Max Matza and Peter Bowes, North America correspondent
BBC News
Reporting fromWashington DC
Watch: Trump and Macron cite ‘progress’ in Ukraine war peace talks
French President Emmanuel Macron has said a truce between Ukraine and Russia could be agreed in the coming weeks.
He was speaking to Fox News in Washington following talks with Donald Trump at the White House on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion.
The US president, who suggested the war could end “within weeks”, insisted Europe should shoulder the cost and burden of any peacekeeping deal for Ukraine.
Macron said any peace deal in Ukraine must “not be a surrender of Ukraine” and must be backed by security guarantees.
The arrival of Trump for a second term at the White House was a “game changer”, the French leader said.
He said he believed it was “feasible” to talk about a truce in the war and the start of negotiations for a sustainable peace within weeks.
Macron said he had spoken to 30 other European leaders and allies and many of them were willing to be part of security guarantees for Ukraine.
He was, he said, working with British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer on a proposal to send troops to the region.
“Not to go to the front line, not to go in confrontation, but to be in some locations, being defined by the treaty, as a presence to maintain this peace and our collective credibility with the US backup,” Macron said.
Negotiations on an end to the fighting, he added, would cover “security guarantees, land and territories”.
One of the best ways to secure a US commitment to Ukrainian sovereignty, he said, would be through a deal on critical minerals, currently being negotiated by Washington and Kyiv.
In a further sign of Washington’s shift on the global stage a US-drafted resolution which adopted a neutral stance on the conflict was adopted, by the UN Security Council. It was supported by Russia but with France and the UK abstaining.
At a joint news conference following his meeting with Macron on Monday, Trump did not mention security guarantees but said the cost and burden of securing peace in Ukraine must be paid for by European nations and not just the US.
Macron responded that Europe understood the need to “more fairly share the security burden” and added that Monday’s talks had shown a path forward.
Trump said he wanted a ceasefire as soon as possible, adding that he would visit Russia to meet President Vladimir Putin once one was agreed.
Macron, however, pushed a more considered approach involving a truce and then a broader peace deal that would include clear guarantees for protecting Ukraine long term.
“We want peace swiftly but we don’t want an agreement that is weak,” he said.
The pair did agree, however, that any peace deal should include the deployment of European peacekeeping forces in Ukraine. That suggestion has been rejected outright by Russia.
“They would not be along the front lines. They would not be part of any conflict. They would be there to ensure that the peace is respected,” Macron said in the Oval Office.
Trump then said Russian President Vladimir Putin would accept that. “I specifically asked him that question. He has no problem with it,” he said.
Watch: Trump and Macron’s history of intense and sometimes drawn-out handshakes
The French president praised Trump’s efforts to engage with Putin in recent weeks, saying there had been “good reason” for him to do so.
Trump declined to call Putin a “dictator” after using the term last week to describe Ukraine’s president.
“I don’t know when we’ll speak,” Trump said. “At some point I’ll be meeting with President Putin.”
He also invited Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House to conclude a deal to share some of the country’s natural resources. “He may come in this week or next week,” Trump said. “I’d love to meet him.”
While there were no moments of open disagreement between Trump and Macron, the French president did interrupt his US counterpart in the Oval Office to push back on his claim that EU aid to Ukraine was all in the form of loans.
“No, to be frank, we paid. We paid 60% of the total effort,” Macron said.
“If you believe that, it’s OK with me,” Trump replied.
The two countries first opposed a European-drafted resolution condemning Moscow’s actions and supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity, which was eventually passed by the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York.
UNGA members backed the European resolution by 93 votes but the US did not abstain but actually voted against it, along with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Sudan, Belarus, Hungary and 11 other states.
The US and Russia then backed a US-drafted resolution at the UN Security Council calling for an end to the conflict but containing no criticism of Russia.
The Security Council resolution was passed but two key US allies, the UK and France, abstained in the vote after their attempts to amend the wording were vetoed.
Meanwhile, the EU and UK passed a fresh round of sanctions on Russia on Monday. The EU sanctions, the 16th round passed since Russia’s invasion, target Russia’s aluminium exports, and its “shadow fleet” of ships allegedly used to bypass sanctions.
The UK sanctions target machine tools and electronics used by Russia’s military and the defence minister of North Korea who is allegedly responsible for deploying more than 11,000 soldiers to Russia to assist in the war.
Watch: US votes against UN resolution condemning Russia aggression against Ukraine
(Bloomberg) — Stocks struggled for direction and 10-year Treasury yields slipped to the lowest in more than two months amid concerns that US President Donald Trump’s tariff plans and measures to restrict investments between the US and China will hurt global economic growth.
Europe’s Stoxx 600 benchmark was little changed at the open. Basic resources and technology stocks led declines, while banks and health care stocks rose. US equity futures pointed to a lower open after a tech-led selloff on Wall Street at the end of trading Monday. Asian stocks fell for a second day. The yen gained and gold held near a record high.
