Blaming the Victim: Trump's Ukraine Démarche

What does Trump's overt tilt in favour of Putin portend for Ukraine, NATO and the world?

As a KGB agent in East Germany, Vladimir Putin’s main job was to use every trick in the agency’s book to “turn” people in influential positions in the West, or those with access to important intelligence data, into either “agents” or “assets” of the Soviet Union.

Their toolkit included flattery, intimidation, blackmail, or bribery. We know, for sure, that Putin made fulsome use of the former in his phone conversations with Trump.

As Trump has acknowledged, Putin expressed great sympathy for the persecution Trump had suffered at the hands of the media and the “deep state”. He also endorsed Trump’s claim that he really won the 2020 election, and that the invasion would never have happened if Trump had been in office.

I posted an article on 27 February on this website that lays out, in detail, the succession of Kremlin lies about Ukraine, about Zelenskyy, about the origin and responsibility for the war. That Ukraine provoked, or even started the war; that Zelenskyy is a “dictator without elections”, that his public approval rate had fallen to 4 percent, that therefore he has no legitimacy and must hold a new election in wartime to participate in negotiations to end the war.

Despite this, the article struck a cautiously optimistic tone. At the time it was written, just over a week ago, a revised “deal” had been agreed between Ukraine and the Trump administration to share the proceeds from exploitation of Ukraine’s mineral wealth. Zelenskyy was on his way to sign the deal, which ended precipitately in the Oval Office.

The original version of the deal was plonked before Zelenskyy by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, followed by a demand he sign it right away, was blatantly extortionate, more extreme than the Versailles reparations imposed on Germany after World War I. It would have taken way more than any credible estimate of the value of US aid to date ($120 billion, not the fantasy $350 billion figure Trump keeps repeating).

The following day, February 28 2025, a day that should live in infamy, there was a press conference to announce the minerals deal. Towards the end of the conference, Zelenskyy was subjected to an exercise in orchestrated thuggery by Vice President Vance and Trump to humiliate him, the embattled leader of a democratic nation enduring a massive invasion to destroy its sovereignty, subjugate its population, and incorporate it into a new Russian imperium.

This had been preceded by visits to the US by Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron to smooth the way, both of whom ladled copious doses of flattery on Trump. Starmer offered a state visit to the UK, including an audience with King Charles III. Trump loves that kind of stuff, and readily accepted the invitation. Things were looking up.

It was a reasonable strategy—it is clear what Starmer and Macron were thinking and hoping.

Here is an example (described in more detail in my 27 February post) of how Trump’s decision on an enormously consequential issue can be influenced, even determined, by a bit of well-placed flattery.

In 2018 at the annual conference of NATO in Brussels, it seemed that Trump was on the verge of pulling the US out of the alliance following a spat over defence spending levels. John Bolton, Trump’s National Security Adviser at the time, insists that Trump was deadly serious in his intention to withdraw.

So, how was the crisis averted? Well, Mark Rutte, then the Prime Minister of the Netherlands (now Secretary-General of NATO) argued that spending by alliance members, while still inadequate, had risen significantly. But then he added the decisive point—he gave Trump the full credit for the increase.

The clouds evaporated. Talk of the US withdrawing disappeared. At the press conference the following day, Trump spoke of what a terrific meeting it had been. As one observer put it, the pin had been put back in the grenade.

Not a good way to make enormously consequential decisions, obviously. But this is who the American people, in their wisdom, both in the GOP primaries and the general election, decided to install as their leader, so the rest of the world just has to work with this reality, as best it can.

OK, it worked that time. But what if a master-manipulator, the beneficiary of many years of professional experience turning and recruiting people to his side, is in the game?

Add to that, Trump’s insistence on seeing such decisions in strictly transactional terms, rather than being based on other considerations, such as a moral commitment to defend a nation subject to unwarranted aggression, or to maintain the cohesion and effectiveness of the alliance system that has sustained the West and the rest of the democratic world throughout the Cold War, and beyond.

