On 24 February, three years to the day since Russia unleashed its all-out assault on Ukraine, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a Ukrainian resolution calling for an end to the war and a “lasting and just peace”. In an act that would have been unimaginable even a month ago, the US joined Russia, Belarus and North Korea in voting against the resolution. China and Iran abstained. It was a shameful day for US foreign policy and a vivid illustration of just how starkly the world has changed since Donald Trump returned to power. Two years ago Joe Biden travelled to Kyiv and rallied a crowd in Warsaw, vowing to “stand up for the right of people to live free from aggression”; today, the US is siding with the aggressor.
Not that the US, under its current leadership, seems prepared to countenance that term. Trump’s diplomats reportedly spent the preceding days attempting to excise references to Russian “aggression” from resolutions at both the UN and the G7, to the dismay of European allies. Sitting alongside Trump in the Oval Office on 24 February, the French president Emmanuel Macron flattered Trump, even praising his ostensibly predatory pursuit of a share of Ukraine’s mineral resources worth hundreds of billions of dollars. He also stated plainly that “the aggressor is Russia” and warned that any settlement “must not mean a surrender of Ukraine… No one in this room wants to live in a world where the will of the mightiest can just be imposed.”
That might be precisely the kind of world that Trump – who in recent weeks has mulled the forcible takeover of Greenland, the Panama Canal and Canada – has in mind. “I really believe that he wants to make a deal,” Trump said of Vladimir Putin. “My whole life is deals… And I know when somebody wants to make it and when somebody doesn’t.”
Trump boasted of his ability to end the war “within weeks” and the “economic development” that would follow “in terms of Russia and getting things that we want”. He appears to view the war in Europe as a mere detail to be ironed out so that the real deal-making can begin. Then again, perhaps it should not come as a surprise that a leader who has floated what amounts to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza – where he has proposed removing the entire population to make way for the “riviera of the Middle East” – should be unconcerned by the implications for international law.
Putin must be delighted with this spectacle. Barely one month in office and already Trump seems intent on dismantling the US government, cutting funding to the US military, picking fights with his European allies, and preparing to abandon Ukraine. For a leader who prides himself on his supposed prowess in deal-making, Trump has demonstrated a bewildering approach to negotiations with Russia thus far, denouncing Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator” and declaring that the Russians “have the cards”. Despite Russia suffering estimated losses of 1,000 to 1,500 soldiers killed or wounded every day, and with the country’s inflation reaching double digits and interest rates at 21 per cent, the Trump administration seems to be walking into negotiations with Moscow with its hands up.
Putin has attempted to exploit Trump’s personal vulnerabilities in recent months. He has praised Trump’s “courage, as a man” in his response to the assassination attempt against him last July, and played up to Trump’s claims that the Ukraine war might not have started if he had been in power. He has also seized on Trump’s notorious transactionalism, chairing a meeting with economic officials to discuss Russia’s reserves of rare earth minerals within hours of Trump’s meeting with Macron. “We, by the way, would be ready to offer [joint projects with] our American partners,” Putin said in an interview on Russian state television that evening. “We undoubtedly have, I want to emphasise, significantly more resources of this kind than Ukraine.”
Beyond the prospect of economic deals and much-needed sanctions relief, Putin is likely to push for the terms he set out on the eve of his invasion, demanding not only that Ukraine be prevented from joining Nato, but that the alliance roll back its military presence from the countries that joined after May 1997, which includes Poland, Romania, Czech Republic and the Baltic states. With a receptive president now in the White House, Putin is no doubt encouraged that his goal of subjugating Ukraine might finally be within his grasp, along with the fundamental revision of Europe’s security architecture. Today’s fight might be against Kyiv, but he has long been clear that his ultimate war is with the wider West.
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The Russian leader is not the only autocrat with cause for optimism. On 24 February, as Macron met Trump in Washington, Putin had a “warm and friendly” phone call with Xi Jinping, who described China and Russia as “true friends who have been through thick and thin together”. The none-too-subtle subtext was presumably to indicate to interested observers that any attempt to drive a wedge between the two powers is destined to fail.
Just as Putin has proclaimed the “era of fundamental, even revolutionary changes” now under way and what he views as the “formation of a completely new world order”, so too Xi has repeatedly stressed in recent years that the world is undergoing “great changes unseen in a century”. Now they confront the tantalising prospect of a US president who appears to share their distaste for the liberal international order, and even to be prepared to hasten its demise.
Xi will also be weighing Trump’s approach to Russia and Ukraine against his own ultimate goal of realising the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, which includes taking control of Taiwan. He knows how quickly the US president can change his mind, as the warm relations between China and the US that characterised the start of Trump’s last term were swiftly replaced by a trade war. Trump has already added new tariffs on Chinese imports since returning to power.
Yet Xi also understands Trump’s contempt for US commitments overseas, including in Asia, where he has long complained about the cost of basing US troops in South Korea and Japan, as well as his repeated warnings about the danger of confrontation with a nuclear-armed Russia and the potential spiral into a Third World War. China has a large (and growing) nuclear arsenal too. Is it really credible that Trump would commit US troops to defend Taiwan, an island he has reportedly compared dismissively to the tip of his pen? Crucially, does Taiwan’s population believe that Trump will defend them – or could they now be pressured into talks with Beijing on “reunification” on China’s terms?
The consequences for the transatlantic alliance are already profound. The incoming German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, declared after the country’s elections on 23 February that Germany must now “achieve independence from the United States” as Trump does not care about Europe “one way or the other”. By voting alongside Russia against Ukraine, the US has shown which side of this war it is now on. Putin and Xi are correct that we are in a moment of profound flux – a new global order is taking shape, and the struggle to determine what comes next is already under way.
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This article appears in the 26 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain in Trump’s World