One month into Trump’s presidency, uncertainty on how his policies will affect US economic growth has prompted investors to cut risk and flock to safer havens such as gold. Trump signaled Monday that tariffs on Mexican and Canadian imports will go ahead, while his administration is sketching out tougher versions of US semiconductor curbs and pressuring key allies to escalate their restrictions on China’s chip industry.
“The continued signaling of new tariffs introduces unnecessary volatility into the markets,” said Rajeev De Mello, a global macro portfolio manager at Gama Asset Management. “A more accelerated U.S. retreat from global leadership raises risks for multinational corporations and global investors that have long benefited from a stable, rules-based international order.”
Among individual stock moves in Europe, Fresenius Medical Care AG shares rose after positive guidance. Unilever Plc declined after Hein Schumacher unexpectedly stepped down as chief executive. Heidelberg Materials AG dropped afte reporting results.
Meanwhile, Trump also deepened Washington’s split with its allies over Ukraine, withdrawing US condemnation of Russia’s 2022 invasion at the United Nations and among Group-of-Seven countries as he aims to end the war on terms agreeable to Moscow.
Trump officials recently met with their Japanese and Dutch counterparts about restricting Tokyo Electron Ltd. and ASML Holding NV engineers from maintaining semiconductor gear in China, according to people familiar with the matter.
This comes after a directive set the stage for a more muscular use of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, a secretive panel that scrutinizes proposals by foreign entities to buy US companies or property, to thwart Chinese investment.
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Trump and Macron Display Old Friendship but Split on the Ukraine War
At a meeting at the White House, President Trump declined to call President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a dictator while President Emmanuel Macron of France stated flatly that “the aggressor is Russia.”
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transcript
transcript
Trump and Macron Showcase Friendship, and Some Differences
President Trump and President Emmanuel Macron of France traded compliments during a meeting at the White House. But they struck different tones on the war in Ukraine.
“Just so you understand, Europe is loaning the money to Ukraine. They get their money back.” “No, in fact, to be frank, we paid — we paid 60 percent of the total effort. And it was through, like the U.S., loans, guarantee, grants, and we provided real money, to be clear.” “If you believe that, it’s OK with me.”
President Trump and President Emmanuel Macron of France traded compliments during a meeting at the White House. But they struck different tones on the war in Ukraine.CreditCredit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
President Trump and President Emmanuel Macron of France put on a show of friendship on Monday in their first meeting since last month’s inauguration, but for all the clubby hugs and handshakes they could not disguise the growing rift between the United States and Europe over the Ukraine war.
Meeting on the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the two leaders seemed intent on avoiding an open rupture as they traded compliments during a convivial White House meeting. But they diverged significantly over the causes of the war, each side’s role in the conflict and its possible resolution.
The session came as the United States and France split sharply at the United Nations over a resolution condemning Russia’s aggression. While Europe and most of the world sided with Ukraine, the Trump administration dissented along with Russia, North Korea and Belarus, putting the United States in a camp that it has rarely if ever been in over the history of the United Nations.
The deepening divide was on display in capitals on both sides of the Atlantic. While the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and European Union buildings in Brussels were illuminated with the blue and yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag in solidarity, the White House made no effort to demonstrate support. While many world leaders made the trek to Kyiv to stand with Ukrainian leaders, Mr. Trump focused on sealing a deal to claim the country’s natural resources as recompense for military aid.
“I think a lot of progress has been made,” Mr. Trump said of his efforts to negotiate peace with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “We’ve had some very good talks with Russia. We’ve had some very good talks with others, and we’re trying to get the war ended with Russia and Ukraine.”
Mr. Trump also said that he might go to Moscow if a peace deal were reached, which he predicted could happen within weeks. That would make him the first American president to visit Russia in more than a decade and would be seen as a boon for Mr. Putin, who faces an international arrest warrant for war crimes.
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This is how much Donald Trump has already transformed America’s global role.
Loath to condemn Kremlin aggression on Monday’s third anniversary of the brutal onslaught on Ukraine, the United States chose new voting buddies at the United Nations, including longtime enemies Russia and North Korea.
The drama at UN headquarters better reflected the gaping new transatlantic rift than the scenes in the White House as Trump and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron clasped hands and ladled out mutual flattery.
This was not the only jarring juxtaposition on a day of diplomatic drama stretching from Kyiv to Moscow, from London to Washington and New York as global powers jockey for position in the global great game suddenly shaken up by Trump.
Say one thing for the American president — his craving for a one-on-one summit with his friend, Russian President Vladimir Putin, has unleashed a torrent of crisis diplomacy aimed at ending the war in Ukraine that was frozen for years.
But his mind-boggling turn toward Putin and away from Ukraine has scrambled old alliances and set off a race by America’s allies and adversaries to shape the peace deal he plans to conclude with the Russian leader.
On the anniversary of the invasion, world leaders took the train into wartime Kyiv to stand with President Volodymyr Zelensky — fresh from being lambasted by Trump. They included Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who could commiserate with his host after Trump insulted him again Monday as the “Governor” of the supposed 51st state.
