Trump stands in a tradition going back to Teddy Roosevelt. Credit: Getty

President Trump’s attempt to end the war in Ukraine has enraged liberal internationalists on both sides of the Atlantic. Dealing directly with the Kremlin and going over the heads of America’s European allies, publicly belittling Ukraine and its leader, and attempting to clinch a minerals deal as the price of further US support for Kyiv — all this counts as heresy among foreign-policy elites committed to “rule-based liberal international order”.
As often happens, Trump breaks with American presidential traditions more in style than in substance. In reality, the 45th and 47th president is in a tradition of realist presidents, going back to Theodore Roosevelt more than a century ago, who have viewed world politics as a great-power club, rather than an arena for idealism.
In brokering the Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, for example, Theodore Roosevelt accepted a Japanese sphere of influence in Korea, South Manchuria, and Sakhalin Island as the price of maintaining a balance of power in East Asia between Russia and Japan. In his 1906 Nobel Peace Prize lecture, TR said that “it would be a masterstroke if those great powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace not only to keep the peace among themselves, but to prevent, by force if necessary, its being broken by others”.
This realist tradition endured the reign of the arch-idealist Woodrow Wilson. Following the entry of the United States into World War I, Wilson asked his adviser Col. Edward M. House to draw up plans for a postwar League of Nations. House suggested to Wilson that such a body “might be confined to the great powers”. In a diary entry at the time, House wrote: “Why permit [smaller powers] to exercise a directing hand upon nations having to furnish not only the financial but the physical force necessary to maintain order and peace? I am sorry to come to this conclusion, because it does not seem toward the trend of liberalism. However, the idealist who is not practical oftentimes does a cause more harm than those frankly reactionary.”
Wilson’s eventual plan for the League of Nations failed to win ratification in the US Senate, thanks precisely to the realists. Some of these, like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, favoured a US-British treaty with France to deter future German aggression but thought that the League of Nations was a utopian experiment doomed to failure.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often held up as an avatar by the internationalists, was much more in the realist grain than they would like to admit. FDR, who had served as assistant secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration, sought to avoid his ex-boss’s mistakes in his own thinking about world order after the defeat of the Axis powers. Roosevelt put his hopes for the postwar world in “the Big Four” or “the Four Policemen”: the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Nationalist China, which would dominate their respective regions, while smaller countries might have “ostensible” participation.
The only “policeman” with a democratic form of government was the United States: Winston Churchill’s Britain ruled its empire outside of the British Isles undemocratically, Stalin’s Soviet Russia was a communist dictatorship, and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist China was an anticommunist dictatorship. When the Declaration of the United Nations (the term for the anti-Axis alliance coined by FDR) was signed on Jan. 1, 1941, the the Big Four signed it first; the other 12 members of the alliance had to wait until the following day.
In wartime Britain, too, realism dominated thinking about the postwar world to come. Like FDR, Churchill was skeptical about global institutions in which each state, no matter how small and weak, had equal authority. In 1943, Churchill proposed that a “Supreme World Council” run by the great powers that would oversee regional councils for Europe, the Pacific, and the Western hemisphere. In a visit with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944, Churchill came up with what he referred to as his “naughty document” — a secret agreement that assigned shares of influence in Central Europe and the Balkans to Britain and the Soviet Union. Greece was to be 90% under British influence and 10% under Soviet influence, Yugoslavia and Hungary were to be 50% British and 50%, and so on.
Focused on winning the war, FDR delegated postwar planning for the permanent United Nations organisation to his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, an ardent Wilsonian who recreated the flawed design of the League of Nations under a new name. Cold War rivalries immediately paralysed the great-power-dominated UN Security Council, because each member had a veto.
The Soviet-backed takeover of China by Mao’s Communists turned the Middle Kingdom from a US ally into an enemy, while Britain’s postwar economic weakness left Washington and Moscow as the only two global military powers in a bipolar world. However, the postwar recovery of Western Europe and Japan and the Sino-Soviet split led President Richard Nixon to conclude in July 1971 that there were now five centers of economic power, if only two of military power — the United States, the Soviet Union, Western Europe, Japan, and China.
According to Nixon, “these are the five that will determine the economic future and, because economic power will be the key to other kinds of power, the future of the world in other ways in the last third of this century”. Determined to extricate America from the war in Vietnam and to avoid similar entanglements, Nixon in 1969 had already espoused “the Nixon Doctrine”, declaring that “we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower necessary for its defense”.
