In his first four weeks as president, Donald Trump made a heel turn in U.S. foreign policy. The move to provide a speedy end to the war in Ukraine is part of this paradigm shift which, together with reactionary stabilization in the Middle East, are his two most urgent geopolitical priorities. In the blink of an eye, the United States went from Joe Biden’s strategy of arming Ukraine and aligning the EU-NATO Western allies in a proxy war to weaken Russia, to initiating ceasefire negotiations directly with Vladimir Putin — leaving out those who were until recently on the same side: the European powers and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The saga began with a personal call between Trump and Putin and continued with a bilateral meeting led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The meeting took place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and was hosted by Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who took the opportunity to try on the suit of “global leader” and project Saudi influence beyond the Middle East.
Although the specific terms of the negotiation are not known — that is to say, how much Ukraine will be pressured to capitulate — what transpired in this first formal meeting (perhaps the prelude to a summit between Trump and Putin) is that the United States and Russia have expressed their intention to restore diplomatic relations and open up business opportunities, particularly for American oil companies.
The rapid rehabilitation of Putin, who has been ostracized by the West since invading Ukraine, contrasts with Trump’s full-blown attack on his supposed ally Zelenskyy, with whom he has an old grudge dating back to Trump’s impeachment during his first term. Trump called Zelenskyy a “modestly successful comedian” and a “dictator” who dragged the United States into a costly war. He has demanded that Ukraine hand over half its mineral resources (in particular rare earth minerals) to pay for both the military aid it received from the Biden administration — which according to Trump should amount to around $500 billion — and for whatever assistance Ukraine might receive from the White House in an eventual post-ceasefire scenario. It is worth remembering that it was Zelenskyy himself who first offered Trump privileged access to these strategic resources in exchange for maintaining the military assistance without which Ukraine would have succumbed to Russia in a matter of days.
Some of these minerals are in the area occupied by Russia, suggesting that the agreement seems to be for Trump and Putin to share the spoils, leaving the European powers — who are also claiming their share — out of the deal.
While Trump played the “bad cop,” the White House envoy to Ukraine, retired General Keith Kelogg, praised Zelenskyy and negotiated the terms with the Kiev government. This supposed transaction is equivalent to practically transforming Ukraine into an American colony, obliged to pay reparations for a proxy war that was encouraged by the United States under Biden and the “interventionist” wing of the American establishment in an effort to weaken Russia without its own troops on the ground.
The change of scenario and imperialist bluster of members of the Trump administration in international forums left the European powers in shock. The first signs came from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The Fox presenter-turned-Pentagon chief (and enemy of “wokism”) informed his NATO colleagues in Brussels of the “realistic” terms for negotiating a ceasefire: that Ukraine would not recover the territories it had lost, which includes Crimea and the four eastern oblasts occupied by Russia; that the United States would not deploy troops in Ukraine after a ceasefire (instead this task will have to be carried out by the European powers and outside the NATO umbrella); and that Ukraine would not be incorporated into the Atlantic alliance. Furthermore, Hegseth made it clear that European security was no longer a priority for the United States, which is concentrating on confronting the threat from China.
This was followed by the intervention of Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference, who surprised his European partners with an unexpected sermon. Instead of the usual reproach that Europe should take charge of its security and increase its defense budgets instead of sheltering under the American umbrella, Vance launched an unprecedented political-ideological attack on “liberal Europe.” He more or less told them that the worst threat to Europe did not come from Russia, China, or any external actor, but from Europe itself, which in the name of “liberal values” cancels “conservative discourse” and raises walls against the political actors who sustain it — that is to say, the Far Right in its various forms. In doing so he all but explicitly called on people to vote for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany’s February 23 elections.
The Trump offensive laid bare not only the fracturing of the traditional alliances of the Western powers, but above all the crisis and impotence of the EU, particularly Germany, which submitted to U.S. leadership in the war in Ukraine and in doing so sacrificed its own interests — namely cheap Russian energy, which is fundamental for the support of its economic model — and is now paying the price with economic stagnation, crisis within the neoliberal center parties, and the rise of the Far Right. The summit called by President Macron in Paris to respond to the affront further amplified divisions in Europe and highlighted its military dependence on the United States. It is not surprising then that the conclusion shared by social democrats, greens, conservatives, “atlantists,” and far-right sovereigntists alike is to deepen militarism and increase military spending to 5 percent, at the cost of increasing indebtedness and cutting the welfare state.