In London, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who will follow Macron’s bid to redirect Trump with his own White House trip on Thursday, said the G7 should take on “more risk” to hurt Russia as he announced a new raft of sanctions. But Trump wants Russia back in the rich nations’ club.
In Moscow, Putin condemned European leaders whom he suggested were too close to Ukraine to help broker peace while dispensing the kind of praise that Trump laps up when he said the president was free from such “shackles.”
Behind the diplomatic theater is a common theme: Leaders know that Trump is desperate for a “deal” to bolster his reputation and worry that in his quest for political adulation at home and an elusive Nobel peace prize, the US president isn’t particular about the details.
“I mean, that’s what I do. I do deals. My whole life is deals. That’s all I know, is deals. And I know when somebody wants to make it and when somebody doesn’t,” Trump said at a news conference with Macron on Monday.
Trump’s subordinates endlessly lionize him for almost super-human prowess at the bargaining table. “He’s the dealmaker in chief. He’s the commander in chief. And it’s only because of his strength that we’re even in this position,” national security adviser Mike Waltz said on Fox Business on Sunday, for example.
The best thing that can be said for the president’s unorthodox approach is that he has offered the possibility of ending a war that is grinding through the lives of young Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and has killed thousands of civilians.
And if he succeeds in inking an agreement with Ukraine to exploit its rare earth metals and minerals — a big if, considering Kyiv refused his previous pillaging demands — he will create a future economic lifeline for the country as it rebuilds and forge a reason for his administration and others to stay engaged.
And no one can say the president isn’t acting on the “America First” promises that convinced many voters to give him a second term.
His administration’s brutalist new approach to Europe has got results. France and Britain are offering to send a “reassurance” force to Ukraine after a peace deal and NATO states look like they will at last start significantly increasing defense spending.
But Ukraine — and for that matter Gaza, which Trump wants to turn into the “Riviera of the Middle East” after sending the Palestinians somewhere else — isn’t a real estate deal.
Peacemaking involves human lives, history’s animosities and complex calculations, including the existential question of whether Ukraine will survive and what a Putin “win” would mean for future European security. There’s no comparison to the branding deals and acquisitions that Trump swung for casinos, golf clubs and skyscrapers during his checkered career as a property developer.
And European concerns were only exacerbated in Monday’s joint news conference with Macron when Trump displayed his apparently limited interest and understanding of how a peace deal without security guarantees could reward Putin’s land grab and lay the groundwork for future wars. The president instead incessantly complained that the invasion would never have happened if he had been in office.
Macron used his extensive repertoire of compliments, tactile body language and handshakes that never seemed to end on “Dear Donald.” And he even got away with correcting him in the Oval Office over his false claims that Washington had almost doubled Europe’s support for Ukraine.
After visiting the White House, Macron sought out another venue to get to Trump — Fox News, telling Bret Baier, “I think the arrival of President Trump is a game changer. And I think he has the deterrence capacity of the US to re-engage with Russia … my concern is that we have to go fast. But we need something first, a truce, which could be assessed, and checked, and full-fledged negotiation.”
Earlier, after turning to Trump at the White House, Macron said: “We want peace; he wants peace. We want peace swiftly, but we don’t want an agreement that is weak.” The French and the British want security guarantees for Ukraine that they argue can only be reinforced by an American “backstop” if Russia is to be prevented from restarting the war.
“The fact that there are Europeans that are ready to engage to provide for these security guarantees and now there’s a clear American message that the US, as an ally, is ready to provide that solidarity for that approach — that’s a turning point,” Macron said. “And that is one of the great areas of progress that we’ve made during this trip.”
But how far “solidarity” goes is unclear since Trump refused to publicly offer US help. Perhaps he doesn’t want to anger Putin before their eventual summit. Or maybe he worries about a possible clash between US and Russian forces if American troops were part of those security guarantees.
Despite Macron’s claims of progress, Trump still views the war through a different lens – as events at the UN showed.
The US delegation voted with some of its most sworn adversaries, including regimes in Moscow and Pyongyang, against a General Assembly resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine and calling for the return of Kyiv’s territories.
Later, Russia and the US voted together again on a Security Council resolution drafted by Washington that did not highlight Moscow’s aggression but that called for a swift end to the war and a lasting peace.
The US resolution passed 10-0 in the Security Council. But several top US allies, including permanent five members France and Britain, abstained. Both countries offered amendments to Washington’s resolution seeking to insert references to the United Nations Charter and Ukraine’s territorial integrity, a European diplomat said. But Russia vetoed them both. “Russia continues to trample on international law and the United Nations Charter by pursuing its aggression against Ukraine,” the diplomat said.
This estrangement between Washington and allies it has protected since World War II was laid bare in the Oval Office when Trump was asked whether Putin, who has killed and imprisoned his opponents, was a “dictator.”
“I don’t use those words lightly,” Trump said days after applying the title to democratically elected Zelensky.
This drew a crooked Gallic grin and a sideways glance from Macron. But it also summed up his enormous task.
