Trumpism, NATO and the Ukraine war (original)

“Two years ago, General Mark A. Milley, then President Biden’s chief military adviser, suggested that neither Russia nor Ukraine could win the war. A negotiated solution, he argued, was the only path to peace. His comments caused a furor among senior officials. But President-elect Donald J. Trump’s victory is making General Milley’s prediction come true,” wrote The New York Times in an article published last week, part of a growing line of arguments by those who fear that the arrival of the new Republican administration will mean leaving Ukraine to its own devices. These articles, present in all major American and European media, take literally Trump’s desire to end the war and his lack of interest in the situation in Ukraine. This has also been helped by the words of JD Vance, who, from his ignorance of the conflict, has proposed a plan that can only satisfy Russia, or the exalted response of Donald Trump Jr. after the confirmation of the American permission to use Western missiles against targets on the territory of mainland Russia. Sometimes, think-tankers and experts also add Trump’s disdain for NATO or his desire not to rescue member countries that do not meet the minimum investment required by the Alliance in the event of a Russian attack.

As now, those who wanted to oppose Donald Trump analyzed his rhetoric from the literal use of his words. The logic of this view was to argue that Trump wanted to dismantle NATO, even though it was clear that his goal was simply to get European countries to increase their defense spending far beyond what they wanted. In other words, the American president did not want Germany or other European countries to be invaded by Russian troops, but to foot the bill for NATO, by increasing military spending and breaking with the tacit post-World War II agreement that European countries could finance their welfare state by leaving the security issue in the hands of the United States. That is the real break that Trump made, not that of NATO.

During Trump’s first term, the president and the entire movement surrounding him, Trumpism, were also repeatedly called isolationist. This is something that is once again insisted upon by appealing to campaign slogans, Make America Great Again or the current America First , taken from the main isolationist organization and which, with Charles Lindbergh as spokesman, fought, sometimes with pro-Nazi positions, against the participation of the United States in World War II. This position forgets Trump’s interventionist policy in Latin America – with the recognition of the interim president of Venezuela Juan Guaidó – or in the Middle East, where the United States bombed Syria, Yemen and continued its presence in Iraq and its unconditional support for Israel. In reality, the only planned withdrawal, which was not executed, since it was Joe Biden who carried it out, was that of Afghanistan with the start of the Doha negotiations with Taliban representatives.

The manifest lack of interest in the war in Ukraine and the expressed desire not to initiate new military interventions have been enough to once again label Trump’s approach as isolationism. These arguments ignore the positions shown by those who will lead Trump’s team, with Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz at the head. Neocon , hawk against China and Iran, with nothing positive to say about Russia and with the desire to destroy every progressive government in Latin America, no one in their right mind should mistake Rubio for an isolationist. Nor is Waltz, who on the eve of the elections proposed draconian sanctions against Russia and “removing the handcuffs on the use of long-range missiles” in Ukraine, a man who seeks to distance the United States from the rest of the world.

In The Strategy of Denial , Elbridge Colby, one of Trump’s foreign policy entourage who was involved in drafting the 2018 National Defense Strategy, details the point of view from which Trumpism operates and which tends to be mistakenly confused with isolationism. The basic concept is the denial of hegemony, that is, the maintenance of American hegemony by preventing countries that oppose the United States from creating their own hegemonic blocs in key regions of the planet. Preventing countries such as China, Russia, Germany or Iran from creating alliances capable of politically, economically or militarily surpassing the United States is the way to avoid the need for a US military intervention. However, the idea assumes constant US involvement in key points: Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East, with Latin America and Africa as not even secondary scenarios.

