian presence, and Trump’s Truth Social spray at Zelensky followed in quick succession.
The chief three-pronged attack line against Trump’s Ukraine pronouncements are that, in ‘a terrifying echo of the betrayal of Czechoslovakia in 1938’ (Antony Beevor, The Australian), they signal appeasement of Russia and betrayal of Ukraine. This will tempt China to grab Taiwan because the US security guarantee has lost all currency. Trump’s Truth Social spray at Zelensky was a signature mix of bombast, hyperbole, and braggadocio. Millions may not have died in the war but the combined casualties do run into hundreds of thousands. Ignoring the exaggerations and narcissism, I focus on four big issues.
First, Trump has already walked back his off-the-cuff false claim on TV that Ukraine started the war. Trump’s blast at Zelensky was more nuanced: the war ‘never had to start,’ it ‘couldn’t be won,’ and it cannot be ended without the US.
There’s a continuing debate on whether or not NATO’s eastward expansion was a broken promise that provoked Putin into attacking Ukraine. I believe it was, and elsewhere have referenced the extensive documentation in support of this argument. In poking the bear once too often in the mistaken belief that Russia was defeated and diminished to such an extent that it could not and would not fight back, NATO leaders forgot the late Henry Kissinger’s sage warning that ‘No great power retreats forever.’ It is unbecoming of those who play hardball to cry when they lose. As an aside, the sight of Zelensky in his performative ‘heroic’ attire, even in the most formal settings, has also been a regular turn-off along with the insistent demand that all other countries must bend their foreign policy interests to support Ukraine.
That said, reasonable people disagree on whether Russia’s invasion three years ago was unprovoked or triggered by NATO’s eastward creep. To Westerners, NATO enlargement was a natural adjustment to the realities of post-Cold War Europe and the historical antipathy of eastern Europeans to Russia. To Russia, it was a threat to core security interests. All Russian leaders from Mikhail Gorbachev to Putin believed that Russia had consented to the peaceful terms of the ending of the Cold War on two core understandings: NATO would not expand its borders eastwards, and Russia would be incorporated into an inclusive pan-European security architecture. Americans tend to get lawyerly in response, that the informal understandings were never put in writing.
To a disinterested outsider, Russia’s hostility to NATO missiles in Ukraine bears striking parallels to the US willingness to risk nuclear war in 1962 because of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Any independent-thinking analyst should be able to grasp a direct hypothetical analogy involving China meddling in Canada or Mexico and the guaranteed robust US reaction.
The claim that the war is unwinnable is grounded in reality. Once war started, based on demographic, economic, and military power imbalances between Kyiv and Moscow, an outright Ukrainian victory on its own was a chimera. With active NATO involvement, it might have been possible, but only at the very high risk of a nuclear war that would destroy the world. Putin expected a quick victory, but Ukrainian bravery and determination under Zelensky’s courageous leadership put paid to that.
However, over time, the cost to Ukraine has been staggeringly high and would only mount if the war were to be prolonged. Hegseth’s blunt message in Brussels was that any expectations that Ukraine can return to its pre-2014 borders or join NATO are ‘unrealistic:’ impossible today, implausible tomorrow, unlikely the day after. This isn’t new policy, merely a public affirmation of the reality that the perfect has become the enemy of the good in NATO’s Ukraine policy.
Second, Trump called Zelensky a dictator. US human rights lawyer Bob Amsterdam told Tucker Carlson that this ‘is an understatement.’ Ukraine is effectively ‘a police state.’ One month into the war, Zelensky suspended 11 opposition parties and nationalised several media outlets. He cancelled elections that were due last May. A 2023 State Department report on Ukraine noted ‘significant human rights issues:’ enforced disappearances, torture, judicial interference, assaults on journalists. Some of the campaign against critical media was funded by USAID. Zelensky’s poll ratings have plummeted from 90 percent in May 2022 to 16 percent last December. A Gallup poll in November found that, for the first time since the war began, Ukrainians supported, by a 52-38 margin, an early negotiated end to the war over continued fighting until victory.
Third, Trump said half the US money sent to Ukraine is missing. Vast sums of US billions given to Ukraine have indeed gone MIA. In Transparency International’s 2021 corruption index, Ukraine was ranked Europe’s most corrupt country. The 2021 Pandora Papers exposé of global corruption showed Zelensky’s close circle were the beneficiaries of a network of offshore companies, including some with expensive London property holdings. Oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, a key supporter of Zelensky’s 2019 campaign, was put under sanctions by the US State Department in 2021 for ‘significant corruption.’ In December 2023, a defence official was arrested for embezzling $40 million in a fraudulent purchase of artillery shells. The next month, Defence Minister Rustem Umerov revealed corruption in military procurement worth $262 million just four months into his job.
Fourth, Trump said the war cannot be ended without the US. Successive US presidents have demanded burden-sharing by NATO partners but have been ignored. A BBC breakdown of military aid to Ukraine from January 2022 to December 2024 inclusive shows that the US gave $69 billion worth and the rest of NATO combined – with a greater population and GDP than the US – $57 billion. A follow-up story noted that an analysis by the Kiel Institute looked at the total of military, financial, and humanitarian aid and concluded that Europe had provided more than the US, $139 and $120 billion respectively. But Trump is correct in the claim that the US gives considerably more than the Europeans in the form of outright grants.