In the two decades that followed the Cold War’s end, globalism gained ground over nationalism. Simultaneously, the rise of increasingly complex systems and networks—institutional, financial, and technological—overshadowed the role of the individual in politics. But in the early 2010s, a profound shift began. By learning to harness the tools of this century, a cadre of charismatic figures revived the archetypes of the previous one: the strong leader, the great nation, the proud civilization.
The shift arguably began in Russia. In 2012, Vladimir Putin ended a short experiment during which he left the presidency and spent four years as prime minister while a compliant ally served as president. Putin returned to the top job and consolidated his authority, crushing all opposition and devoting himself to rebuilding “the Russian world,” restoring the great-power status that had evaporated with the fall of the Soviet Union, and resisting the dominance of the United States and its allies. Two years later, Xi Jinping made it to the top in China. His aims were like Putin’s but far grander in scale—and China had far greater capabilities. In 2014, Narendra Modi, a man with vast aspirations for India, completed his long political ascent to the prime minister’s office and established Hindu nationalism as his country’s dominant ideology. That same year, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had spent just over a decade as Turkey’s hard-driving prime minister, became its president. In short order, Erdogan transformed his country’s factionalized democratic ensemble into an autocratic one-man show.
Perhaps the most consequential moment in this evolution occurred in 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency of the United States. He promised to “make America great again” and to put “America first”—slogans that captured a populist, nationalist, antiglobalist spirit that had been percolating within and outside the West even as the U.S.-led liberal international order took hold and grew. Trump was not just riding a global wave. His vision of the U.S. role in the world drew from specifically American sources, although less from the original America First movement that peaked in the 1930s than from the right-wing anticommunism of the 1950s.
For a while, Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race seemed to signal a restoration. The United States was rediscovering its post–Cold War posture, poised to buttress the liberal order and to stem the populist tide. In the wake of Trump’s extraordinary comeback, however, it now appears more likely that Biden, and not Trump, represented a detour. Trump and comparable tribunes of national greatness are now setting the global agenda. They are self-styled strongmen who place little stock in rules-based systems, alliances, or multinational forums. They embrace the once and future glory of the countries they govern, asserting an almost mystical mandate for their rule. Although their programs can involve radical change, their political strategies rely on strains of conservatism, appealing over the heads of liberal, urban, cosmopolitan elites to constituencies animated by a hunger for tradition and a desire for belonging.
In some ways, these leaders and their visions evoke “the clash of civilizations” that the political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing in the early 1990s, imagined would drive global conflict after the Cold War. But they do so in a manner that is often performative and flexible rather than categorical and overzealous. It is the clash of civilizations lite: a series of gestures and a style of leadership that can reconfigure competition over (and cooperation on) economic and geopolitical interests as a contest among crusading civilization-states.
This contest is rhetorical at times, allowing leaders to employ the language and the narratives of civilization without having to stick to Huntington’s script or to the somewhat simplistic divisions it foretold. (Orthodox Russia is at war with Orthodox Ukraine, not with Muslim Turkey.) Trump was introduced at the 2020 GOP convention as “the bodyguard of Western civilization.” The Kremlin leadership has developed the notion of Russia as a “civilization-state,” using the term to justify its efforts to dominate Belarus and subjugate Ukraine. At the 2024 Summit for Democracy, Modi characterized democracy as “the lifeblood of Indian civilization.” In a 2020 speech, Erdogan declared that “our civilization is one of conquest.” In a 2023 speech to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, Chinese leader Xi Jinping extolled the virtues of a national research project on the origins of Chinese civilization, which he called “the only great, uninterrupted civilization that continues to this day in a state form.”
In the years to come, the kind of order these leaders fashion will greatly depend on Trump’s second term. It was, after all, the U.S.-led order that had encouraged the development of supranational structures following the Cold War. Now that the United States has joined the twenty-first-century dance of nations, it will often call the tune. With Trump in power, conventional wisdom in Ankara, Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, and Washington (and many other capitals) will decree that there is no one system and no agreed-on set of rules. In this geopolitical environment, the already tenuous idea of “the West” will recede even further—and, consequently, so will the status of Europe, which in the post–Cold War era had been Washington’s partner in representing “the Western world.” European countries have been conditioned to expect U.S. leadership in Europe and a rules-based order (not necessarily of American vintage) outside Europe. Shoring up this order, which has been crumbling for years, will be left to Europe, a loose confederation of states with no army and with little organized hard power of its own—and whose countries are experiencing a period of acutely weak leadership.
The Trump administration has the potential to succeed in a revised international order that has been years in the making. But the United States will thrive only if Washington recognizes the danger of so many intersecting national fault lines and neutralizes these risks through patient and open-ended diplomacy. Trump and his team should regard conflict management as a prerequisite for American greatness, not as an impediment to it.
THE REAL ROOTS OF TRUMPISM
Analysts often wrongly trace the origins of Trump’s foreign policy to the interwar years. When the original America First movement flourished in the 1930s, the United States had a modest military and did not have superpower status. America Firsters wished more than anything to keep it this way; they sought to avoid conflict. In contrast, Trump cherishes the superpower status of the United States, as he emphasized repeatedly in his second inaugural address. He is sure to increase military spending, and by threatening to seize or otherwise acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal, he has already proved that he will not shy away from conflict. Trump wants to reduce Washington’s commitments to international institutions and to narrow the scope of U.S. alliances, but he is hardly interested in overseeing an American retreat from the global stage.