But the image of the imperialist bully projected by Trump does not change the fact that the war in Ukraine will end in defeat for Zelenskyy and, indirectly, for NATO, of which the United States is the central component. Biden’s strategy of using Ukraine to weaken Russia, without crossing the red line of direct war between Russia and NATO, had long since reached its limit. As military analysts of various persuasions argued, Ukraine’s victory — even counting on the sophisticated weaponry of the United States and Europe — was a fantasy. Despite Russia’s strategic errors, high military losses, and the impact of the war on the economy, Putin’s alliance with China, and the expansion of its collaboration with Iran and North Korea allowed Russia to maintain 20 percent of the Ukrainian territory it conquered in the Donbas. With no clear strategy on NATO’s part, prolonging the war was only going to increase the cost to the United States (and also to the EU powers) as well as the risk of escalation or an even greater defeat of Ukraine and its allies.
The negotiations are just beginning and are likely to be tortuous. The contradiction that Trump faces is that in order to end the war he must accept many of Putin’s demands, while at the same time preventing Russia from claiming a resounding triumph over the West, which objectively strengthens the position of the antagonistic bloc, particularly China.
The divisions at the top of the imperialist power structure continue to deepen. The “realist” sector maintains that it is still possible to return to the strategy of Trump’s first term and use the negotiations with Putin to separate Russia from China. The “interventionist” wing, which brings together liberal democrats and neoconservatives, says that Trump “betrayed Ukraine” and are afraid that the inevitable concessions to Putin will weaken the position of U.S. imperialism in Europe and Asia and be seen as a failure by the enemies of the West, China above all.
Trump’s politics are in line with “America First,” a slogan that helped him win the presidency a second time. The slogan can be misleading, not only because of the ambiguity inherent in such empty signifiers, but also because of its historical relationship with the isolationist tradition. For the Trump administration it means neither inward withdrawal nor “pacifism.” The precise meaning is not to get involved in wars that are not in the national interest of U.S. imperialism (a type of “realism”), to reaffirm its dominance in the “Western Hemisphere” as a “sphere of influence,” and to concentrate resources — military, geopolitical, and economic — on containing China, which is the main strategic challenge for the waning leadership of the United States.
This reorientation should be seen as the reason for the trade wars, the use of tariffs to obtain concessions from allies and enemies, and, more generally, the aggressive imperialist rhetoric that Trump has been deploying. This includes references to the Monroe Doctrine and to the presidency of William McKinley, characterized by protectionism and the territorial expansion of the United States (Puerto Rico, the Philippines, etc.). In that period of the rise of American power — between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century — President Theodore Roosevelt summed up imperialist policy in the phrase “speak softly and carry a big stick.” But the conditions of the 21st century after a major capitalist crisis could not be more different. Trump presides over an imperialism in hegemonic decline that faces competition from China. That is why, when he threatens to reoccupy the Panama Canal, annex Canada, buy Greenland, or take over the Gaza Strip — which entails the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people — he seems instead to be reversing Roosevelt’s maxim.
The war in Ukraine has exposed the exhaustion of the so-called “liberal order” led by the United States since the second post-war period, and in particular its neoliberal version, which was reinforced after the American triumph in the Cold War.
Since the capitalist crisis of 2008, a new stage has begun whose structural coordinates are the hegemonic decline of the United States, the emergence of China as a competing power that has advanced in an alliance with Russia that attracts other countries in conflict with the West, and the appearance of intermediate powers such as Turkey. The Biden presidency was a failed attempt to restore the old liberal order and rebuild U.S. leadership by commanding the alliances of the West. Trump expresses a different strategy to overcome this crisis of American imperialism, with a Bonapartist turn in domestic policy based on an alliance with billionaires such as Elon Musk, and a foreign policy orientation guided not by the leadership of a global order, but by imperialist national interest. The latter represents a kind of return to the “spheres of influence” of classical imperialism, which, beyond unstable partial agreements, reinforces rivalries between powers and warmongering. This is the concrete meaning of the re-actualization of the epoch of crisis, wars, and confrontations between revolution and counter-revolution.
This article was originally published in Spanish on February 23, 2025 in La Izquierda Diario.
Translation by Madeleine Freeman