So, what if Putin, seeing that Trump wanted a deal over Ukraine’s rare earths and other minerals as a condition for ongoing US support, decided to offer a better deal?

He has been indicating this publicly, and is in a strong position to do so, given that much of the mineral wealth is in occupied and contested areas. Add to that, the vast resource potential in Russia’s own territory. What if he offered America the opportunity to participate in joint exploration of them. Putin did raise such a possibility, and Trump seems excited at the prospect.

You can see how Trump would be tempted—if, indeed, he does see things in purely transactional terms. What might have transpired in these private phone conversations between Trump and Putin? When asked at the Oval Office event when he last spoke to Putin, Trump said they had spoken several days earlier. There is no publicly available readout of what was discussed, or decided.

Here is the problem with Trump’s deal-making transactionalism. In negotiating the deal, the outcome will likely depend on the goals of the respective negotiators.

Is it to get the best possible outcome for Ukraine? In current circumstances that would be something like the 1953 Korean model—a stable armistice line with credible guarantees, and the survival of Ukraine as a genuinely sovereign democracy. Zelenskyy has pretty much conceded that there was little prospect of regaining the illegally seized territories by military means, and said that in the long-term he would seek their return by diplomacy.

Or, is Trump’s main goal to get the best deal for the United States, or for Donald Trump personally? Or to reach some settlement with Russia to pursue Trump’s own stated territorial ambitions with regard to Greenland, Canada, Panama, and Gaza? If either of the latter, this will not be good for Ukraine.

If the latter, it would be logical for Putin to say to Trump something like:

Donald, I respect absolutely your right to be the dominant power in the Western hemisphere, and to take whatever territories in that space that best serves your interests, whether the minor powers affected like it or not.

Greenland, after all, is part of the North American, not the European, tectonic plate so it is part of the North American continent.

As for Canada, well as Elon Musk rightly tweeted, it is not a real country. It is just an artificial construct of the British Empire, an anomaly that your forebears tried to correct back in 1812. Time to address that historic injustice! [Musk later deleted this tweet after Canadians reacted by starting a petition to cancel his Canadian citizenship and boycott his products]

Moreover, has not your great theorist of international relations, Professor John J. Mearsheimer, said that is exactly the right way for great powers to behave—take advantage of opportunities to improve your strategic position, and don’t hesitate to use military force if needed to achieve this end?

You really should listen to Mearsheimer. Almost as great an intellectual as our distinguished philosophers Alexander Dugin, who the Ukrainian nazis tried to murder but killed his daughter instead, and the late great Ivan Ilyin, our guiding light.

So I am prepared to grant you all that—go for it. But I am perplexed that you will not grant me, as the head of another great power, to act likewise. As I have argued since 2008, Ukraine is not a real country. Historically, it is a part of Russia, artificially split from the motherland first by Lenin, that communist bastard, and again in 1991 after that fool Gorbachev broke up the Soviet Union, the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th Century.

Be reasonable Donald! A bit of give and take, if you please! And think of the economic opportunities if we choose to cooperate!

That is obviously a hypothetical, but not I think an entirely implausible one. It is illustrative of how Trump’s contempt for sovereignty, even of close allies which it is committed to jointly defend under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, undermines the rhetorical and moral position of the Western alliance and demoralizes its members.

And, if you think it misrepresents Mearsheimer, just read his books, or for a short version check out his paper War and International Politics where he outlines his “Clausewitzian” view of when recourse to war by great powers is warranted, even if contrary to international law and the norms of Just War Theory.

We just don’t know what transpired in the leadup to the Oval Office conflagration. Was it a temper tantrum, or was it premeditated? It certainly looked like the latter.

