Donald Trump’s Geopolitical Game and Vladmir Putin’s Rapprochement

Donald Trump’s handling of the conflict in Ukraine reached its turning point with the high-level meetings between Russian and US diplomats in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in February, to discuss an end to the conflict. Without Ukrainian and European representatives, the new administration in Washington indicated that the solution to the conflict would not necessarily come from Kiev or Brussels.

Joe Biden’s administration has been disastrous for U.S. geopolitical interests. His response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022—including freezing billions of dollars in Russian assets held in Western banks and excluding Moscow from the SWIFT system—ultimately forced Russia to adapt to the new economic realities. To meet this new challenge, Vladimir Putin has strengthened ties with Beijing, Pyongyang, and Tehran, creating an uncomfortable scenario for Washington, which has seen historical adversaries draw closer to Russia. In response, Donald Trump appears to be embracing geopolitical pragmatism as his new strategy and priority.

What seems to be a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy—marked by criticism of NATO and a reassessment of Europe’s role for the U.S.—under Donald Trump is viewed by analysts as a course correction from the Biden administration. A conflict that should have remained regional (the invasion of Crimea in 2014 and eastern Ukraine in 2022) has instead escalated into a geopolitical and economic crisis with global repercussions.

The rapprochement between Washington and Moscow positions Donald Trump as a pragmatic negotiator aware of the effects of “hypersanctions” against Russia. It is worth remembering that sanctions were applied to Moscow during the Trump administration. How can we resolve the increased importance of the BRICS, the formation of the Moscow-Beijing axis that has been consolidated over the last three years, the rapprochement between the Russians, North Koreans, and Iranians, and the awareness that dependence on the dollar must be reduced in the long term by the Global South?

This framework must be analyzed in Donald Trump’s current stance. Washington is aware that the damage done during this period affected US interests. It is also true that the current US president has been controversial, to say the least, on a number of issues that do not follow a logic that is easy for the general public to understand.

The high number of sanctions against Russia and its expulsion from the SWIFT after 2022 forced Moscow to create mechanisms to withstand the pressure imposed by Washington and Brussels. Vladimir Putin certainly didn’t expect the high level of retaliation from the West after the second wave of invasion of Ukraine. A key aspect of Moscow’s survival was its “Strategic Partnership” with China.

With the US being an important rival, especially on the Taiwan issue, Beijing knows that Russia plays an important role in the geopolitical dispute. In this way, a high-level partnership, never seen in Soviet times, could materialize. Two nuclear powers, one of which is among the world’s leading economies and has a consistent geopolitical project and is willing to play a prominent role in the international system, have become one of the main geopolitical problems for the US in the second decade of the 21st century.

The expansion of BRICS is another important component in this challenging scenario for the US and Donald Trump. The US leader is aware of the problem of BRICS+, its newly expanded version. As it presents itself as a proposal for a new positioning of numerous emerging countries in their various stages on the international stage, it has important soft power from a propaganda point of view. It also has economic structures that are easier to access, such as the New Development Bank (NDB) and the New Silk Road sponsored by China.

At the same time, these countries became more aware of the long-term importance of the US dollar’s decline in international trade. Hypersanctions and Russia’s total exclusion from the SWIFT demonstrated the danger of dependence on a system based on a single country’s currency. However, this is not new; several countries have already used their currencies in the intra-BRICS trade. The advance of discussions on an alternative payment system to SWIFT, for example, is the result of the Washington-Brussels axis encirclement of Moscow.

Another aspect that should be mentioned is that Donald Trump’s attacks on the European Union and NATO are not new. Since his first term in office, Trump complained about how little his European partners have spent on their own defense. The scenario has changed. Logically, the money spent by the US taxpayer on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict was scandalous. Imagine a society with a series of social and budgetary problems seeing its tax money go to the other side of the Atlantic, to Russia’s doorstep, to finance a war that makes no sense to the domestic public. Even with a pro-financing propaganda machine at work all the time saying the opposite, the American taxpayer didn’t believe it and gave Donald Trump a landslide victory over Joe Biden.

Donald Trump, acting pragmatically, is the biggest obstacle to the belligerent logic of Euro-American sectors. Despite numerous criticisms that Trump’s leadership in various sectors may exist, his current foreign policy towards the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is the most logical for the immediate geopolitical interests of the US.

The signal is clear: let Europeans take care of their security without US resources and let Russians take care of their post-Soviet space. At the same time, Washington must discourage or weaken further anti-systemic actions, such as Sino-Russian, Moscow-Pyongyang, and Russian-Iranian partnerships. There is much to be corrected. Now, we have to wait for Donald Trump’s next move in the geopolitical chess.

[Photo by the White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

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