Donald Trump Is No Longer Hiding His Preference for Putin
Published in El País
(Uruguay) on 20 February 2025
by Claudio Fantini (link to original)
(Uruguay) on 20 February 2025
by Claudio Fantini (link to original)
Translated from
by Tom Walker.
Edited by Patricia Simoni.
The sun is setting on a historic alliance. The U.S. president is telling Europe that it will no longer be the main political, economic and military ally of the United States.
Donald Trump has started to redesign the geopolitics of the American power with a vision closer to that of Vladimir Putin than to that of the European Union. And the way it was communicated to Brussels was bad. But even worse was the way Volodymyr Zelenskyy was told. Bizarrely, the White House chief belittled the Ukrainian president, describing him as a leader without popular support and accusing him of having started the war with Russia.
If he had not pushed the world into the realm of the absurd, Trump’s destruction of the historic alliance of northwestern European powers would be considered a betrayal of the “free world.” The invasion of Ukraine made it clear that it wasn’t just the Soviet Union that had threatened Western democracy. Putin’s authoritarian and expansionist Russia is also a threat.
It was clearly a serious geostrategic mistake that the U.S. did not move closer to Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union and Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. But whatever we should have done and failed to do with those leaders we cannot do today with an autocrat who assassinates his opponents and critics as he attacks neighboring countries including Georgia and starts a criminal war by invading Ukraine.
Trump is conceding to Russia the right to rule and call the shots in the Slavic region. The U.S. attacked and brought down Slobodan Milošević in 1999 to defend the Albanians from ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, four years after it attacked and defeated the Bosnian Serb militias of Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić in defense of Muslims who were being driven out of Bosnia Herzegovina. But today the U.S. acknowledges that Russia rules the Slavic world.
From the same geopolitical viewpoint, the Russian regime recognizes Washington’s right to rule the region from the Central American isthmus to the Canadian arctic, including Greenland.
If we extend that reasoning to China —in addition to leaving the Uyghurs of Xinjiang province unprotected — Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia and Japan will feel abandoned.
The ultranationalist Narendra Modi and the extremist wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party have the same ambition in the region around India, to the alarm of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.
Trump began negotiations with Russia by giving it occupied territory and closing the door to NATO for Kyiv. Trump said it himself by announcing that he and the Russian leader “agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately.“ The Kremlin will agree to make certain withdrawals in exchange for the return of the Russian region of Kursk. Putin will have to drop his original objective when he launched the invasion: total occupation of Ukraine and complete annexation or annexation of the eastern half and installation of a puppet government in Kyiv that would convert western Ukraine into a satellite state of Moscow. Strictly speaking, Russia abandoned when the invasion began and Ukrainian defenses repelled the Russian advance on Kyiv. What is certain is that when the negotiations with Trump are done, the map of Russia will have grown, and the map of Ukraine will have shrunk.
Europe remembers that when British and French leaders Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier negotiated with Hitler in 1938. By signing the Munich Agreement and surrendering Czech territory, they made the Führer the winner, and emboldened him to pursue his expansionist war.
Moldova will be for the Kremlin what Poland was for the Nazis: the next country to invade. The Russian-speaking, pro-Russian Moldavians of Transnistria will play the role that the Russian-speaking, pro-Russian Ukrainians of Donbas play.
From Kaliningrad, Russia could next attack the Baltic countries. They would get little help from a NATO without the U.S. — or from the U.S., when Putin’s main ally in the West is someone he can manipulate.
Donald Trump has started to redesign the geopolitics of the American power with a vision closer to that of Vladimir Putin than to that of the European Union. And the way it was communicated to Brussels was bad. But even worse was the way Volodymyr Zelenskyy was told. Bizarrely, the White House chief belittled the Ukrainian president, describing him as a leader without popular support and accusing him of having started the war with Russia.
If he had not pushed the world into the realm of the absurd, Trump’s destruction of the historic alliance of northwestern European powers would be considered a betrayal of the “free world.” The invasion of Ukraine made it clear that it wasn’t just the Soviet Union that had threatened Western democracy. Putin’s authoritarian and expansionist Russia is also a threat.
It was clearly a serious geostrategic mistake that the U.S. did not move closer to Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union and Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. But whatever we should have done and failed to do with those leaders we cannot do today with an autocrat who assassinates his opponents and critics as he attacks neighboring countries including Georgia and starts a criminal war by invading Ukraine.
Trump is conceding to Russia the right to rule and call the shots in the Slavic region. The U.S. attacked and brought down Slobodan Milošević in 1999 to defend the Albanians from ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, four years after it attacked and defeated the Bosnian Serb militias of Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić in defense of Muslims who were being driven out of Bosnia Herzegovina. But today the U.S. acknowledges that Russia rules the Slavic world.
From the same geopolitical viewpoint, the Russian regime recognizes Washington’s right to rule the region from the Central American isthmus to the Canadian arctic, including Greenland.
If we extend that reasoning to China —in addition to leaving the Uyghurs of Xinjiang province unprotected — Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia and Japan will feel abandoned.
The ultranationalist Narendra Modi and the extremist wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party have the same ambition in the region around India, to the alarm of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.
Trump began negotiations with Russia by giving it occupied territory and closing the door to NATO for Kyiv. Trump said it himself by announcing that he and the Russian leader “agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately.“ The Kremlin will agree to make certain withdrawals in exchange for the return of the Russian region of Kursk. Putin will have to drop his original objective when he launched the invasion: total occupation of Ukraine and complete annexation or annexation of the eastern half and installation of a puppet government in Kyiv that would convert western Ukraine into a satellite state of Moscow. Strictly speaking, Russia abandoned when the invasion began and Ukrainian defenses repelled the Russian advance on Kyiv. What is certain is that when the negotiations with Trump are done, the map of Russia will have grown, and the map of Ukraine will have shrunk.
Europe remembers that when British and French leaders Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier negotiated with Hitler in 1938. By signing the Munich Agreement and surrendering Czech territory, they made the Führer the winner, and emboldened him to pursue his expansionist war.
Moldova will be for the Kremlin what Poland was for the Nazis: the next country to invade. The Russian-speaking, pro-Russian Moldavians of Transnistria will play the role that the Russian-speaking, pro-Russian Ukrainians of Donbas play.
From Kaliningrad, Russia could next attack the Baltic countries. They would get little help from a NATO without the U.S. — or from the U.S., when Putin’s main ally in the West is someone he can manipulate.
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