The Trump administration has made a startling turn in the past few weeks on its foreign policy, particularly on Russia, Ukraine and Europe. American officials met with their Russian counterparts in Riyadh to begin talks toward a settlement of the war in Ukraine while signalling a willingness to repair relations with Moscow in the future. Trump, meanwhile, blamed Ukraine for starting the war and went out of his way to insult President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator” and, perhaps worse, a “moderately successful comedian”.
This is fairly galling given that it was in the United States’ power to avoid the war in the first place by retracting its pledge to bring Ukraine into Nato. Instead, Washington opted to use Kyiv as a cat’s paw to bleed Russia, and refused to push for a settlement earlier, which would have saved hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives. The first Trump administration itself set Russia and the West on a collision course by sending weapons to Ukraine after the Obama administration refused, and by leaving the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019.
What is frustrating about the recent actions of the Trump administration is that, from a realist perspective, the initial moves it has made have been promising. Unfortunately, all these events have been complicated—or even contradicted—by the President’s crude and incoherent approach, which unnecessarily threatens to sour America’s long-term relations with Europe.
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