The true roots of Trump’s foreign policy can be found in the 1950s. They emerge from that decade’s surging anticommunism, although not from the liberal variant that channeled democracy promotion, technocratic skill, and vigorous internationalism, and that was championed by Presidents Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy in response to the Soviet threat. Trump’s vision stems from the right-wing anticommunist movements of the 1950s, which pitted the West against its enemies, drew on religious motifs, and harbored a suspicion of American liberalism as too soft, too postnational, and too secular to protect the country.
This political legacy is a tale of three books. First came Witness by the American journalist Whittaker Chambers, a former communist and Soviet spy who eventually broke with the party and became a political conservative. Witness was his 1952 manifesto on fellow-traveling American liberals and their treachery, which emboldened the Soviet Union. A similar vision motivated James Burnham, the preeminent postwar conservative foreign-policy thinker. In his 1964 book, Suicide of the West, he faulted the American foreign-policy establishment for snobbish disloyalty and for upholding “principles that are internationalist and universal rather than local or national.” Burnham advocated a foreign policy built on “family, community, Church, country and, at the farthest remove, civilization—not civilization in general but this historically specific civilization, of which I am a member.”
Artwork depicting Trump, Putin, and Xi at an art gallery in Crimea, Ukraine, February 2025Alexey Pavlishak / Reuters
One of Burnham’s intellectual successors was a young journalist named Pat Buchanan. Buchanan supported Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, was an aide to President Richard Nixon, and in 1992, launched a formidable primary challenge to the sitting Republican president, George H. W. Bush. It is Buchanan whose ideas most precisely foreshadow the Trump era. In 2002, Buchanan published The Death of the West, in which he observed that “poor whites are moving to the right” and contended that “the global capitalist and the true conservative are Cain and Abel.” Despite the book’s title, Buchanan had some hope for the West (in his us-and-them sense of the term) and was confident in globalism’s impending crack-up. “Because it is a project of elites, and because its architects are unknown and unloved,” he wrote, “globalism will crash on the Great Barrier Reef of patriotism.”
Trump assimilated this decades-long conservative tradition not through studying such figures but through instinct and campaign-trail improvisation. Like Chambers, Burnham, and Buchanan, outsiders enamored of power, Trump relishes iconoclasm and rupture, seeks to upend the status quo, and loathes liberal elites and foreign-policy experts. Trump may seem an unlikely heir to these men and the movements they shaped, which were shot through with Christian moralism and at times with elitism. But he has cannily and successfully cast himself not as a refined exemplar of Western cultural and civilizational virtues but as their toughest defender from enemies without and within.
THE REVISIONISTS
Trump’s dislike of universalistic internationalism aligns him with Putin, Xi, Modi, and Erdogan. These five leaders share an appreciation of foreign-policy limits and a nervous inability to stand still. They are all pressing for change while operating within certain self-imposed parameters. Putin is not trying to Russify the Middle East. Xi is not trying to remake Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East in China’s image. Modi is not attempting to construct ersatz Indias abroad. And Erdogan is not pushing Iran or the Arab world to be more Turkish. Trump is likewise uninterested in Americanization as a foreign-policy agenda. His sense of American exceptionalism separates the United States from an intrinsically un-American outside world.
Revisionism can coexist with this collective avoidance of global system building and with the thinning out of the international order. To Xi, history and Chinese power—not the UN Charter or Washington’s preferences—are the true arbiters of Taiwan’s status, for China is whatever he says it is. Although India does not sit beside a global flash point like Taiwan, it continues to litigate its borders with China and Pakistan, which have been unresolved since India achieved independence in 1947. India ends wherever Modi says it ends.
Erdogan’s revisionism is more literal. To advantage its allies in Azerbaijan, Turkey facilitated Azerbaijan’s expulsion of Armenians from the contested territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, not through negotiation but through military force. Turkey’s membership in the NATO alliance, which entails a formal commitment to democracy and to the integrity of borders, did not stand in Erdogan’s way. Turkey has also established itself as a military presence in Syria. This is not quite a reconstitution of the Ottoman Empire. Erdogan does not aim to keep Syrian territory in perpetuity. But Turkey’s military-political projects in the South Caucasus and the Middle East have a historical resonance for Erdogan. Proof of Turkey’s greatness, they show that Turkey will be wherever Erdogan says it ought to be.
Amid this rising tide of revisionism, Russia’s war against Ukraine is the central story. Acting in the name of Russian “greatness” and presiding over a country that has no end in his eyes, Putin’s speeches are awash in historical allusions. Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, once wisecracked that Putin’s closest advisers are “Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great.” But it is the future, not the past, that really concerns Putin. Russia’s 2022 invasion was a geopolitical turning point akin to those the world witnessed in 1914, 1939, and 1989. Putin waged war to partition or colonize Ukraine. He meant the invasion to set a precedent that would justify similar wars in other theaters and possibly excite other players (including China) about the possibilities of disruptive military ventures. Putin rewrote the rules, and he has not ceased doing so: badly as the invasion has gone for Russia, it has not resulted in Russia’s global isolation. Putin has renormalized the idea of large-scale war as a means of territorial conquest. He has done so in Europe, which had once epitomized the rules-based international order.