Following Nixon’s opening to the People’s Republic of China, the Shanghai Communique in 1972 acknowledged China’s interest in Taiwan: “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States government does not challenge that position.”
Following each of the three global conflicts of the 20th century — the two world wars and the Cold War — idealist hopes for a “new world order” free of great power conflicts excited many Americans. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union into independent republics in 1991 led liberal internationalists to call for “a league of democracies” to police a globalised world society, while neoconservatives dreamed of a single global market and “rules-based order” policed by the Washington alone as the “world’s only superpower”.
But China under Xi Jinping and Russia under Boris Yeltsin and his successors rejected American hegemony and called for a multipolar world in which they would be the hegemonic powers in their own regions. It is not “blaming the victim” to point out that invitations to join the US-led NATO alliance were followed by the Russian invasions of Georgia in 2008 and of Ukraine in 2014 (and, on a larger scale, in 2022).
The realists saw this coming. On Aug. 1, 1991, three weeks before Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the USSR, President George H. W. Bush, a consummate realist, told the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic that it would be better for Ukraine and the other Soviet republics to remain together in a loose union, rather than make a hard break with Moscow. In the speech, derided as “Chicken Kiev” by the neoconservative New York Times columnist William Safire, the elder Bush warned: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”
For its part, the United States has continued to observe the Monroe Doctrine by treating the North American quartersphere as its own exclusive domain, toppling regimes it does not like and installing clients. Reagan invaded Grenada in 1983, Bush I invaded Panama in 1989, and Clinton invaded Haiti in 1994 in “Operation Uphold Democracy”. By abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban after 20 years of warfare, Joe Biden tacitly acknowledged that Central Asia is less important to Washington than North America. Similarly, by moving quickly to end the costly proxy war in Ukraine and opposing Ukrainian membership in NATO, Trump is signaling that Eastern Europe is not a core American interest, either.
Nor is enmity against Russia baked into the American tradition. For most of the time since the United States achieved independence, Americans have been morally repelled by successive forms of Russian autocracy — even as US diplomats have viewed Russia as a counterweight to powers that pose greater potential threats. During the Civil War, to deter Britain from intervening on the side of the Confederacy, the Lincoln administration welcomed the Russian fleet to American ports, including New York, where Russian naval officers paraded down Broadway past cheering crowds. Harper’s opined that it would “be wise to meet the hostile alliance of the Western Powers of Europe by an alliance with Russia”.
Under Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, an American naval squadron arrived at the Russian Baltic port of Kronstadt to a 21-gun salute and a display of American flags. To thwart British influence in North America, Johnson’s secretary of state, William Seward, bought Alaska from the Tsar and tried but fail to obtain Greenland for the United States. In 1946, the Truman administration offered to buy Greenland from Denmark; in 1955, the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged President Eisenhower to try to buy Greenland; and Trump has revived the idea at a time of increased tensions with Russia and China.
Tsarist Russia was America’s ally against Imperial Germany in World War I, and the Soviet Union was America’s ally against Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II. Only the elimination of other great-power threats led to rivalry between Washington and Moscow. Now that China is viewed as America’s greatest strategic rival, an American strategy of seeking to pry Beijing and Moscow apart, if possible, is only to be expected.
There may be sound arguments based on realpolitik to oppose Trump’s strategy toward Ukraine. But to be consistent, moralists who invoke American ideals ought to condemn FDR and Churchill for agreeing to a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe that lasted half a century after 1945. And they must condemn Eisenhower and Johnson for failing to take significant action to punish the Soviet Union from crushing democratic rebellions in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The ephemeral spasms of Wilsonian utopianism form the exception to the rule that American statesmen in every generation usually are guided by considerations of the national interest in their dealings with other major powers, including those whose internal regimes are repugnant to American principles. Uncle Sam may engage in flowery talk — but allies and enemies alike know that he drives a hard bargain.
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SubscribeWill Unherd get someone to write about the Chagos debacle?
It seems not.
There you can see the worldview of Starmer-Hermer-Sands playing out in real time.
Two points stand out.Firstly they are acting against UK’s national interest. Sands, moron-in-chief, claims he is ‘celebrated’ by the British for doing so. Hermer has given recent speeches justifying prioritising other countries legal claims over the UK’s.
Secondly these lawyers get fabulously rich acting against the UK.
Why does Unherd hide what is happening?
There is article after article on America’s realist international policy, silence on the UK’s self-harming international policy.
Well for a start Hermer ‘isn’t one of us’, whatever he might say. He has zero empathy with being British, despite the misfortune of being born in Wales. In fact by his actions he appears to actually hate us.
