The EU’s worst nightmare has come true: Donald Trump is returning to the White House. It’s not hard to imagine the panic that many leaders must feeling as they gather this morning in Budapest for the European Political Community summit. Most of them, after all, have spent the past four years undermining the EU’s strategic interests by submissively aligning themselves with the Biden Administration’s reckless foreign policy everywhere from China to Gaza. The result? Europe today is more politically, economically and militarily vassalised to America than at any point since 1945.
More to the point, European elites have allowed themselves to be dragged by Washington into a disastrous proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, condemning their citizens to collapsing industry and rising prices. That’s even as the conflict in Eastern Europe exposes the continent to unprecedented military risks, including the genuine possibility of nuclear war. Yet despite all these sacrifices, all that eagerness to do the Pentagon’s bidding, Trump’s isolationist bent means it could ultimately all be for nothing.
For the past few years, the EU’s leaders have framed their entire foreign policy in American terms. Nato expansionism; economically decoupling from Russia; supporting Ukraine’s victory-at-all-costs strategy — each has been justified in the name of preserving the transatlantic alliance, even at the expense of Europe’s actual interests. Under Biden, that meant embracing a hawkish agenda grounded in aggressively countering any challenges to US hegemony, all supposedly part of an existential struggle between democracy and tyranny.
But with Trump back in charge, and his administration likely to pursue an isolationist bent, all these sacrifices risk being pointless. Though the president-elect is unlikely to withdraw from Nato altogether, he has expressed scepticism towards the alliance during his campaign. Among other things, that has involved criticising European countries for failing to meet defence spending targets, even suggesting that the US might not protect Nato members if they don’t pull their weight.
It’s easy to see why this prospect alarms the EU establishment. For years, they have backed the “mutually reinforcing roles” of Nato and the European Union, both as a bulwark against Russia and to ensure Western dominance globally. A weakened US commitment to Nato therefore threatens the very foundations of the EU’s newfound ideological identity: an extension of the American umbrella. No less important, the potential withdrawal of American arms and cash from Kyiv would seriously hamper the EU’s ability to continue the proxy war in Ukraine alone, especially given the tight finances and sluggish military-industrial complex of many member states. Trump himself has hinted in just this direction, notably criticising Volodymyr Zelenskyy for allegedly starting the war with Putin.
Trump has even suggested he might unilaterally impose a ceasefire and peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine. This is unlikely to happen: Russia, which is winning on the battlefield, will push for such a hard bargain that even Trump may struggle to accept. A more likely outcome, then, is that the incoming Republican administration will continue to deliver weapons to Kyiv but ask Europe to foot the bill — a situation that would allow the conflict to smoulder on, even as Europe gets poorer. That’s despite the fact that even Western media outlets are now conceding that the war in Ukraine is lost.
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SubscribeWow, the us didn’t force these policies on the eu. Russia and their own bad decisions did that. Who would have thought being weak and dependent on Russia could go wrong?
There is a weird strain of conspiracy theorist who believes Biden and the neocons bewitched all the Europeans to go all in on the Ukraine because … why?
It’s unclear to me why this narrative continues to persist. If you talk to the average Northern European, they’re not thrilled about russia flexing its muscles.
I have just got back from a trip to Finland and Estonia. The Finns have a long history of cordial relationship with Russia, but the Estonians have a visceral hatred for it. I saw a chalkboard outside a cafe which said something like “Hey Putin, why don’t we just fast forward to the part where you kill yourself in a bunker”.
I respect your own experience but do the Finns really have a ‘long history of cordial relationship with Russia’? Have they really forgiven the murderous Russian invasions, and forced annexation of a good chunk of their country within living memory?
You mean like the Soviet-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40? The Finns fought most bravely but were overwhelmed by the human waves of troops pouring in from the East. They never had a chance, and they had no choice but to have a “cordial relationship” with their gigantic neighbor.
You do yourself something of a disservice. The Western European relationship with Russia is historically incredibly complex. Sarcastic incredulity is not the tone in which the problem should be aproached, as if it were a simple thing.
The relationship between Germany and Russia in particular has been the great European geopolitical riddle of the last 200 years. The current state of affairs is another stop-gap. The Pax Americana has done much to freeze the question in aspic for the last 70 years but when American power passes away it will return.
More so, speaking as an Englishman, I am unavoidably aware that I owe my own nations liberty and independence to the expense of Russian blood and arms, in having liberated Europe in 1814 and again in 1945. On the other hand Russia has suffered many painful invasions in her history which has led to an abiding paranoia about her borders, which has undoubtedly made of her a very unpleasant neighbour.
Neither Russia nor Germany is going away. Sense will have to be made of that frontier one way or the other and I am only grateful, if guilty, that there are many hundreds of miles between Dover and the Volga.
For American readers: Fazi is part of a small minority in Europe which thinks like this. People like me, think his views are deranged. Putin is not a conservative by any means. He’s an ethno-nationalist who wants to recreate the Soviet Union, with a crony capitalist economy. He is certainly not our friend.