With no discernible strategy for either victory or peace, NATO, including Biden’s US, gave enough support to Ukraine to keep fighting but not to win. It has ended up with the worst of all outcomes: hundreds of thousands of casualties, a generation of young men wiped out, economy wrecked, infrastructure gutted, and a likely worse land-for-peace deal than could have been negotiated before or in the early days of the war without the accompanying costs.
Hard military facts on the ground will determine the cartographic maps that delineate Ukraine’s new borders. That would still leave open other big questions: the status of Crimea and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine; Ukraine’s relations with Russia, NATO, and the EU; the identity of guarantors and nature of security guarantees for Ukraine; the timing of Russia’s exit from sanctions. None of this can happen without Russia and the US.
Europe’s military underspending is ‘an implied tax on the American people to allow for the security of Europe,’ then-Senator Vance wrote in the Financial Times a year ago. Trump and his cabinet colleagues have called time on American taxpayers subsidising Europe’s bloated welfare state.
The astonishing Trump-Zelensky public spat in the White House on the 28th and the roll call of European leaders lining up in support of Zelensky demonstrates the reality of donor dependency. Europeans must believe they are entitled to a US security subsidy in perpetuity while they indulge their luxury beliefs.
If the effete Europeans had taken ownership of Western support for Ukraine in a conflict at the geopolitical heart of Europe and involving their collective future, they would be in the driver’s seat in peace talks. They didn’t and they’re not. If Europeans and Zelensky reject Trump’s deal without tabling a realistic alternative, Trump can wash his hands of any further involvement and Putin can resume the war. How will this work out for Ukraine and Europe?
What of the 1938 Munich pact analogy? During the Cold War, geopolitical and economic relativities meant that ‘Globocop’ US picked up the tab for Soviet containment. It’s strategic common sense for Trump to end the war on the best terms available and shed the burden of Ukraine to Europe.
The geopolitical landscape has shifted. Trump is realigning US policy to the new contours. Allies and adversaries alike should get used to it. If there’s a hungry bear prowling in the woods beyond Europe’s backyard, it’s time for Europe to lock and load.
In speaking truth to smug complacency at the Munich Security Conference, Vance’s core thesis was that the growing divide on free speech was undermining the shared democratic values as the foundation of the US–Europe security relationship. Just as important, exiting the net zero death cult, ending the gender fluidity fantasy, abandoning DEI and antiracism insanity, severely curbing mass immigration, and reclaiming pride in the accomplishments and achievements of Western civilisation and culture, would do more to end European deindustrialisation and impoverishment, attenuate social divisions, restore cultural cohesion, and rebuild national self-confidence, resolve, and the foundations of military power than whining about Trump putting US interests ahead of European ones.
The abandonment of Israel by Western governments, including Australia, piling pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make concessions instead of backing Israel to eradicate the evil that is Hamas, has been a more unforgivable betrayal of Western values and interests.
The US has become an overstretched superpower no longer able to police all regions of the world. Unless someone can offer a convincing case to a rightly sceptical American and global audience that Uncle Sam can continue to deal with all threats simultaneously, it makes strategic sense for Trump to try and offload the burden of addressing Ukraine to Europe, or else to end the war on the best terms available and escape the trap of the sunk cost fallacy.
For Australian interests, prioritising China is the great imperative. The Ukraine war pushed Russia into a de facto ‘no limits’ alliance with China, reversing the singular achievement of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger more than fifty years ago. The Wall Street Journal reported on 21 February that one major calculation behind Trump’s embrace of Putin is ‘a strategic desire to drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing,’ both of which have long been trying to curb US dominance of the international order.
Elbridge Colby, nominee for undersecretary of defence for policy, tweeted on 16 December that the US ‘needs to face the fact that we can’t do everything in the world. And that we are way behind on the primary issue facing the country from a geopolitical perspective, which is China dominating Asia, and we are not gaining in Asia by spending in Ukraine.’ Would any Australian disagree?
Zelensky and NATO leaders are rattled. The trans-Atlantic alliance is at risk of rupture. Russia’s isolation is at an end. Minds should turn to how best to boost Ukraine’s deterrent capabilities and address the underlying causes of the conflict so that external security guarantees lose salience. That requires a new European security architecture in which Russian and US participation are prerequisites. Unpalatable but unavoidable.
To return to Trump, recall the apocryphal story of Churchill saying, ‘You can always rely on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.’ In point of fact this seems to be a variation of a remark by former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, which itself had different formulations but the gist remained the same; his ‘conviction that men and nations do behave wisely when they have exhausted all other possibilities.’ For three years, Zelensky and NATO have done everything to resist and repel the Russians from Ukraine, but in the process, they have ceded yet more territory. Trump, who in his first term famously became the first president in office in recent memory not to begin a new war, is trying to put a halt to the meat grinder of a war.
Similarly, it is easy enough to denounce Trump’s coerced minerals deal as an example of bullyboy neocolonialism. Yet, half the revenues from developing the mineral resources will be paid into a jointly owned fund that will invest in the country’s ‘safety, security and prosperity.’ This does give the US a material stake in a peaceful future with secure borders for Ukraine. As always, only history itself can answer whether Trump ends up on the right or wrong side of history.
Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University. This article was sourced HERE
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