As for the other two muppets , “what a parcel of rogues in nation” as the late Mr Robert Burns put it so eloquently.
Well being born in Britain does not make you British, particularly when you are born into a section of society that is at best ambivalent to the British.
Search “Chagos” in the Unherd search facility.
Do this before commenting that Unherd doesn’t address an issue.
There’s several articles which address the Chagos Islands issue directly.
You’ve been told this before.
A truly fascinating essay, providing some essential historical and strategic context to our current state of affairs, including many historical details of which i was unaware.
It would appear.i’m not alone. Our so-called leaders in Europe are entirely devoid of any sense of how the great power games have played out since the rise of industrialism. Further, talk of post-industrialism now appears premature, as manufacturing hoves back into view, something with which the European elites have no experience and little appetite for.
‘Specious Humbug’ – as Dickens described all such American self-congratulation on Freedom’s score.
I’m not sure the 16 Million Filipinos subject to American rule between 1898 and 1946 would have understood the fine distinction drawn here between American Democracy and British Imperial Rule.
Nor perhaps the 2 Million Puerto Ricans and 4 million Cubans who lived under less formal American domination by 1945. Dare I mention the position of the Black man in Dixie while the Great Republic so busily preached democracy abroad?
It is a classic form of the strategic ellision of truth which America has pioneered and made her own since the great slave owning Founding Fathers proclaimed the freedom and equality to all mankind.
I had the same thought. Well said.
Everything is known in comparison
Fair enough on the whole. But John Adams, much the most conservative and religious among the Founding Fathers, had no slaves. Another distinction which would color your argument, if not blur all the facts presented in black and white, is that America did not move into the Philippines or Latin America and impose their own culture in the manner of the imperial Brits in India, Africa, and elsewhere. (Granted, we certainly did in the present-day U.S. itself, both before and after we were primarily English). It was more of a Coca Cola and greenback empire. I’m not saying the U.S. has been a nice and noble Uncle to everyone, but they have tended to respect local sovereignty a bit more than Britain did before the series of mid-20th revolutions that occurred across its empire. Putting aside inconvenient exceptions like trying to install our favorite dictators and puppets, that is.
I’m starting to think politics ain’t all that nice. I still think it better to have leaders, like Churchill and FDR, who for all their faults believed in something non-selfish and didn’t see the world as little more than a personal card game or business deal, like Putin, Xi, and whomever else. Then again, Sir Winston and Franklin D. were singular men, take them for all and all. We might not look upon their like again. (Hard to know how Hamlet the Elder handled things, all happening off stage and page).
I have been a fan of Lind’s usually perceptive insights, but for the first time, I have to balk. Trump’s “realism” is an interpretation based on wishful thinking and to compare Trump to FDR and TR is interpreting Ttump as having some sort of historical knowledge an illusion.
Instead Trump acts from his grubby, transactional mentality: does it produce the right mark on the plus side of a ledger?
To demand a substantial share of Ukraine’s mineral supply is as much as example of imperial overreach as invading Iraq.
A truly “realist” view of Ukraine would understand that the issue of Ukraine is more than some obscure ethnic conflict of no concern to the U. S. Russia’s imperial appetites won’t end with Ukraine; it will continue past Crimea, Transdinestra, and affect others such as Lithuania and Latvia,
And the USA has no interests in Lithuania, Latvia etc for which it will risk a direct war with Russia which would quickly go nuclear.
In the same manner, Britain and France had no interests in Czechoslovakia in 1938. Wonderful how the logic of great power “spheres of influence” kept Europe at peace inn 1914 and 1939.
The problem there (thinking of the Great Power theory) was that Germany was a frustrated would be Great Power and that Britain and France were on the brink of decline while the US was entering its pomp. The Great Power argument holds good only as long as the power geography is stable.
Hitler came to power in 1933. 10 years later, he had conqured most of Europe. If Putin is following Adolf’s playbook, he has to be the most inept world leader since Napolean III.
BTW, IMHO Chamberlin was not appeasing Hitler, but buying time. Britain had started a rearmement program in 36 and needed more time for it to take effect. (Imagine winning the Battle of Britian without Spitfires or Hurricanes, but bi-planes instead). Also, the political situation was different. If war had broken out in 38, Poland might well have allied with Germany.
A ‘modest proposal’. When the Hamas backing inhabitants of Gaza are ‘resettled’ far from that theatre, they should in justice go to places from which Jews were driven in 1948 or where they were murdered a few years earlier.