Colby’s ideas, like those of the rest of Trumpism, are focused on China and on preventing a rise that would endanger American hegemony in Asia and, by extension, in the entire world. In this scenario, Europe is a secondary theatre in which the correlation of forces means that there already exists a bloc capable of preventing an opponent of the United States, primarily Russia, but also Germany, from forming a counter-hegemonic bloc. Colby is explicit in arguing that this bloc, NATO, is not only excessively large for needs, but has also extended to include allies that are difficult to defend and who, therefore, are a burden. It is there, and not in a non-existent desire to favour Russia, where the interests of Trumpism are parallel to those of Moscow, although their arguments are different. For Russia, NATO is not an obstacle to its hegemony in Europe, but a danger to its security, while for the United States, the need to maintain a presence in countries it considers redundant (the Baltic countries stand out in particular, and the admission of Ukraine is not even being considered) represents an economic burden that it would like to get rid of. However, as with the war in Ukraine, this should not be understood as a desire to isolate itself, but rather to force European countries to increase their contribution to reduce the economic cost for Washington. Even so, fear of the literal meaning of Trump’s words, not of their real meaning, is already causing the US president-elect to obtain, even before taking office, what he has been seeking for some time: that European countries unite to increase the weight of their contributions to paying for a war in which the economic benefit of increased tension and sales of military equipment fundamentally favour Washington, the world’s leading military power.

The war, which has been escalating ever since negotiations broke down in the spring of 2022, awaits Trump’s arrival at its most uncertain moment. However, it is not Trump’s arrival that has made Milley’s prediction come true. His argument about how this war would end through negotiations and not with a complete military victory is not the omen of a visionary, the wish of a hopeful isolationist or an internationalist fearing the worst, but the analysis of reality. The first months showed that this war was not going to end with the blue and yellow flag over Sevastopol or the Russian tricolor over Kiev. In the absence of a complete victory, a military conflict can only end through negotiation. As a comprehensive article in Foreign Policy showed months ago , in 2022, reluctant to reintegrate Russia into international relations, they chose not to favor dialogue. With Ukraine willing to sacrifice itself for the common goal, the war took the path from which it has not deviated until now.

The change of attitude that Trump’s victory has brought about among a part of the population, even in Ukraine and among the community of experts, is not a result of an adaptation to the fait accompli of the coming to power of someone who wants to abandon Kiev, but of the fact that the war cannot be won. Last week, an article published by the opinion section of The New York Times assumed that the negotiations would mean the loss of territories and the withdrawal from NATO for Ukraine, rewarding Putin’s aggressionand allowing a country that he called democratic to fall. “Mr. Trump should do the same,” the article continued.

This realism on the part of one side, which is growing although not yet the majority on the media scene, contrasts with the recent moves by the Biden administration, which is focused on doing everything possible to defend Ukraine, even if that means raising the danger of the war expanding one step further or moving to levels where the Russian reaction already involves testing medium-range missiles, there is talk of long-range ballistic missiles with nuclear capacity and the Kremlin feels it is necessary to resort to nuclear risk reduction channels to warn the White House that it is not carrying out a nuclear attack.

Last week, one of the most important people in the Republican transition team, Robert Wilkie, in charge of defense policy, denied in a BBC podcast that Donald Trump’s first term in office was isolationist. Exaggerating the danger to the United States and the effect of Washington’s actions, Wilkie stressed that “when Russia got too close” to Ukraine, “Trump bankrupted its economy,” and “when Iran got too close to Iraq,” the United States “had Suleimani killed.” Isolationist or not, the threat of intervention is always on the table in the White House. According to Wilkie, Trump will contact Putin “to tell him to stop” and Zelensky to “tell him that negotiations are needed.” Meanwhile, Biden’s team is working to provide Ukraine with as many military supplies as possible and the European Union is seeking to increase its assistance to allow Kiev to continue fighting until it reaches a position of strength, the only moment when the red line of diplomacy can be crossed. The Biden and Trump teams seem to agree on this, and they do not want to strengthen a country that they also see as a potential opponent. There is still a long way to go before any kind of negotiation begins, and there is no certainty that any success will be achieved. Until then, a period of uncertainty and potential chaos has already begun, in which the dangers go beyond the slow movement of the front.