A Trump-Putin pact is emerging – and Europe is its target | Rafael Behr
A prime time current affairs programme; a discussion about Donald Trump’s handling of the war in Ukraine. “He’s doing excellent things,” says a firebrand politician on the panel, before listing White House actions that have belittled Volodymyr Zelenskyy and weakened his battlefield position – military aid suspended; satellite communications obstructed; intelligence withheld. “Do we support this?” It is a rhetorical question.“We support it all. Absolutely,” the celebrity host responds. “We are thrilled by everything Trump is doing.”Such approval might not be out of place on polemical rightwing channels in the US, but these exchanges weren’t broadcast to American audiences. The show’s anchor is Olga Skabeyeva, one of Vladimir Putin’s most dependable propagandists. To hear the highest pitch of praise for Trump’s bullying of Ukraine you need to watch Russia’s state-controlled Channel One.This being a Kremlin script, the enthusiasm was soon leavened with suspicion. For now the pressure on Kyiv is great, Skabeyeva continued, but what will the Americans want in return?It is a good question, although that doesn’t mean there is an answer. It is a mistake to project coherence on to the erratic moves of an overgrown toddler-tyrant. Illusory patterns might be traced in the chaos, the way faces can be found in drifting clouds if you stare hard enough. But Trump does have predictable tastes and grudges. He loves money and status. He hates obstacles to the acquisition of those things. He is well disposed to Russia, seeing it as the kind of place where good deals can be done. He is hostile to the upkeep of Ukrainian independence, which he sees as a bad use of US treasure, wheedled out of Joe Biden (withering disdain) by the crafty Zelenskyy (deep dislike).These petty prejudices are strongly enough held to sway US foreign policy in a Kremlin-friendly direction without the additional requirement of a strategy. There is plenty for Putin to work with.When Russian and US delegations met in Saudi Arabia last month to discuss a resolution to the war in Ukraine, the most revealing feature of the conversation was the exclusion of any Ukrainians.Less discussed, but still significant, was the inclusion in Putin’s delegation of Kirill Dmitriev, an alumnus of Stanford University, McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, now head of the Russian state investment fund. His pitch was that US businesses have foregone billions of dollars in profits by quitting Russia. Sanctions against Moscow are presented as another way that Ukraine and its European accomplices are ripping off America. Shortly after the Saudi meeting, Dmitriev was formally appointed Putin’s “special representative for investment and economic partnership with overseas countries”, with a mandate covering deals with the US.The proposed model, unnamed but also unhidden, is partition. Washington gets access to Ukrainian mineral resources. Moscow gets a fat slice of Ukraine. Russia and America reset diplomatic relations and renew commercial ties without any of the old fuss around rule of law and human rights – an oligarch entente.There are many reasons to recoil from such a deal. It would be a cynical betrayal of Ukraine and a renunciation of the transatlantic alliance. It would reward a dictator’s rapacious territorial aggression. It would embolden him to violate the sovereignty of other neighbouring countries, whose western orientation Russia has never stopped resenting since they escaped Soviet vassalage. It would license similar ambitions wherever authoritarian regimes fancy unilaterally redrawing disputed borders.But none of those objections move Trump. Not long ago they might have found a voice in the Republican party establishment. But the Maga personality cult appears to have deactivated the GOP’s capacity for foresight, erased its memory and dissolved its conscience.Instead of applying a corrective lens to Trump’s venal myopia, America’s former cold warriors add their own distorting filters to the White House’s pro-Russia tilt. One common rationalisation is to cast it as a tactical play in a great game with the ultimate goal of isolating and containing China. Advocates of this manoeuvre seem not to have considered the possibility that Beijing is the obvious beneficiary from sabotage of the international legal apparatus that Washington built. China will gladly fill any void left by America’s retreat into narcissistic commercial protectionism.Meanwhile, the evangelical Christian side of the US right finds inspiration in examples of reactionary dogmas of the Russian Orthodox church wired into laws of authoritarian repression. Putin has proscribed “LGBT extremism” and, late last year, “child-free propaganda” – anything that discourages women from fulfilling their patriotic duty to breed new citizens.This ideological affinity is cherished also by Russian nationalist commentators. They welcome the Trump regime as a powerful ally in global resistance to the effeminate moral degeneracy emanating from the continent they call “Gayrope”.Hostility to Europe, and the EU in particular, is where the various strands of a potential Maga-Putin front come together. The Russian and US presidents share a venomous resentment of the soft power that Brussels wields through the aggregation of many national markets into one trading bloc.From Trump’s point of view, the EU is a wicked cartel, denying US farms and businesses their inalienable right to sell to millions of European consumers. For Putin, it is an enemy apparatus, part of the post-cold war western expansion that locked Russia out of its natural sphere of influence.For both men, the idea of pooling sovereignty among democratic nations for mutual economic advantage is incomprehensible. To negotiate as equals with the EU – a flimsy paper entity without any tank divisions to call its own – is absurd and abhorrent. Their answer to soft power is to confront it with the hard stuff, connive in its dismemberment and share the spoils.This is the subtext of negotiations to end the war that Putin started and that Trump wants to end without regard for justice. They are rehearsing a shared agenda through the proxy of partitioning Ukraine, exploring the scope of a partnership that has a deeper foundation than America’s former allies want to admit. It might not come to fruition. Trump is easily distracted, but also easily bought and Russia has put a predatory joint venture on the table. Europe is the prey.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist More