It extends beyond Putin. If he were to drop dead tomorrow, whoever replaced him would not be our friend either.
Putin is not a nice man and he is not our friend, and most likely neither will his successor be. But that does not change reality, and the reality is that we in the West have to live with Russia. The bear might not be the most pleasant of neighbors and never has been, but he owns a sizable portion of the real estate in Eurasia and is nuclear-armed. We don’t have to love the bear, but that does not make it a good idea to poke him. If we do, he will usually turn to the dragon for help.
“that does not make it a good idea to poke him”
– Yes, let him poke you and take what he want
With respect, it is this particular branch of analysis which seems discordant.
The Soviet Union was many things but it was emphatically not an ethno-nationalist project.
This analysis is one of many seemingly infelicitous pairings of motivations which are routinely attributed to Mr Putin. We are told he is at once a pragmatist and a megalomaniac, an unhinged lunatic and a Macchiavellian genius, a cynic and a Romantic, a nativist and an expansionist, a covetous sybarite and an profligate warmonger.
It is not entirely convincing.
I am well rebuked. I should have been clearer. Putin wants to recreate the geography of the USSR. Even he understands communism was a disaster, so he prefers crony capitalism instead.
I see what you mean now.
The closer model may then be that of the 19th Century Russian founded Holy Alliance, particularly in his relations with the conservative and religious elements in the former Danubian Principalities of the former Austro-Hungary.
The Tsar seems to have sincerely believed that it was a compact for the maintenance of stability, and Christian monarchy. Castlereagh thought it a “piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense” masking Russian aggrandisement and hegemony in the East.
It strikes me that that was also the underlying template on which the atheistic USSR was incongruously super-imposed in the 1950s.
Except Russia, and most certainly its elites, are no longer Christian. Russia has lower Church attendance rates than super-secular Western Europe.
Try as hard as one might, it’s impossible to conjure up a persuasive dynamic of Russian expansionism. As Lindsay Graham observes, they have more than they need and we could profit from getting our hands on it. Thus the need for them to be concerned about what goes on around their borders.
Putin has been in power for more than 20 years. What evidence is there of his desire to re-create the Soviet Union? Oh, that’s right; there is none. None. Zero. Because he’d have moved in that direction by now.
Attacking and invading Ukraine? And Georgia in 2008.
Putin waited, patiently, for the West to implement the Minsk Agreements, while Ukraine bombarded the Russian speaking Eastern Ukraine with artillery, resulting in 16,000 deaths.
And then ‘Elenski announced he was going to get nuclear weapons. From where we don’t know, but Putin didn’t want to find out.
Russia never implemented their part of Minsk, which would have forced them to withdraw the troops they had there.
And Zelensky didn’t threaten to get nuclear weapons then, but merely lamented that they had given up those they had in exchange for worthless security guarantees from Russia and others in the Budapest memorandum.
They might go for nuclear weapons now, if the west withdraws its support. With Ukraines technological level, a smaller nuclear bomb would probably only take 6 months to produce.
Kyiv doesn’t have six months. It’s a Kabul scenario now.
Both preposterously provoked. Putin much criticised for not responding more decisively to Western backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government, one which got on well both East and West by the way.
I agree with your view of Putin, and his intentions. The question is what is the best way for Europe to deal with him and perhaps curb his ambitions. In the 1980s, at the height of the sabre-rattling between the Reagan-led U.S., and the sclerotic regime of the USSR, I spent over a year in Europe (I’m Canadian of Austrian descent), and many of the people I spoke with, who were understandably alarmed about the situation, felt that the best thing for Europe to do about it was…nothing. If the Russians want to invade, let them. They figured that it wouldn’t have taken long for the military discipline in the Warsaw Pact forces to break down, and that the non-Russian forces would have been just as likely to train their guns on their soviet overlords as on European civilians. Of course, such a strategy is not guaranteed to be successful, but no strategy ever is. But it has the advantage of limiting civilian casualties, and doing much less damage to necessary infrastructure than the alternative of conventional or (God-forbid) nuclear war.
It’s better be slave, yes?
Slav, I think you mean.
The kernel of interest in this is that in contemporary conditions, no one can continue in occupation of a non compliant population on any large scale. Putin knows this, that’s why he’s never wanted to conquer and occupy Ukraine merely ensure that it once again has a non hostile regime. That will remain true even when the UA collapses completely. There’ll eventually be a partition of 1993 Ukrainian territory more realistically aligned with composition of population and economic and cultural ties as well as geopolitics. It’s time to start thinking about this as a mutually beneficial outcome and certainly preferable to forever warring.
He’s a Russian imperialist.
That comment is extraordinarily ill informed both about Russia and what most people in Europe now think. Fazi knows what’s what both here and there.