Today’s conflicts amount to the clash of civilizations lite.
The war in Ukraine, however, hardly augurs the death of international diplomacy. In some ways, the war has kickstarted it. For example, the BRICS group, which formally links China, India, and Russia (along with Brazil, South Africa, and other non-Western countries) has grown larger and arguably more cohesive. On the other side, Ukraine’s coalition of supporters has become far more than transatlantic. It includes Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea. Multilateralism is alive and well; it is just not all-encompassing.
In this kaleidoscopic geopolitical landscape, relationships are protean and complex. Putin and Xi have built a partnership but not quite an alliance. Xi has no reason to imitate Putin’s reckless break with Europe and the United States. Despite being rivals, Russia and Turkey can at least deconflict their actions in the Middle East and in the South Caucasus. India regards China apprehensively. And although some analysts have taken to describing China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia as forming an “axis,” they are four profoundly different countries whose interests and worldviews frequently diverge.
The foreign policies of these countries emphasize history and uniqueness, the notion that charismatic leaders must heroically uphold Russian or Chinese or Indian or Turkish interests. This militates against their convergence and makes it hard for them to form stable axes. An axis requires coordination, whereas the interaction among these countries is fluid, transactional, and personality-driven. Nothing here is black and white, nothing set in stone, nothing nonnegotiable.
This milieu suits Trump perfectly. He is not overly constrained by religiously and culturally defined fault lines. He often prizes individuals over governments and personal relationships over formal alliances. Although Germany is a NATO ally of the United States and Russia a perennial adversary, Trump clashed with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in his first term and treated Putin with respect. The countries Trump wrestles with the most are those that lie within the West. Had Huntington lived to see this, he would have found it baffling.
A VISION OF WAR
In Trump’s first term, the international landscape was fairly calm. There were no major wars. Russia appeared to have been contained in Ukraine. The Middle East appeared to be entering a period of relative stability facilitated in part by the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords, a set of deals intended to enhance regional order. China appeared to be deterrable in Taiwan; it never came close to invading. And in deed if not always in word, Trump conducted himself as a typical Republican president. He increased U.S. defense commitments to Europe, welcoming two new countries into NATO. He struck no deals with Russia. He talked harshly about China, and he maneuvered for advantage in the Middle East.
But today, a major war rages in Europe, the Middle East is in disarray, and the old international system is in tatters. A confluence of factors might lead to disaster: the further erosion of rules and borders, the collision of disparate national-greatness enterprises supercharged by erratic leaders and by rapid-fire communication on social media, and the mounting desperation of medium-sized and smaller states, which resent the unchecked prerogatives of the great powers and feel imperiled by the consequences of international anarchy. A catastrophe is more likely to erupt in Ukraine than in Taiwan or the Middle East because the potential for world war and for nuclear war is greatest in Ukraine.
Even in the rules-based order, the integrity of borders has never been absolute—especially the borders of countries in Russia’s vicinity. But since the end of the Cold War, Europe and the United States have remained committed to the principle of territorial sovereignty. Their enormous investment in Ukraine honors a distinctive vision of European security: if borders can be altered by force, Europe, where borders have so often generated resentment, would descend into all-out war. Peace in Europe is possible only if borders are not easily adjustable. In his first term, Trump underscored the importance of territorial sovereignty, promising to build a “big, beautiful wall” along the U.S. border with Mexico. But in that first term, Trump did not have to contend with a major war in Europe. And it’s clear now that his belief in the sanctity of borders applies primarily to those of the United States.
Trump and Modi in New Delhi, February 2020Al Drago / Reuters
China and India, meanwhile, have reservations about Russia’s war, but along with Brazil, the Philippines, and many other regional powers, they have made a far-reaching decision to retain their ties with Russia even as Putin labors away at destroying Ukraine. Ukrainian sovereignty is immaterial to these “neutral” countries, unimportant compared with the value of a stable Russia under Putin and with the value of continuing energy and arms deals.
These countries may underestimate the risks of accepting Russian revisionism, which could lead not to stability but to a wider war. The spectacle of a carved-up or defeated Ukraine would terrify Ukraine’s neighbors. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland are NATO members that take comfort in NATO’s Article 5 commitment to mutual defense. Yet Article 5 is underwritten by the United States—and the United States is far away. If Poland and the Baltic republics concluded that Ukraine was on the brink of a defeat that would put their own sovereignty at risk, they might elect to join the fight directly. Russia might respond by taking the war to them. A similar outcome could result from a grand bargain among Washington, western European countries, and Moscow that ends the war on Russian terms but has a radicalizing effect on Ukraine’s neighbors. Fearing Russian aggression on the one hand and the abandonment of their allies on the other, they could go on the offensive. Even if the United States stayed on the sidelines amid a Europe-wide war, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom would probably not remain neutral.
