RIGHT ANGLE – The Realist Trump Against Europe’s Ideological Battle Against Putin

If Europe seems to still be defying the U.S. President Donald Trump’s path towards a ceasefire in Ukraine, it could be due to reasons that are more ideological than realistic.

In fact, more and more voices are now coming to suggest that the support to Ukraine from the West has been based on the premise that more than defending or protecting Ukraine, the war should lead not only to the downfall of Russian President Valdmir Putin but also the disintegration of Russia, leading to “the total victory of democracy over authoritarianism”.

The predominant view of the Western elites is that the end of the Cold War heralded the supremacy of what is said to be liberal international order in which “liberal democracy must prevail”.

Viewing the war in Ukraine in ideological terms, this premise is shared widely and strongly among the western elites and leaders. Trump’s victory last year may have silenced these elites in America for now, but their counterparts in Europe continue to be strong and are in control of almost all the governments.

Obviously, they seem to be disappointed with Trump as the U.S. President, who is quintessentially a “realist” in international affairs, believing in “balance of power” among the major nations to promote national interest.

During his first term as President, Trump proved that he was truly unique among modern U.S. leaders. Unlike any President before him in the post-1945 era, he was skeptical of treaties and alliances, preferring competition to cooperation. He defined the national interest to exclude things such as the spread of liberal values and military or humanitarian interventions. He did not view the United States as a divine intervener for the mistreated abroad. Instead, he shifted Washington’s focus to great-power competition and to regaining the United States’ global power advantages.

For Trump, “national interest” is everything and while pursuing this, there is not much space for “normative goods” like the spread of liberal values and military or humanitarian interventions. He does not not view the United States as a divine intervener for the mistreated abroad. His main focus is regaining the United States’ global power advantages by pursuing “ power politics”.

He is, in other words, a true realist: someone who avoids idealistic and ideological views of global affairs in favor of power politics.

As Andrew Byers, Nonresident Fellow at Texas A&M University’s Albritton Center for Grand Strategy and Randall L. Schweller, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Program for the Study of Realist Foreign Policy at Ohio State University, argue, Trump is for avoiding the use of U.S. military force. This is not because he is more of a humanitarian than his predecessors but because he views world politics more in geoeconomic terms than geostrategic ones, and so he tries to conduct conflict via economic rather than military means. “I want to invade, if I have to, economically,” Trump said in 2019, when talking about Iran and its nuclear program. “We have tremendous power economically. If I can solve things economically, that’s the way I want it.”

For Byers and Schweller, Trump’s “America first” agenda is “an intellectually defensible, fundamentally realist program that seeks to ascertain and act on the United States’ national interests rather than the interests of others. It is born of an inescapable premise: the United States no longer has the power it once did and is spreading itself too thin. It needs to sort its essential national interests from desirable ones. It must devolve more responsibility to its wealthy allies. It must stop trying to be everywhere and do everything”.

However, this is something the European elites are not prepared to reconcile with. As John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, has explained, they remain deeply committed to what is said to be their “triple package of policies” — NATO enlargement, EU expansion, and democracy promotion. For them, Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate “the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.”

In fact, as Eldar Mamedov, a Brussels-based foreign policy expert has recently pointed out, ever since the eruption of the crisis in Ukraine( even before the Russian invasion), there has been “McCarthyism, European style” to crackdown any dissenting voice the Ukrainian situation . Those who differ with these elites on Ukraine, have been smeared and delegitimized as Kremlin mouthpieces, and subjected to harassment, marginalization and ostracism.

Unlike their counterparts in the United States, ruling elites in the countries that have joined NATO in the last few years have systematically suppressed any reasoned debates and discussions on joining the military alliance in their respective countries.

In the narratives of these European elites, there cannot be any scope for any reconciliation with Putin and Russia until their eventual and total subjugation to the international order as determined by them. And that is the reason why they are said to have more or less brainwashed / pressurized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to remain uncompromising and rigid on any talks on peace or ceasefire agreement with Russia.

It may be noted here that when in March 2022, both Ukraine and Russia were close to a deal , it was the European leaders who convinced Zelensky to backtrack with the assurances and narratives that a military “ victory” over Russia was imminent with their support.

Reportedly, this deal talked of Russia withdrawing to its position on February 23 2022 (the day it invaded Ukraine) , when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”

In retrospect, had this deal fructified, it would have been much better than the situation that Ukraine is in at present. Ukraine has lost more territories to Russia and is farther away from achieving anything remotely resembling a military victory than at any point since February 2022.

Reportedly, it is the then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson who sabotaged the 2022-deal. He visited Ukraine and urged Zelensky to break off talks with Russia for two key reasons: Putin cannot be negotiated with, and the West isn’t ready for the war to end.

Johnson’s role in undermining the talks is now generally acknowledged. In fact, none other than Johnson himself admitted recently that he saw the war in Ukraine as “a proxy war” against Russia.

But then Johnson, all said and done, represented the narrative of the dominant western elites in general. Its principal theme is that most of Europe, including Ukraine and many parts of Russia , must be “westernized” (Europeanized) and part of the western liberal order. In fact, long before the Ukraine war this policy was pursued systematically.

It began, as pundits are now acknowledging, at least in the United States, in the beginning of this century with eastward expansion of the European Union and NATO and then sponsoring of pro-democracy movements in the form of the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004 in Ukraine.

Viewed thus, realist scholars say that Putin or for that matter any proud Russian leader in his place would have stuck to the traditional balance of power theory that describes a state of equilibrium between nations so that any one state or group of states does not gain too much power and become a threat to others. And it is understandable why Russia sees Ukraine as a bulwark against NATO and Kyiv’s possible membership in the Alliance as a “redline.”

Keeping Ukraine out of NATO and preventing its total “Europeanization” is a “matter of life and death” for the Kremlin.

Perhaps, Trump, the realist, realizes this well. That is why he is urging negotiations to end the war through a modus vivendi between the West and Russia. He seems to believe in the principle of coexistence by abandoning the liberal-Western plan to Europeanize Ukraine and make it a member of NATO.