Putin doesn’t need to be our ‘friend’ for us to get on with Russia perfectly well. As was taking place when Bill Burns was US ambassador there under GW Bush. That’s when best ever nuclear nonproliferation deals were done and the US helped Russia into the WTO. Burns published about this in his memoirs including that he was dismissed when a new regime in Washington brought such good relations to an end. Not because of anything Russia had done either.
This author mistakes his own opinions for facts. Truly, unless he is a mind-reader, he does not know what DJT will do. His first term perhaps offers some clues …. he will firmly encourage Europeans nations to do the right thing and pony up for their own defense.
About NATO, it is eminently unfair for America to pour a huge proportion of its GDP into the military, while European nations save money and pay for generous social welfare programs. To protect the vineyard is as important as planting your vines …..
We applauded Trump when he berated NATO members for not spending enough on defense. If Europeans want NATO, then they have to spend 2% of GDP or more on defense.
Besides defense, NATO and the EU need to revisit their Green policies. Perhaps some of you remember President Trump calling our Germany in a UN speech for being too dependent on Russian oil and gas. He was right.
I don’t think Trump is right on much, but he was right on that. Germany should never again buy Russian oil and gas, and neither should anyone else in the West. Do do so is to sign up to be a permanent hostage of whichever tyrant rules Russia.
No we should lift the sanctions.
We shot ourselves in the feet with those. Free trade would be better.
I don’t think there is any evidence that it was russia that stopped the gas is there? And the west imposed the sanctions. So the west decided to cut off a load of cheap gas, at a time when Europe needed it most.
Europe wasn’t exactly held hostage by Russia regarding the gas then, was it?
Do you think continuing to use lng which is more expensive, takes longer to process and has to be shipped from other nations, including Qatar I believe, in Britain’s case, is better?
Surely it was Ukraine that held Europe hostage when it cut off the gas in transit to Europe, because it couldn’t pay its debts to Russia.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Russia-Tells-Europe-To-Negotiate-With-Ukraine-For-Gas-Transit-Deal.amp.html
‘Russia has said it’s willing to continue supplying gas to Europe via Ukraine if Kyiv and the involved European countries can come to an agreement.
The remaining gas flows are roughly split between LNG, pipeline flows through Ukraine and other pipeline routes (primarily flows via Turkey into Bulgaria as well as a small flow via Belarus into Lithuania)’
There is still gas traded through pipelines across Ukraine, you will have to be more specific.
Which gas transit agreement are you saying ukraine has violated?
The sanctions on Russia imposed by Europe and the US are explained here:
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/sanctions-against-russia-explained/
These are far more consequential than whatever gas arrangement you are accusing ukraine of violating. You will have to be less ambiguous. There is still significant gas transiting ukraine as explained here:
https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/end-russian-gas-transit-ukraine-and-options-eu
‘On 1 January 2025, a major contract governing the transit of Russian gas through Ukraine will end, with significant implications for remaining Russian gas exports to some European Union countries’
Whether this agreement continues is significant, is this the agreement you are talking about? In which case it hasn’t even ended yet, hopefully they will continue it.
Biden made it a condition of its support that Ukraine doesn’t renew. But Trump could well change that. Something to watch.
Exactly wrong, as Schroeder proved the only way to avoid such threat is to trade normally, the general rule in British politics forever. Germany’s deals with Gazprom excited envy elsewhere though, that’s where the trouble came from.
Same applies to China, as William Overholt, the best Western expert on Asian economies always maintained, even when it cost him his job at Rand.
Quite, and the Germans laughed at him, they are not laughing now as poverty and AfD comes through the door, and the guilty politicians scramble out through the window.
Trump is not an isolationist, he is a realist.
This author is a fantasist with severe TDS..
If you voted for Baerbock you could have green war. Not going to be re-elected though.
Europe’s security interests would be much better served by making a clean break from NATO.
Europe needs a new Defence Treaty, which brings the EU’s armies under a central command and forces Member States to pay into a common defence budget.
That’s seems impossible today, but with enough Russian tanks on the EU’s doorstep, anything becomes possible.
A ridiculous fantasy that’s never going to happen.
NATO works. It’s not broke, so don’t fix it.
Besides that, there are a lot fewer Russian tanks on the EU’s doorstep today than there were 40 years ago. And the ones remaining aren’t that great.
NATO works? For the US military industrial complex, maybe. But not for Europe or its near neighbours.
NATO is why hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dead rn.
NATO is why energy prices are forcing Europe to deindustrialise.
NATO is Europe’s worst nightmare.
re “NATO is why hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dead” – presumably you think that for some reason Russia is not responsible for its own actions.
If NATO had not marched eastwards after the collapse of the Soviet Union the war in Ukraine might not have happened.
You’re right, the war would have happened in Poland or Hungary instead. With 40 million Ukranians fighting on the Russian side.
Do you have even the slightest bit of evidence to support that? Putin has been around more than 20 years, and did not bother Hungary, Poland, or any other EU nation in that time.
Because they’re all in NATO. If NATO hadn’t expanded things may have been very different.
