Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 we have seen two consistent narratives that have remained unchanged. First, a constant, increasingly hysterical series of claims from Russia that they are prepared to start a nuclear war unless they are given free rein to plunder, torture, and slaughter. Second, a constant, increasingly hesitant meekness from the West that we are reluctant to provide Ukraine with money and munitions lest it trigger Armageddon. This combination of nuclear blackmail and Western dithering has allowed the war to drag on much longer than it ought, with appalling atrocities inflicted on the Ukrainian people, growing resentment among Western populations, and the increasing transformation of Russia into a fanatical aggressor calling upon even more unhinged dictators to join its genocidal campaign. Under a Trump administration, this hysteria and hesitancy will increase.
Donald Trump’s presidency has the potential to go in two directions for Ukraine, Western defence, and the future of the post-WWII rules-based international order, which at present is moribund in the face of what Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine term “the Axis of Upheaval”. Now that Trump controls the White House, Senate, and House and is surrounding himself with appointees whose qualifications are political loyalty over policymaking competence, he has free rein to enact his will. And as the 2016-2020 presidency showed, Trump’s will is highly erratic and near-impossible to predict. One of these two directions is positive for Ukraine and the West. The first Trump presidency showed a muscular American foreign policy against tyrannical dictators – namely Iran and China, and a president with a business rather than policymaking background, who view international politics as transactional, has little desire to appear weak, duped, or to make bad deals (although the incoming president’s commercial past has more than a few of these).
In this scenario, Trump’s antagonism towards China and America-First policy could be most positive for Ukraine. No president wishes to be accused of creating job losses in American munitions factories or handing over Ukraine’s rich to a rival – while his lukewarm attitude to Russia, open hostility to China and Iran, and sense of personal betrayal by North Korea, has strong potential to fracture an authoritarian axis already under severe strain by Putin’s military recklessness, nuclear brinkmanship over the world’s first launch of an IRBM in anger, and Xi Jinping’s fury at North Korea’s involvement in the war. This fragmenting of the Axis would be highly beneficial to Ukraine and the West, but although this scenario could well end the war in 2025, it would again show the unpredictability of US policy under Trump and his successor.
The second direction is much more bleak. Trump’s sainted status among his support base allows him to spin any foreign policy development as good for America, and shift the blame for economic fallout onto Democrats, allies, and an imagined nefarious global elite conspiring against the American people. Should Trump choose to withdraw support for Ukraine or force President Zelenskyy into negotiations for a Cold War-style partition of Ukraine, there is next to nothing that the rest of NATO and its allies can do. The European Union has money but not muscle. NATO’s Pacific allies are hesitant to transfer munitions to Europe, especially if they fear an isolationist USA and an emboldened China in the Pacific. AUKUS and the European Political Community are still being formed, European munitions manufacturing is woefully inadequate, and no amount of StormShadows and SCALPs from Britain and France can make up for a withdrawal of the enormous military assistance provided by the USA. And crucially, Europe is experiencing its own bout of hysteria. European populations, angered at the post-pandemic economic slump of Europe, and European governments fearful of isolationist or pro-Russia populist rivals snapping at their heels, are showing hesitancy in providing aid and hysteria at constant, unrealised threats of nuclear conflict – as evidenced by the failed German government reaching out to the Kremlin.
In this second scenario, the war can still end in 2025 but bequeath a much darker world, in which megalomaniac dictators and tinpot tyrants feel emboldened to attack their neighbours – as witnessed in the rapid, bloody end to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict – while governments across the planet scramble for nuclear defences in the face of an unreliable West.
The grave challenge for policymakers across the free world is Trump’s erratic, unpredictable style. His first administration showed an ad hoc approach to policy and a disregard for precedents and rules. Now, in control of all three policymaking branches in Washington, Trump has the potential to be either the saviour of the rules-based international order through arming Ukraine – or be its executioner. If the Western order is to survive then leaders must persuade their angry, dejected, fleeced populations to pay even more for defence while economic, strategic, and moral arguments must give way to personal diplomacy and transactional flattery to keep the White House mollified. Instead of crowing over political appointments to the White House, Allied politicians must immediately pay attention to diplomatic appointments to Western embassies in Washington.