Were the war in Ukraine to widen in that way, its outcome would greatly affect the reputations of Trump and Putin. Vanity would exert itself, as it so often does in international affairs. Just as Putin cannot afford to lose a war to Ukraine, Trump cannot afford to “lose” Europe. To squander the prosperity and power projection that the United States gains from its military presence in Europe would be humiliating for any American president. The psychological incentives for escalation would be strong. And in a highly personalistic international system, especially one agitated by undisciplined digital diplomacy, such a dynamic could take hold elsewhere. It could spark hostilities between China and India, perhaps, or between Russia and Turkey.
A VISION OF PEACE
Alongside such worst-case scenarios, consider how Trump’s second term could also improve a deteriorating international situation. A combination of workmanlike U.S. relations with Beijing and Moscow, a nimble approach to diplomacy in Washington, and a bit of strategic luck might not necessarily lead to major breakthroughs, but it could produce a better status quo. Not an end to the war in Ukraine, but a reduction in its intensity. Not a resolution of the Taiwan dilemma, but guardrails to prevent a major war in the Indo-Pacific. Not a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but some form of U.S. detente with a weakened Iran, and the emergence of a viable government in Syria. Trump might not become an unqualified peacemaker, but he could help usher in a less war-torn world.
Under Biden and his predecessors Barack Obama and George W. Bush, Russia and China had to cope with systemic pressure from Washington. Moscow and Beijing stood outside the liberal international order in part by choice and in part because they were not democracies. Russian and Chinese leaders exaggerated this pressure, as if regime change were actual U.S. policy, but they were not wrong to detect a preference in Washington for political pluralism, civil liberties, and the separation of powers.
With Trump back in office, that pressure has dissipated. The form of the governments in Russia and China does not preoccupy Trump, whose rejection of nation building and regime change is absolute. Even though the sources of tension remain, the overall atmosphere will be less fraught, and more diplomatic exchanges may be possible. There may be more give-and-take within the Beijing-Moscow-Washington triangle, more concessions on small points, and more openness to negotiation and to confidence-building measures in zones of war and contestation.
If Trump and his team can practice it, flexible diplomacy—the deft management of constant tensions and rolling conflicts—could pay big dividends. Trump is the least Wilsonian president since Woodrow Wilson himself. He has no use for overarching structures of international cooperation such as the UN or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Instead, he and his advisers, especially those who hail from the tech world, might approach the global stage with the mentality of a start-up, a company just formed and perhaps soon to be dissolved but able to react quickly and creatively to the conditions of the moment.
Ukraine will be an early test. Instead of pursuing a hasty peace, the Trump administration should stay focused on protecting Ukrainian sovereignty, which Putin will never accept. To allow Russia to curtail Ukraine’s sovereignty might provide a veneer of stability but could bring war in its wake. Instead of an illusory peace, Washington should help Ukraine determine the rules of engagement with Russia, and through these rules, the war could gradually be minimized. The United States would then be able to compartmentalize its relations with Russia, as it did with the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, agreeing to disagree about Ukraine while looking for possible points of agreement on nuclear nonproliferation, arms control, climate change, pandemics, counterterrorism, the Arctic, and space exploration. The compartmentalization of conflict with Russia would serve a core U.S. interest, one that is dear to Trump: the prevention of a nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia.
Biden, not Trump, represented a detour.
A spontaneous style of diplomacy can make it easier to act on strategic luck. The revolutions in Europe in 1989 offer a good example. The dissolution of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union have sometimes been interpreted as a masterstroke of U.S. planning. Yet the fall of the Berlin Wall that year had little to do with American strategy, and the Soviet disintegration was not something the U.S. government expected to happen: it was all accident and luck. President George H. W. Bush’s national security team was superb not at predicting or controlling events but at responding to them, not doing too much (antagonizing the Soviet Union) and not doing too little (letting a united Germany slip out of NATO). In this spirit, the Trump administration should be primed to seize the moment. To make the most of whatever opportunities come its way, it must not get bogged down in system and in structure.
But taking advantage of lucky breaks requires preparation as well as agility. In this regard, the United States has two major assets. The first is its network of alliances, which greatly magnifies Washington’s leverage and room to maneuver. The second is the American practice of economic statecraft, which expands U.S. access to markets and critical resources, attracts outside investment, and maintains the American financial system as a central node of the global economy. Protectionism and coercive economic policies have their place, but they should be subordinate to a broader, more optimistic vision of American prosperity, and one that privileges long-time allies and partners.
None of the usual descriptors of world order apply anymore: the international system is not unipolar or bipolar or multipolar. But even in a world without a stable structure, the Trump administration can still use American power, alliances, and economic statecraft to defuse tension, minimize conflict, and furnish a baseline of cooperation among countries big and small. That could serve Trump’s wish to leave the United States better off at the end of his second term than it was at the beginning.
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The response to Elon Musk’s “What did you do last week?” email to federal employees suggests that there may be limits to how far he can push the government’s work force.