NATO marched where? I would say it was Ukraine, a sovereign state, who knocked on their door, trying to prevent exactly what has happened. Why do you believe ukrainians don’t have any agency? Is this some form of the classic russian racism towards them?
it is that the overwhelming majotity of the commentators here have probably never been to Russia, dont understand the language and frankly, are quite clueless as to what it really is. 2 years ago, the excellent UnHerd interview with D. Murray The gullible Right has fallen for Putin summarised it well. Interestingly, while, in that country, the United Kingdom is the most consistently hated amongst the ‘unfriendly’ Western nations, it is also the one with the highest prevalence of the fans of Russia. If all that is about the quest for ‘anti-wokeness’, Afganistan would be a safer choice, wouldnt it.
Which Ukrainians ? Zelensky was elected with a mandate for peace at home and abroad and initially he renewed the gas deal with Moscow. But Azovs and others determined to attack Russophone Ukrainians turned things upside down and most Ukrainians were dragged into a conflict they didn’t seek, by their own government.
Putin has wanted to recreate Peter’s empire for decades. The weakness of Europe encouraged him. Alexander said he would rather fight an army of lions led by a sheep and than an army of sheep led by a lion.
Apart from Attlee, Callaghan and Thatcher, Europe has largely been led by sheep. One cannot measure figthing spirit but one can perceive a lack of it.
Since the early 1980s the various violent communist groups such as the Red Army Faction have joined the Green Parties. They pushed for banning of nuclear energy. Schroeder a member of the SDP is friend of Putin. Merkel was a com unist to the age of 35 years and allowed the German armed forces to be degraded.
Since the late 1990s, Europe has been weak and Putin saw his opportunity.
That’s exactly the sort of pseudo idealist warmongering that’s given Britain a worse name in the world now than in Empire days.
NATO has kept its members at peace for 75 years. No NATO member in Europe has been attacked. If that’s not a success for Europe, I don’t know what is.
It outsourced war to Serbia quite successfully.
NATO served a purpose up to 1991. Thereafter, it needed to be dismantled, and the failure to do so has had very negative consequences.
What about a reformed idea of the nato alliance. It at least needs to be more flexible.
I don’t see why the uk/ europe can’t have their own foreign policies that aren’t dictated by nato.
It doesn’t exactly work, to say that the policies they have followed so far, and their performance in aiding Ukraine works is stretching it. They were badly prepared, Europe is now lingering on the edge of a recession, partly due to the sanctions strategy they have followed, we have inflation and ukraine is retreating in places. I think it could work a lot better.
Apparently America is too split politically to support a nato war anyway, (according to an article I read on here) and America can’t really afford it anyway because of their debt.
In reply to Mr Stull, regarding the idea of a European Central command:
Centralising everything doesn’t always work either, nato is basically a centralised defence arrangement anyway, so I’m not sure the idea of a centrally controlled European army would be much better, why can’t we decentralise, and everyone goes back to having their own foreign policy and control of their own army? Surely alliances could then be made as and when necessary, rather than everyone being tied into a central command?
How does NATO work? There is no Soviet Union any longer, so one might reasonably question why it even exists other than the featherbedding of several individual careers. Putin has no desire to invade Europe. He demonstrated that over 20 years of NOT invading. He’d rather do business by selling something his country has that EU states need.
Ummm, he invaded Georgia. He invaded Ukraine twice. Why wouldn’t he take the Baltics is he could get away with it?
Certainly, there’s scope for Trump to shift spend into improving US social and medical welfare if people are to believe he’s made America great again.
Let’s not call Trump’s foreign policy “isolationism.” Let’s call it Monroe Doctrine 2.0.
And let’s not forget Monty’s advice. Rule One: Don’t invade Russia. Rule Two: Don’t invade China.
Personally, my solution to the Ukraine problem is to rename Lviv as Lemberg, as it was in the good old days of Austria-Hungary when Lemberg was the capital of Galicia and Austrian economist von Mises was born.
I foten think that some of the borders in Eastern Europe still don’t make sense even this long after WWII when there were mass population expulsions (e.g. Sudeten Germans, Baltic Germans) and large border changes (Poland moving around 100 miles to the west, Moldova hacked off from Romania) which cleaned up most of the ethnic minority problems that partly led to WWII.
But not all of them were “solved” by those changes. And many are still festering – or capable of being weaponised. Russians in Moldova. Russians in the Baltic States. Not sure ex-Yugoslavia’s totally sorted either.
And certainly, as I think you implied, the sourth western part of Ukraine (Galicia) which used to be in the Austro-Hungarian empire is a far more natural cultural fit with the EU than Donetsk.
Wouldn’t it be nice to move Ukraine back to its 1938 borders. It always gives me frisson of surprise to see Ukraine on the Danube Delta, and no doubt the hapless Bulgarians we sold to the USSR at Yalta , along with much of Hungary and a third of Poland could be set free too to restore the natural balance of East Central Europe.
Europe is going to need to massively re-arm to prepare for the inevitable war with Russia. It now cannot rely on the US to do the “heavy lifting” in this regard.