Could Putin, on learning of the apparent success of negotiations over a mineral deal have come to Trump with a better offer? Could this be the explanation of the ridiculously exaggerated indignation from Vance followed by Trump to Zelenskyy’s attempt to highlight the need for enforceable guarantees of any peace settlement? Could this have all been a performance to blow up the deal and justify the termination of military support for Ukraine, including intelligence support, that followed? Again, we don’t know.

This raises a further question. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said, in his address to the recent Munich Security Conference, that the US would be reducing its military commitment to Europe to give prime focus to the challenge from China in the Indo-Pacific. This is a view long supported by some of the foreign policy specialists in Trump’s circle, such as Elbridge Colby, his nominee for Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.

The rationale for this is that CCP-controlled China is the main threat to the US. Unlike Russia, China is challenging the US in all domains of national power—economic, technological, military, and even cultural. Therefore countering it will need to be the main priority, Hegseth argued.

Fair enough. But how is likely to approach this challenge, given his transactional, deal-making philosophy? The US alone cannot do it, given China’s vast population, with a middle class component now estimated to be well in excess of the total population of the US, its education system now producing five times as many STEM graduates as the US, its manufacturing sector producing double the value added of the US.

Collectively however the Group of Seven (G7) countries, with a combined GDP approaching $50 trillion can, especially when supplemented by the other democracies, including Australia.

The US should be the lynchpin of a democratic bloc capable of ensuring the survival and flourishing of societies committed to democratic elections, the rule of law, and personal, political and religious liberty in the face of the challenge from the coalition of autocracies centred on China that favours the negation of all these features.

That, in light of his behaviour pattern since taking office, is not how Trump sees things. He makes little distinction between democratic allies and autocratic foes. In fact, he seems to prefer the latter, extending a level of respect to their personalist dictators way in excess of that granted to democratic leaders—especially those he perceives as obstacles to his goals.

So what might Trump do, given these realities?

One strategy favoured by some in Trump’s circle, including apparently Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is to try and pull off what is often described as a reverse Nixon, a reference to Nixon’s rapprochement with China that culminated in his visit to that country in February 1972 and a general opening of relations thereafter. America plus Russia—that could improve the geopolitical balance sheet, though sadly Ukraine might have to be sacrificed along the way, geopolitical roadkill.

For reasons outlined succinctly by Professor Michael Clarke in an article that was just published in the Lowy Interpreter, this is a geopolitical fantasy. In 1972, China and the Soviet Union had been locked in a vicious ideological division and territorial struggle for at least a decade.

Nixon’s visit came three years after a violent conflict on the Ussuri river that marked the border between the two countries. In 1969 the veteran New York Times journalist Harrison E. Salisbury wrote a book titled The Coming War Between Russia and China. Today, there is no such bitter dispute between them today, with the two declaring a “no limits” partnership on the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

While the state ideologies in the two countries differ, with Russia holding to an ultra-conservative nationalist philosophy grounded in Russian Orthodox religiosity, and China under Xi has pledged a renewed allegiance to Marxist-Leninist doctrine, they are bound by a commitment to personalist autocratic governance and a common project to overturn the Western-dominated global order and all that it represents.

Moreover, the power balance between China and Russia today is the reverse of that between China and the Soviet Union in 1972. The Soviet Union back then was overwhelmingly dominant over China in technology and industrial development.

Today it is the reverse, in all spheres except for nuclear weapons and some areas of military technology. Russia is overwhelmingly dependent on China for consumer goods, and components for its military, and as a market for its hydrocarbon fuels. At the first sign of Russia allying with the United States, China would take steps to underscore this dependency in no uncertain terms.

What else could Trump be contemplating, should the reverse Nixon move not prove fruitful? In February Trump floated the idea of a grand summit of himself, Putin and Xi Jinping, ostensibly to jointly agree to arms reduction. Xi seems interested, with speculation that such a tripartite summit could end up with an agreed informal division of the world into spheres of influence, a veritable Yalta 2.0.

Time to update Orwell’s map, perhaps?