Elon Musk participated in a fireside chat with the TV host Rob Finnerty during the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., last week.Credit…Eric Lee/The New York Times
Elon Musk’s monthlong rampage through the federal bureaucracy appears to have met its first real test, as some of President Trump’s top loyalists flatly reject the billionaire’s demand that their employees justify their jobs or be summarily fired.
By Monday, just 48 hours after an email from Mr. Musk with the subject line “What did you do last week?” landed in the email boxes of millions of federal workers, personnel officials proclaimed the “request” to be voluntary even as Mr. Musk renewed his demand.
For the first time since the beginning of Mr. Trump’s return to power, government employees appeared to be fending off, at least for now, an ambush in their war with the world’s richest man. Even if the head-spinning series of events — contradictory tweets from Mr. Musk, comments from the president and emails from agency heads — left many of them confused.
After Mr. Musk’s email, several agencies quickly sent out emails telling their employees they did not need to provide the five bullet points about their activity that he wanted.
“There is no H.H.S. expectation that H.H.S. employees respond to O.P.M., and there is no impact to your employment with the agency if you choose not to respond,” said an email sent to employees at the Department of Health and Human Services, referring to the agency that sent Mr. Musk’s request, the Office of Personnel Management.
The Department of Health and Human Services added that anyone who wanted to respond should “assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly.”
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Candidates vying to replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada faced each other for the first time on Monday in a French-language debate.
The stage was shared by four hopefuls: former governor of the banks of Canada and England Mark Carney, former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, Liberal government House leader Karina Gould, and businessman and former MP Frank Baylis.
The question of how to deal with Donald Trump dominated the first half, as the US president has repeatedly threatened to tariff Canada and make it the “51st state.”
Candidates also answered questions about domestic matters like immigration, healthcare and the high cost of living.
Early in the debate, Freeland – whose resignation as finance minister in December triggered the collapse of Trudeau’s leadership – stated that Trump represented “the greatest threat to Canada since World War Two”.
She frequently drew on her experience in government, saying that she had successfully faced Trump during his first term when she helped renegotiate North America’s longstanding free-trade agreement.
But Freeland warned that Trump’s second term might be worse for Canada.
“He wants to turn Canada into the 51st state, and it’s no joke,” she said. “That is why he is supporting [Russian President] Vladimir Putin’s criminal attempt to redraw Ukraine’s borders.”
“Trump wants to redraw our borders too,” Freeland said.
To counter these threats, Freeland and the other candidates suggested strengthening trade ties with the EU and the UK.
Baylis proposed a “new economic bloc” consisting of Canada, the UK, New Zealand and Australia, noting that all four countries shared the same values, cultures and governing systems.
Carney, who is frontrunner in the polls, focused his message on helping Canada achieve economic prosperity. He proposed doing so by leveraging its resources, including critical minerals and metals, as well as making Canada a “superpower of clean energy” and removing trade barriers between provinces.
He, too, agreed with Freeland that Trump’s second term was different from the first.
“He is more isolationist. He is more aggressive,” Carney said. “In the past he wanted our markets. Now he wants our country.”
He added that he would be in favour of imposing dollar-for-dollar tariffs on the US should Trump move ahead with his threat to levy a 25% tax on all Canadian goods starting on 4 March.
Gould, the youngest candidate on the stage, positioned herself as the candidate “for today and the future”, with a message that homed in on how a Liberal Party under her leadership would work to make life more affordable for Canadians.
The candidates also addressed shifting US policy on Ukraine. As the four debated, Trudeau was in Kyiv marking three years since the Russia-Ukraine war began.
All four candidates agreed that Canada should continue supporting Ukraine. Freeland suggested that money seized from Russia through sanctions be redistributed to help Ukraine’s war effort, while Carney stated that any discussion on Ukraine’s future could not happen without the Ukrainians at the table.
Freeland also suggested that Canada should foster closer ties with Denmark which, she noted. was also facing threats from Trump who has signalled his desire to take over Greenland – a Danish territory.
For the second half of the debate, candidates offered up their ideas for how to help Canada reduce its federal budget deficit, tackle crime and increase its military spending.
They were also asked about climate change, with both Freeland and Carney saying they no longer supported a carbon tax on consumers – a key climate policy of the Trudeau government that has become unpopular with Canadians.
At certain points, candidates also took aim at Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, saying he would be unfit to defend Canada against Trump.
Poilievre is currently leading in the national polls, though the gap between him and the Liberal Party has narrowed since Trudeau’s resignation. The Conservative leader has since focused his attacks on Carney, arguing that a Liberal Party under his leadership would not be different from that under Trudeau.
Monday’s debate is the first of two, with a second, English-language debate slated for Tuesday. Liberal Party members will vote for their next leader on 9 March, after which Trudeau is expected to step down.
The French-language debate is especially important for Francophone Canadians in Quebec, whose votes are influential in helping decide which party will form Canada’s next government.
Whoever is elected as leader would become Canada’s next prime minister until the next general election, which must be held on or before 20 October.