Why exactly would Russia want invade Western Europe? So he can subsidize a bunch of failed states? Ukraine actually has resources.
“Farmland” is a resource. Russia contains a lot of tundra, but not much fertile land.
Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter.
And yet it is the world’s largest grain exporter.
Re-arming makes a war more likely because it makes it possible for the war to be fought conventionally. Russia is much less likely to attack you if all you have is nukes because you’re then much more likely to use them.
National conservatism is the natural order of thing, pushing peversions as normal will not survive reality.
Progressives have taken the levers of power, they have rewarded themselves with the assets of the West.
The public sectors gaping fanancial maw, used by progressives to retain control is what will destroy them.
Once people fully realise that they have been used by these parodies of human beings, people will destroy them.
Elon Musk realises this, as do a few other of the super rich, will that reality prevail before it is to late for them to save Western culture and their lives, I doubt it, to many of them believe they are obove the natural order of things.
That’s funny, because I would have thought “parody of a human being” was a good description of Musk himself.
Nothing like the resentful jealousy of the small man, is there?
MM, dude your projection is a rather blatant.
My pet theory about the Ukraine is that Trump will broker a “dirty peace” in the Ukraine fairly quickly and then hang some heavy threats on the violation of it. I think that Putin is going to respect Trump and not take the acquisition of a strip of Ukraine and the Crimea as the starting gun to help himself to Moldova, bits of the Baltic States etc.
That gives Europe a bit of breathing space to get their own security beefed up and Trump should put the boot in on that, it’s fair. America’s been grumbling about having to shell out for European security for ages and if we still haven’t made significant moves towards footing our own bills then it’s simply our own fault.
I think in the long term, we’ll thank Trump for being so harsh, as it will bring a certain emancipation. The US and Europe will still be buddies. The US will always be the bossy one that decides where to go on a night out, but we won’t be that annoying friend anymore that always manages “forget their wallet” when you get there and never pays you back.
It’s going to be an uncomfortable time, but we’ll be in a better situation for it long term.
[On a separate, slightly unrelated note: I am really looking forward to watching Starmer and Lammy try to lay on the friendliness and get in Trump’s good books. If I was Trump I’d be doing everything to needle them and max out on the awkwardness. It will be entertaining.]
Good analysis, but the West can’t make the mistake of taking sanctions off Russia. Russia needs to be further ground down, even if by non-military means.
Right, because sanctions are working so well. Good to have you back MM.
They are working quite well. Check out the Russian inflation.
Why ground down? Is it because Russia has the gall not to reject its Orthodoxy in favor of what liberalism has become in the West? Is only one way of life permitted? Those who aspire to the one world state have no choice but to answer “yes.”
Russia has lower church attendance than the west. What orthodoxy are you talking about?
They should be ground down not because they are Orthodox, or speak Russian, or have a totalitarian regime.
They should be ground down because they use force, including hundreds of missiles launched into civilian areas, killing thousands of men, women and children civilians.
They should be ground down because their leaders are profoundly immoral and wicked.
e·vil
[ˈēv(ə)l]
adjective
profoundly immoral and wicked:
I see. So, we in the West, then, are not “beyond good and evil”, as we claim to be. Value judgements are not relative after all. We’re absolutists, notwithstanding our constant protestations to the contrary?
If only the West had implemented the Minsk Agreements … … …
If online Russia had implemented its part of the Minsk agreements…..
You’ve failed to notice that those sanctions are grinding us down , not them. And reshaping their government into a good replica of European Social Democracy of fifty years ago. Real wages, housing conditions, social benefits and investment in health and education all significantly up with very low net debt. No other country in Europe can compete!
Trump will make mincemeat of Starmer…
Starmer/Labour apparently actively campaigned for Kamala in the USA.
No, he didn’t. Some Labour Party members did, but none involved in the government. Starmer and his foreign minister actually played it safe and sucked up to Trump before the election.
(Also, it would be a smart move to choose a username to enable the rest of us to differentiate you from the other “UnHerd Readers” out there with their variously different views).
That should be fun! I’ll bring the popcorn for anyone else who would like to watch.
I’m sure Starmer and Lammy will try to ingratiate themselves with Trump. I’m also fairly sure he doesn’t have any respect or time for grovelling brown nosers.
It would be an utter dereliction of his duty to the country for Starmer to keep Lammy on as FS now. It was stupid to appoint him in the first place.
Interesting article, However it has a large blind side. Normalise relationships with Russia? Exactly how do you normalise relationships with a despot?
The world is filled with despots. You have to have a relationship with them.
The world is indeed filled with despots, but most of them don’t launch unprovoked invasions of neighboring countries.
How much more of a defeat do you have to witness in Ukraine before you recognise you were wrong to Stand with them?
