In the Putin-Trump era only the strong can be free

As America’s 47th president moves into the Oval Office, Europe needs a long-term approach to shoring up its defences against Russian aggression. In the short term, the options remain worryingly limited. Europe’s security will depend on a US president who views foreign territories as real estate that can be bought, traded and sold on. 

In Ukraine, Donald Trump says he wants ‘peace through strength’, a phrase that Volodymyr Zelensky and other European leaders are clinging to. What Trump means by those words, however, remains ominously uncertain.  

Zelensky hopes they mean an initial surge of support that will level the military playing field with Moscow. For Russia to agree to a durable peace, grounded in solid security guarantees, Putin must first feel there is a possibility of defeat. Moscow will have to be incentivized to make concessions. Only then will a lasting deal be feasible, with terms that underpin Ukraine’s sovereignty with hard military assurances from the West, for example in the form of NATO membership. 

But for Trump such a surge has major downsides. Sure, he can forward the bill for more military aid on to the Europeans. However, the real estate tycoon has staked his reputation on ending the fighting within the first 100 days (although, more recently, this has become six months) of his presidency. Escalating the war, even with the goal of de-escalation later, smacks of America’s forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and of failure. More importantly, Trump revels in face-to-face dealmaking with the likes of Vladimir Putin. Postponing such summitry will be loathsome to him. It is his best shot at winning the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Shooting for a ‘quick fix’, as opposed to ironclad but difficult-to-achieve guarantees against future Russian incursions, seems perfectly in line with Trump’s philosophy regarding the world order. While Zelensky insists on the inviolability of state sovereignty, this is hardly a position shared by the Trump White House. As we know from his infamous press conference at Mar-a-Lago on 7 January, for Trump Ukraine is to Russia what Greenland and Panama – or indeed Canada and Mexico – are to the US. Geographically situated within the close security perimeter of the US, these are not fully sovereign states. 

With his comments Trump has effectively reinstated the nineteenth-century Monroe doctrine, through which the US – a rising power on a continent where, from Mexico to Brazil, the European colonizers had just been kicked out – decreed that the Americas belonged to Washington’s privileged sphere of influence. According to Trump, US security interests in the Western Hemisphere are so pervasive that the sovereignty of other states can be constrained and, in the extreme case, terminated by absorption into the United States itself. As he remarked about Greenland: ‘People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do they should give it up because we need it for national security.’ So much, then, for the sanctity of state sovereignty.  

Encouragingly for Putin, this legitimates other great powers interfering in their ‘near abroad’.  Trump himself drove home the point at the same press conference. NATO membership for Ukraine would mean that ‘Russia has somebody right on their doorstep, and I could understand their feelings about that.’ Since the end of the Second World War and the foundation of the UN, ‘spheres of influence’ have been taboo in international affairs. But Trump’s imperialist presidency intends to bring down the curtain on this era in world politics. Forcibly changing borders, annexing countries, interfering in the affairs of neighbours, all these things are once again viewed and openly talked about by the POTUS as legitimate instruments for great powers to use in securing national interests.  

For Trump, a peace deal that grants Russia not just de facto new territories in Crimea and the Donbas but also influence over how Ukraine governs itself in the future is not a major concession to a revisionist and law-breaking Russia. To him, it is merely an affirmation of the new norm in international politics, according to which the big can prey on the small, and rights and rules count for nothing. Some reassurances, it is true, must be provided to Kyiv – or there may be no peace. But suffering from a shortage of frontline troops, Ukraine’s leverage over Russia is decreasing. As things stand on the battlefield, Trump’s options are to get a deal that ends the war but leaves Ukraine within the Kremlin’s sphere of influence, or to get no deal at all. 

Should Trump choose the former, is there anything Europe could do independently to further secure Ukraine’s sovereignty? The options, sadly, seem extremely limited. Proposals to despatch a European joint military force to Ukraine with the aim of guarding the peace remain underdeveloped. They also seem beyond the bounds of political reality. No European state would (quite rightly, by the way) want to risk a direct war with Russia without US involvement or at the very least an American security backstop. And the US evidently has no appetite for such a role. European boots on the ground would undoubtedly raise a red flag for Putin and therefore be incompatible with a peace deal. 

Europe could speed up the EU accession process, but with Ukraine left open to Russian extortion, influence and military incursion, this would come at huge risk to the EU itself and its institutional and territorial integrity. The deterrent effect of EU membership, moreover, remains weak. The Union does not dispose of the means or command structure to back up its defence solidarity clause (Art. 42(7) TEU, the pendant of Article 5 NATO) vis-à-vis a power like Russia.  

Another possible path is for Europe to offer massive financial support to Ukraine, enabling it to establish an effective deterrent itself. But this, too, depends on Trump’s talks with Putin, for whom Ukraine’s demilitarization is a crucial goal. The Kremlin has long complained about the West flooding Ukraine with weapons, even before the war. In spring 2022, in an early peace offering, Moscow demanded Ukraine’s military be slashed to 50,000 personnel. If Trump gives in to such demands, European funding, even if available, offers no respite.  

The fact is that, entirely in line with Trump’s big-eat-small philosophy, in matters of war and peace it is the strong who decide the future. If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu, as the familiar saying goes. 

Two things are necessary. In the short term, Europe’s leaders must keep their counsel and seek to persuade Trump to strike the best deal possible with Putin. They will need to woo him with gifts, flattery and other things he values. Much like America’s tech CEOs, they will need to go to Mar-a-Lago as supplicants.  

Looking at the longer term, however, Europe must now learn the lesson it should have learnt eight years ago, when Trump first entered the White House. It must redouble its efforts to build and grow its own military and industrial power, including by overcoming its own internal divisions. US patronage, in many ways the key to Europe’s post-war success, has become an untenable, unpredictable and toxic substitute for strategic autonomy. Europeans love their individual freedoms, but those cannot exist without the freedom of the state itself. And in the new world order Trump and Putin are creating, only strong states can be free.