In one case we have detailed statistics. Einsatzgruppe 3 declared Lithuania Jew Free after counting 171000 Jews killed, many of them turned in, even directly killed by Lithuanian civilians. So, 171000 Hamas supporters to Lithuania! And a larger number to the Western Ukraine. That would stop dead any Russian designs on the Baltics and Kiev!
“Grubby”? Trump is a well-known cleanliness fanatic. Your ad hominem was mindless.
Had to stop reading when author stated Tsarist Russia was US ally against Germany in WWI. Post-imperial Russia capitulated to Germany around same time US declared war. In fact Russia quiting the war made it imperative US enter western front as Germany now had freed up divisions as peace broke out in the east.
Actually the US via Mr Paul Warburg and others, plus our good selves, had been paying to keep Imperial Russia in the War since 1915.
When Max Hoffmann and the German Army roundly defeated the Tsar, Kerensky and the wretched Bolsheviks all that investment was irretrievably lost.
In retrospect we should have permitted Hoffmann to push on to Moscow and ‘strangle the Bolshevik baby in its cradle’, but nobody seems to have thought of that.
Perhaps the examples of other foreign invaders coming into Russia (eg Napoleon) deterred the US government from taking the course of action you advocate?
“We should have permitted Hoffmann to push on to Moscow…”?
By “we,” do you mean the UK, the Allies, or the Allies and Associated Powers? None of them had any say in how far the Germans advanced when the Brest-Litovsk negotiations broke down, and then the Bolsheviks threw in the towel and signed. The Germans took as much as they wanted, which was basically the Baltic coast and the Ukraine, before trying to ship most of the Ostheer West for the showdown in France and Belgium.
As for “strangling the Bolshevik baby in its cradle,” the Allied involvement in the Russian Civil War was, on the whole, a clusterf**k of immense scale and importance. There certainly was an attempt to strangle that baby.
And, the Tsar fell to the Menshevik Revolution before the US entered the War, and the US and Russia were cobelligerents for about 10 months before the Bolshevik coup took place, leading to Russia’s withdrawal from hostilities. At no time were Tsarist Russia and the US both engaged.
Perhaps “Trump” is more of a proximate cause of America’s unfolding withdrawal from an arbitrary “rules-based international order.” Is not a more fundamental cause the fact that the formerly sole superpower can longer afford to pay for it?
The effort to implement uni-polar paradise envisioned by a Wolfowitz or a Brzezinski has wasted $trillions and killed millions… and has finally proven to be unsustainable. Nary too soon. “The West” has wasted the last 30 years.
May a multi-polar world prove more salutary for “the West” and the rest of the world. I’m optimistic.
This is a good essay and a good reminder.
It is not sufficient for the Idealist to deceive others. He must also deceive himself.
Progressivism is an Ersatz Gnostic Religion according to Eric Voegelin.
Their “prophets” have thought themselves demigods who could create a heaven on earth. If we assume that they were not disingenuous, we can judge them to have betrayed an incredible naivete.
What an excellent piece, Mr. Lind. I’ve been complaining lately that UnHerd has been publishing soft and occasionally vacuous opinion pieces that are not at all informative. This piece is rich with relevant information. That’s what most of us are looking for. Thank you.
Good article, despite a couple of technical problems.
The US always looked out for #1, as it were, until the USSR fell, after which it spent 25 years (1991-2016) chasing unicorns and rainbows, letting its hard won advantages collapse as it enabled and encouraged much of the world take advantage of it and strip its industrial base.
I’ve always found the talking point that “Trump cozies up to dictators” by simply talking to them as being either intellectually lazy or completely blind to the historical record.
First, I would say that no previous US President tried to extort a purported ally under attack from a tyrannical power. And the offered extortion did not even guarantee any benefit for the nation extorted.
Also, the Yalta analogy is false. FDR and Churchill did not say, “well, let’s divide up Europe into spheres of influence because that’s the best way to run the world.” They acquiesced to Soviet domination of Eastern Europe because Soviet troops were on the ground there and they had no alternative.
This essay appears to have bypassed the proofreading stage, with unfortunate consequences for those who wish to quote from it. Could someone please do some stealth editing?
Interesting that USA tried to purchase Greenland as far back as 1946. Trump has been reviled (as ever!) for daring to raise this possibility in 2025 – mostly by ignorant people who are unaware that various US presidents since Truman have tried and failed to implement this option.
I think that most people react to Trump’s style, not the substance of his ideas, most of which are logical and actually quite reasonable.