As far as I can see, Ukraine is still an indepedent country and hasn’t surrendered to Russia. And Russia hasn’t made any net territorial gain in the past 2.5 years. Despite huge manpower, material and economic losses. As well as huge reputational damage (Who would now choose to buy Russian military kit when it performs so poorly ? Who thinks the Russian armed services are well led and perform well in the field ?).
What am I missing ?
What you’re missing is the enormous cost in human lives of keeping this war going indefinitely. Still, it’s not your kids doing the dying so who gives a f**k, eh?
He claimed there was a “defeat”. That was what I challenged. Because it’s simply untrue.
Actually, I do care about the kids dying. And please don’t try to tell me what I think (we saw how well that sort of thing went down for the Dems in the US election).
And no, I don’t think the war should be continued indefinitely. Trump is an opportunity to come to a practical settlement that ensures Ukraine’s survival and security, even if that means reduced borders. And yes, I would regard such an outcome as having been worth the effort to ensure regional stability around Ukraine and prevent harmful and destructive Russian expansion into its former empire.
I did claim their was a defeat, because there so patently is.
Russia is closing in on the final square kilometre of Luhansk Oblast. Donetsk will follow soon.
Trump will cut a deal, that’s what he does. And when he does, Russia will have gained much of what it set out to get, Ukraine will end up with less territory than they could have had a year ago. With thousands of dead young men and an economy in tatters.
That is the very definition of defeat.
Ukraine is by no means an ‘independent country’. It is beholden for its very survival to the American Empire under whose lure it fell.
As for territorial gains, this is simply false. Bahkmut, Avdiivka, Vulhedar…Russia has made significant net territorial gains and is currently winning on average 15 sq km a day.
Reputational damage? Did you see the recent BRICS summit? Half the world was there, eager to shake Putin’s hand. Or if you mean their military hardware, my sources suggest the Russian equipment performs about as well as the NATO stuff – so is significantly better value for money. Also, Russia can deliver, because they have production capacity the West lacks.
What are you missing? The fact that Ukraine as a nation has been effectively destroyed. Its EU allies dragged into the economic mud.
You may also have missed the recent Presidential election in the US. I’ll save you the trouble of reading up on it: The guy who promised to get out of Ukraine just won.
It is far more independent than it would be with a Russian puppet regime (like Belarus with its agrofuhrer).
The Standers with Ukraine will say absolutely anything.
In UA today, young men are being dragged from their homes by recruitment thugs to die in a proxy war the West is waging against Russia, on the orders of a regime installed by the CIA and who just cancelled the last election.
The public budget is paid by foreign backers, and no one with half a brain believes that Ukraine would survive 20 minutes past the withdrawal of Western backing.
Whatever Belarus is or isn’t, that is not ‘independence’.
“In UA today, young men are being dragged from their homes by recruitment thugs to die in a proxy war the West is waging against Russia”
– Wait, wait, wait… Where are these young American men dying in Ukraine? Or where do you buy this weed to smoke?
I live in Ukraine and no it hasn’t been “destroyed” and it is an independent country preserving lots of freedom and safety for its citizens even during the war.
Peter is saying net territorial gain in the past 2.5 years, meaning it lost more territory since than it acquired and that is true, considering it got kicked out of Kyiv, Kherson and Kharkiv regions during that time. The further gains are negligible, at the current pace Russia will occupy the whole of Donbass in 5 years, except it cannot sustain this pace for even another year, considering the staggering losses.
Really? Young men can’t leave the country. They are forced into the army.
The President cancelled the elections.
And the public budget is paid by foreign countries, meaning the moment they stop paying the country goes into immediate default.
To count ‘blitz’ territory is dishonest and specious. Russia never occupied this territory, they just moved through it. As you know, if you live in Ukraine, the fortified lines are in the east.
Regarding casualties, as I have written here many times before, Russia is taking fewer than Ukraine, for a much bigger population. They can sustain and everything about their current strategy suggests they are intending to.
The truth.
KSA? China? Indonesia? Etc.
It will be easy once Putin faces defeat. If that day never comes, we will just cede ground as he rolls out the empire as far as he can.
Trump’s election is a victory for free speech in Europe. These clowns in the EU will think twice about punishing Musk.
Great point, hopefully with wider implications for the Misinformation “industry” and those malignant actors seeking to clip the wings of Unherd.
Hopefully Unheard will have the sense to relocate to a US service provider as Guido has.
It certainly saved my Twitter account!
I get 90% of my news from YouTube clips and X. It is the way forward.
Are you being sarcastic? It’s certainly the way forward if you just want to hear what you want to hear, and then more of the same.
Have you been to either YouTube or X? I can hear a lot of what I disagree with, along with what I already think. THAT was Elon’s whole point. YouTube, meanwhile, is far more likely to whack a video that deviates from leftist orthodoxy than one that the challenges the right.
This explains a lot
Sadly, I see no signs of reality hitting the clowns (in whom I include the media, institutions and business elite as well as the politicians). They’re still stuck in their cognitive dissonance (in its malignant TDS strain). They’ll continue to tell you that he somehow doesn’t represent America and imply that only the dumb voters supported him, so their opinions don’t matter as much as the college grads.
