Welcome back, Vladimir! All is forgiven.
That’s the message President Donald Trump delivered, first in a phone call last week, and now very publicly, to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
No matter how this ultimately affects negotiations over Ukraine, the country Mr. Putin invaded three years ago: Mr. Trump’s embrace of the man who started Europe’s most devastating conflict since World War II is likely to have a lasting impact on U.S. alliances worldwide.
Why We Wrote This
President Trump’s readiness to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine with the aggressor, Vladimir Putin, while blaming the victim, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has thrown the Western alliance into its worst crisis since World War II.
One of its immediate effects seems irreversible.
In a major victory for Moscow even before Ukraine talks have begun, the U.S. president has abandoned a core element of the allied response to Mr. Putin’s unprovoked war: isolating Russia and excluding it from the top table of world diplomacy.
After last week’s phone call, the first such contact since the 2022 invasion, Mr. Trump sent Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Saudi Arabia for talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Moscow’s delegation also included Mr. Putin’s top foreign policy aide and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund.
All three men are still subject to international sanctions imposed after Russia’s attack.
If, as Mr. Trump predicted this week, he and Mr. Putin hold summit talks in the coming days, Moscow’s diplomatic isolation will be in tatters.
So, too, will be a long-unquestioned consensus among the U.S. and its allies: that Mr. Putin’s invasion and destruction of Ukraine represent a danger to Europe’s security and a violation of international law, and are simply wrong.
In recent days, Mr. Trump has increasingly echoed Mr. Putin’s narrative about the war.
He has called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator” who bore responsibility for the war, because he could have negotiated a way out by simply ceding parts of his country to Mr. Putin.
Mr. Trump added that, like the Russian leader, he believed Mr. Zelenskyy should hold an election – delayed because of the war – before being given a seat at talks to determine his country’s future.
Mr. Trump claimed recent polls had Mr. Zelenskyy “down at 4% in approval rating,” in an apparent nod to Kremlin arguments that he lacks political legitimacy.
In fact, the most recently published poll suggests he enjoys nearly 60% backing, comfortably above Mr. Trump’s own poll numbers.
Beyond the alarm in Europe at Mr. Trump’s U-turn on Russia, allies further afield will be worried about what the move portends for his broader foreign policy in the next four years.
Until now, countries such as Japan, or Australia, have shared the Europeans’ view that by signaling their readiness to address Mr. Trump’s concerns about investment and trade, they might find sufficient common ground to ensure their decades-long partnerships held firm.
In the early weeks of Mr. Trump’s second administration, the rule of thumb has been to avoid overreacting to public statements they find worrisome. Private discussions with Washington, they trust, will yield more considered policies.
That is still what European governments want to believe regarding Ukraine, having taken some encouragement from more nuanced statements by U.S. officials including Secretary of State Rubio and Mr. Trump’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg.
They know, however, that only Mr. Trump’s voice will matter in the end.
And he appears to have developed a far more coherent overall view of what he wants to accomplish in the world than he had during his first term.
It is a vision of an America laser-centered on its own economic interests – wielding its influence, above all through the threat of tariffs, to drive harder bargains with its allies. Mr. Trump’s use of his personal leverage to shape relations with other world leaders and rivals, such as Vladimir Putin, is key to his vision.
During his first term, America’s alliances survived some battering to emerge largely unscathed.
But that was in part due to the presence of senior figures – such as former National Security Adviser John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, CIA director and later Secretary of State – who intermittently tried to moderate Mr. Trump’s thinking.
That was the case, for instance, during a first-term bout of summitry with similarities to this week’s Russia embrace: his meetings with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
After their first summit, he surprised Asian allies by suddenly canceling regular military exercises by U.S. and South Korean forces – adopting North Korean vocabulary by referring to them as “war games.”
But in the end, despite what Mr. Trump had described as a political love affair with Mr. Kim, North Korea refused to give up its nuclear weapons program, as Mr. Trump had demanded it should.
European governments believe it is equally unlikely that Mr. Putin will abandon his stated conditions for ending the war, including recognition of Russia’s annexation of eastern Ukraine and a refusal to accept Ukrainian membership of NATO.
Their deepening concern is that Mr. Trump, who said Wednesday that the Russians “have the cards” in negotiations over Ukraine’s future, might, in fact, agree with the Russian leader’s arguments.
In the absence of any sign so far of serious pushback from within the administration, that will leave European countries, and Ukraine, to fend for themselves.
