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On Sunday, newly elected President Donald Trump, commenting on the demise of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, investigated Russian President Vladimir Putinan ardent supporter of Assad, to whom Putin granted political asylum in Russia.
“There was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Trump pointed to the fact that “600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead, in a war that should never have started and could go on forever.” Trump said Russia is currently in a “weakened state” because of “Ukraine and a bad economy.”
This swipe at Putin will likely be a prelude to Trump’s Russia policy during his second term. If you thought Trump and Putin were friends, don’t be fooled. There will almost certainly be no rapprochement between Moscow and Washington under Trump’s watch. This is why.
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Then-President Trump, right, shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 on June 28, 2019. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
Whether or not President-elect Trump succeeds in resolving the nearly three-year-old, devastating conflict between Russia and Ukraine as promised, and despite his negotiating talents, it is highly unlikely that the incoming Commander in Chief will resolve the fundamental, irreconcilable differences between Moscow and Washington will erase. . Ukraine, where Russia and the United States are currently engaged in a proxy war, is just one example of Russian national interests clashing directly with America’s long-term bipartisan foreign policy.
Moscow and Washington both want Ukraine within their sphere of influence. Russia considers Ukraine part of its strategic security perimeter and therefore outside US geopolitical control. To enforce Russia’s version of the Monroe Doctrine, Putin is waging a brutal war against Ukraine. His goal is to Keep Ukraine out of NATOAccording to Moscow, it is a hostile military alliance. Likewise, Russia considers other former Soviet states, such as Georgia and Moldova, as part of its vital interests.
Former President Donald Trump, right, meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Trump Tower on Friday, September 27, 2024 in New York City. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
US policy in Eurasia is almost a century old and is very unlikely to change in the near future. This policy was guided by the so-called ‘defend forward’ logic, conceptualized by the Dutch-American geostrategist John Spykman in the 1930s. A balance of power realist, Spykman convinced the U.S. national security establishment that to increase its chances of survival, America should become involved in Eurasian affairs. This strategy called for the establishment of American strategic alliances and military bases in Eurasia, to prevent a rising rival power that could threaten America.
Spykman’s doctrine was rooted in British geographer Halford Mackinder’s 1904 thesis that whoever controls Eurasia – which he called the World Island – controls the world. Mackinder believed that Eurasia is destined to play a dominant role in world politics because of its vast natural resources and central location on the globe.
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Russian soldiers take a group photo near an American M2 Bradley fighting vehicle captured by Russian forces in Ukraine on November 3, 2024 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. (Photo by Artem Priakhin/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Former President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, summarized this policy in his 1997 book, “The Grand Chess Board: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives.” Echoing Mackinder and Spykman, Brzezinski wrote that the US “must ensure that no state… gains the capacity to push the United States out of Eurasia or even significantly reduce its decisive arbitrating role.”
The Russians took Brzezinski’s strategic guidance – ‘who controls Eurasia, controls the world’ – seriously. They concluded that Washington was seeking the containment and territorial fragmentation of Russia. A major Russian think tank summarized its views on US-Russian policy as follows. “The United States will seek to weaken and dismember the rest of the world, especially the great Eurasia. This strategy is being pursued by the White House regardless of whether it is occupied by the conservative or liberal administration and whether or not there is a consensus among elites.”
The deep-seated distrust between Russia and the US dates back to Soviet times. It is very unlikely that Trump will overcome this. The core of this distrust is the expansion of NATO.
Moscow and Washington have starkly different interpretations of what was promised to Russia when US Secretary of State James Baker met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, as part of negotiations for the peaceful reunification of Germany. The Russians took Baker’s famous assurance of “not an inch east” as a pledge not to admit former Soviet states into the Alliance, a claim that US and NATO leaders deny, and some call it a “myth.”
A soldier from the 24th Mechanized Brigade, named after King Danylo of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, fires a 2s5 “Hyacinth-s” self-propelled howitzer at Russian troops in a front line amid the Russian attack on Ukraine, near the town of Khasiv Yar in Donetsk region of Ukraine on November 18, 2024. (Oleg Petrasiuk/Press Service of the 24th King Danylo Separate Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces/Handout via REUTERS)
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO admitted the Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania – which were formerly part of the Soviet Union, and added a number of former Soviet bloc countries such as the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. to the alliance. A total of thirteen Eastern European states have become members of NATO since 1997. This resulted in the reduction of the Russian buffer zone from 1,000 miles during the Soviet Union to 160 miles. Moscow felt cheated and accused the US and NATO of violating their promises. Putin made it his lifelong mission to restore the lost buffer against NATO.
Thirty declassified American, Soviet, German, British and French documents, consisting of written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels, reveal that Gorbachev did indeed receive what he perceived as NATO’s promises not to erode Russia’s security. For example, the U.S. Embassy in Bonn informed Washington that German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher had made it clear “that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process” would not lead to “an attack on the security interests of the Soviet Union”.
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The same cable contained language indicating that NATO should undertake an “expansion of its territory to the East, that is, closer to the Soviet borders.” However, the phrase “brought to faith” appears to be the main verbiage used in these documents, which has contributed to the difference in interpretations. The phrase reflects the informal nature of guarantees rather than legal guarantees.
That is why, as part of the peace settlement that Trump is trying to broker between Russia and Ukraine, Putin will almost certainly accept nothing other than formal legal guarantees from NATO that exclude Ukraine’s membership.
Putin does not trust Trump, despite the apparently positive relationship between the two. Trump doesn’t trust Putin either. During his first term, Trump took several actions aimed at undermining Russia’s military strategy and economy. Trump approved the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, created the US Space Force, ordered the development of a nuclear-armed, low-yield sea-launched cruise missile and authorized an operation that killed 300 people. Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group in Syria. In 2017, Putin summarized his realpolitik relationship with Trump. He “is not my bride. And I am not his bride, nor his bridegroom. We run our governments,” Putin told a reporter at an economic summit.
President-elect Donald Trump accepts the Patriot of the Year award at Fox Nation’s Patriot Awards. (Fox Nation)
President Biden’s recent drastic policy change, which gave Ukraine the green light to properly attack Russia with US-supplied long-range missiles, confirmed to Putin that Washington cannot be trusted. Therefore, in response to Trump’s recent request to Putin, which reportedly took place during a telephone conversation, not to escalate in Ukraine, Putin did the opposite. The Russian made two very escalatory moves. Putin approved changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine, lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, and authorized an attack on Ukraine with a new class of experimental hypersonic missiles, the Oreshnik. The Oreshnik has sufficient range to target all of Europe and the west coast of the US. Neither the US nor NATO have any defense against it.
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Putin is a product of Russian strategic culture and has a worst-case scenario mentality. The premise of inevitable conflict, deeply ingrained in Russian thinking, will always be the driving force behind Moscow’s foreign policy. Trump is a talented businessman and could turn US-Russia relations from an adversarial to a transactional basis. But Trump or not, Russia and America will never be friends.