But I do think it moves the needle amongst some of the people in the UK and EU. However, as most of us recognise, our leaders don’t lead (and haven’t done for 20 years or more), they follow and it will take far longer for them to catch up.
That is a very good point.
I think the author should have a lie down and relax. Trumps election success is not good news for the Euro Elite it is true but it’s also not good news for the BRICs either. With the abandonment of the Net Zero delusion just watch America re- industrialise and grow and coal burning China facing a US tariff begin to lose its industrial advantage.
And watch other countries go oops and try to catch up.
Who is doing the alleging in this sentence? I think we should be told. It’s framed as not Trump and not the writer: just some unnamed people.
But such a serious accusation needs to be stood up properly.
‘Trump himself has hinted in just this direction, notably criticising Volodymyr Zelenskyy for allegedly starting the war with Putin.’
In the end we will have to address Russian security concerns, and how previous policy, or lack thereof, has stoked them. But the other side of the coin is the not unreasonable desire of those states surrounding Russia to be as free from its influence as possible. Should we have turned our backs on them when they requested NATO membership? Is Ukraine to be so casually consigned to the dustbin as the author would seem to have it? Is the idea of combating naked aggression no more than an American ploy to retain hegemony? And is Russia really a natural ally simply because it takes a more robust attitude to the culture wars nonsense our own elites have bent the knee to?
Russia doesn’t really have ‘security concerns’ – it is safe and knows it. The ‘concerns’ are the language it uses to legitimise aggression (ie a ‘zone of influence’ etc). We must draw the line somewhere, wherever that is. Russia will push to that line.
So an alliance that is naturally hostile to Russia is not a concern? I see. So if Putin or the Chinese or someone else were to amass weaponry on the UK’s periphery, that would be okay, right?
NATO has no hostility towards Russia. It is designed to prevent Russia attacking its members. In that, it’s ‘restrictive’ for Russia, but it is not a threat. Consider Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal, which Putin has often told his domestic audiences prevents serious invasion.
Obviously the strategic choices of an immediate neighbour are a valid interest for any national government. But Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 surprised even his own elite. It wasn’t ‘necessitated’ by Ukraine’s westerly direction, given it was nowhere close to NATO membership. However, the Eastern members of Nato don’t host US nukes so if Ukraine did enter it could be treated in a similar way.
Putin doesn’t fear a military attack from Ukraine. He probably fears the place succeeding like Poland has outside Russian domination, which might ultimately lead Russia back to Europe and democracy.
The west has to sort of ‘look after’ Russia by allowing it to feel important while also denying it its empire, which will only feed the desire for more. It’s not cool to sign 40m people into vasseldom either.
Russia’s only security concerns are on the Chinese border. They have 3,000 nuclear weapons. No Western nation is attacking them.
This is so often forgotten it seems but exactly right.
Germanys falling to bits, France is in bits,Spain is drowning,majority of EU governments are minority, and the UK just elected the student union from a wet wipe university – some chance
Excellent piece. Predictions are difficult (I thought KH would win) but the scale of Trump’s victory (both Houses and the fact that he won the popular vote too) means that it will have a global impact, not just in geopolitical terms but in other areas such as social policy as well. Most of the impact will be felt in the future, particularly if Trump is succeeded by Vance (very progressive geopolitically) or Tulsi Gabbard.
Suddenly Fazi’s Realist thoughts and views look to some people like he’s been right all along on a whole host of issues. That’s sort of the way it is. People can be told the truth, but if most of the establishment is telling people one thing, most people lack the personal qualities to disagree. Even now the top post on this thread simply doesn’t like the often right Fazi… 🙂
My thoughts on this are that reality wins again… The all time historical undefeated champion, “reality” wins again! Narratives might win the battle for a time, but reality always eventually wins the war.
I think this piece misses the reason why Mr Trump favours Russia over the Ukraine (and thus over Europe/the EU. This is that his absolute foreign policy priority is ending the challenge to the US’ dominant world position from China. He wants to reverse the Kissinger strategy of using China against the then Soviet Union and detach Russia from China. He believes (correctly) that the EU is at best an extremely reluctant economic, and anyway militarily irrelevant supporter of his planned confrontation with China. On the essential economic issue, the continuation of the dollar dominated trading system, especially in raw materials, he believes (correctly) that the eurozone is a useful subservient ally in heading off Beijing’s potential renminbi-based alternative, an assumption strengthened by his securing US domination of crypto systems. So he will therefore leave Europe alone in setting a limit upon Russian revanchism in Ukraine and perhaps in some other parts of the former Soviet European empire. Where this might leave the UK is uncertain. We are obviously following a US lead in defence, with our (albeit gravely under-funded) naval re-deployment to South and East Asia and the AUKUS pact. But it is less obvious that our post-Brexit commercial interests will be well served by joining the US’ anti-China crusade.
Ukraine’s performance in the war is a function of Western support. We’ll see what Trump does.
The EU’s worst nightmare has come true: Donald Trump is returning to the White House. ——-> If this is your opening sentence, maybe just maybe, what follows should not be a demonstration of why the opposite is true. Trump did not drag the EU or anyone else into war. He did not demand submissiveness from member states. Perhaps these people having nightmares should take a hard look in the mirror to acquaint themselves with the problem.
So far, hardly any comments sympathetic to the Ukrainians, or their right to choose who governs them (Zelensky won their last vote easily), or the murderous and criminal actions of Putin’s forces. Did you not grumble about support for Kosovo just because it didn’t cost you much?
He won the last vote and refused to hold another. And who supported Kosovo.
A vote in the middle of a full-scale war with so many on the front lines would be problematic and untreliable.
…who apart from the Ukrainians are you willing to surrender to Czar Putin, Comrade Fazi? The Baltic Republics? Finland? Poland? The whole of the old Warsaw Pact? With or without East Germany? Maybe let him have Austria and Greece this time round, and outdo Stalin in 1945/48?
Quite.
‘We got ours – f**k Ukraine. Not our problem. Ukraine shouldn’t have been wearing a short skirt.’
Some remarkable eagerness to accommodate and excuse Putin in the article and in the comments.
Merkel shutting down Germany’s nukes while pushing Nord Stream still seems more like economic sabotage than rational energy policy. Their armed forces were deliberately run down on her watch too.
I still wonder if there’s information in the KGB archives about a bright young East German socialist (whose family unusually moved from West to East Germany in the 1950s) being recruited in the 70s…
EE Cummings on the USSR’s ‘special military operation’ in Hungary, 1956, and the west’s response…
https://sandefur.typepad.com/freespace/2009/06/thanksgiving-1956-by-ee-cummings.html
Thanks for the link. Cummings colorfully criticizes US inaction. Yet the mildest criticism of USSR invasion. Same is done to this day. How does Russia keep such an enduring respect and free pass from western intelligentia?
❝even Western media outlets are now conceding that the war in Ukraine is lost.❞ I don’t think Western media outlets speak with much authority on this – though they like to think they do (especially the BBC and The Economist)
No doubt Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan are way better informed, right?!?!?
LOL, you guys are so gullible!
Sounds like ‘globalism’ is getting a stake in its heart which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.
All kids (and pseudo-client states throughout history) detest when the Bank of Dad threatens to shut its lending windows to them and their friends. The very thought makes a kid shudder in fear. It’s their “worst nightmare.” They loudly proclaim to their friends that their dad is the worst ever and how they wish they could be adopted by another – obviously superior – dad. These are their moans … at least for that hour of the day.
Yet the Bank of Dad serves an important societal function: Bossman Dad doesn’t have unlimited resources, and he wants to train his kids to be responsible adults one day. Adults who can be self-sufficient and who, thereby, have self confidence and can demand respect.
Ergo, the Bank of Dad sometimes tightens its Terms and Conditions to require more responsibility and accountability from the kids.
Similarly, the question of the future of Europe is really for each European State to answer:
Do they value the free societies that they crafted and fostered since WWII, with help in the form of free resources and loans from the United States? And are these free societies worth defending with their own blood and treasure now that the societies are mature?
… or …
Is the value of these free societies deemed less than the desire to live a non-responsible life of non-sacrifice, in luxury? If so, then a European State may turn away from the request of the US and, instead, ask for an umbrella of protection and defense to be provided by a BRIC country – much like many states in Africa have chosen to ‘bend the knee’ to China in return for China’s resources.
The Ukraine war is over. I’m in the US defense industry and I’ve known that the war was not winnable for 15 months. I know people that come in and out of the Donbas and the situation is dire – we’ve not been told the truth. THEY HAVE NO TROOPS. And the Russians will never quit. They consider it a war of national survival. We should listen to them. And the US should disengage. It’s a European War, not a threat to NATO.
Someone doesn’t know how NATO works!
Why would a European war not be a threat to NATO? Most nations in NATO is in Europe after all.
Of course Trump will turtle on Ukraine and give Putin everything he wants. Hey, maybe he gets a couple of new hotels in Moscow out of the deal! And you don’t want to upset the boss on your first week back on the job!
Calling President Trump an isolationist is absurd. He is not a globalist woke lackey of the WEF. He is a true internationist: nations making agreements that help the citizens of that nation. Avoid wars. Increase freedom and prosperity.
This is fair, though Trump casts everthing as ‘against America’, which is absurd. He may not mean that of course. And sometimes you need international cooperation through common bodies not merely transactional deals one to one.
It looks as if Trump wants European troops, including the heroic and excellent British, to protect Ukraine after the currnet combat line is frozen. Whether Russia keeps occupied land is an open question.
Fazi is happy that the lives of 40 million people will be destroyed for the sake of the stability of the world and the “security” of Russia.
Like any socialist, he is sure that progress requires a price that others must pay, be it slavery or death.