A little more than a month into his second term and already we have reached a new peak of Trump derangement syndrome. His creeping betrayal of Ukraine and embrace of Russian leader Vladimir Putin has stunned Europe. The US-led world order is on the verge of collapse. Again.
In truth, that order has always been chimerical and American perfidy often balances its altruism. Donald Trump is next in line to disappoint his friends – he is just less bothered than his predecessors about admitting it.
US president Woodrow Wilson watched for nearly three years as Europeans bled themselves white in World War I. It was only German U-boat attacks on Americans and their ships that tipped him into war on the Allied side.
Wilson’s plan to make the world safe for democracy after German defeat – in his Fourteen Points and League of Nations – was rejected by the US Senate.
American isolationism was a stain on world politics for the next two decades. Communism and fascism marched across Europe and Asia.
It took a surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, not the invasion of Poland in 1939, to bring the US into World War II.
Franklin Roosevelt maintained US neutrality – as France was conquered and Britain stood alone – for the war’s first two years. Poland’s fate was to be handed to the Soviet Union – the state that had dismembered it in a deal with Nazi Germany, beginning World War II – for the next half century.
The Western allies became practised at respecting Russia’s buffer zone. Trump may not know this history but it gives him cover in Ukraine.
We remember the Allied victory in 1945 as ushering in 80 years of US global engagement – which, it is claimed, Trump is busily ending. Perhaps. But those years also were replete with American infidelities and desertions. Trump is inextricably part of that less lauded American tradition. The US, of course, rebuilt Germany and Japan. No nation in history has done more to generate global prosperity and freedom than the US. It sponsored European reconstruction and offered security against Soviet communism.
But it also did little to roll back that ideology in Eastern Europe – what we now think of as Russia’s “near abroad”, where Ukraine uncomfortably sits.
Harry Truman is blamed for losing China in 1949. He also acquiesced to the Soviet colonisation of Prague, Warsaw and East Berlin. We can hear echoes of Truman’s realpolitik in Trump’s selling out of Kyiv. In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower left Britain, France and Israel twisting in the Egyptian wind. His refusal to back their seizure of the Suez Canal doomed the intervention. A few years later, the clever Harvard men surrounding John F. Kennedy got him into Vietnam. Australia and South Korea followed him there.
After 58,000 American soldiers died in South Vietnam’s defence, the Nixon administration abandoned the south to its zealous neighbour. Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine will be comparatively much easier. The pattern extends into the post-Cold War era. Bill Clinton had no interest in rebuilding Afghanistan after Soviet withdrawal – made possible by Ronald Reagan’s covert support of the Mujaheddin. The Taliban filled the vacuum. Indeed, George W. Bush, the last great military interventionist, is roundly condemned for his use of force to liberate Muslims. I wrote a book defending his war on terror and was quickly transported to Australia.
The men after W. have been studious avoiders of hard power.
Barack Obama, the supposedly anti-Trump president, forsook foreigners just as easily as his successor. Omer Aziz, a scholar of the Syrian civil war, described Obama’s failure to intervene in these terms: “The Syrian uprising (in 2011) was ignited by children who spray-painted anti-Assad slogans on their school’s wall. They were arrested and tortured the next day. Their fellow citizens, who had lost their innocence long ago, took to the streets to demand their dignity. They chanted, ‘One, one, one, the Syrian people are one.’ They threw flowers on (US) ambassador (Robert) Ford’s car when he went to their rally. They thought the Americans were with them. But the US was nowhere to be found.”
Trump 1.0 honed his desertion of ally strategy on the Kurds, one of the most pro-American people on Earth. Joe Biden’s bolting from Afghnistan in 2021 was an error of judgment almost as catastrophic as his choice of vice-president. Trump 2.0 now risks in his appeasement of Russia being seen like Biden in Afghanistan: handing an ally to an enemy.
We are nostalgic for a “rules-based” world order that the US often lacked the resolve to sustain. From Saigon to Damascus and Kabul to Kyiv, the US has a long and depressing record of walking away from allies.
Consider, also, despite the outrage directed towards US Vice-President JD Vance in Munich this month, that falling out with Europeans is an occupational hazard for most American presidents. Trump’s rift with the EU over Ukraine is not as deep as that between George W. Bush and Paris and Berlin over the Iraq war.
Trans-Atlantic relations were in a worse way in 2003 than they are today. It was then because the US was determined to remove a dictator and an “old Europe” (what US secretary of state Donald Rumsfeld called the negationists) that wanted him kept in place. And if you think Trump buddying up to Putin is unseemly, consider how deliberately after the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 that the US offered its perpetrators “most favoured” trading status. Resisting Chinese and Russian autocracy does not guarantee you American support. Taiwan, watch out.
Trump certainly has it arse-backwards when it comes to blaming Ukraine for starting the war. His swallowing of Putin’s propaganda is emetic – like FDR blaming Winston Churchill rather than Adolf Hitler for World War II. But Trump’s apparent treachery is hardly unique.
As one Melbourne-based Russian historian put it to me sardonically: Trump can never be right simply because he is Trump. Fail in stopping the war, and he is a loudmouth who promised and never delivered. Succeed in stopping the war, and he kowtowed to Putin. His critics are anti-war, but only when it suits them. Once the violence is about to stop, they suddenly want it to continue.
The world is a better place for America’s engagement in it. There are in foreign fields many thousands of US war graves attesting to the sacrifice. America does not owe them to Europe.
What Trump’s transactional retreat from Ukraine reveals is how dependent on his nation we have become. The US is not a welfare state for its work-shy allies. Trump does not exist to perpetuate a global welfarism. The democracies craving US support need to be better, bolder defenders of democracy and Western values. That is the best insurance against the inconstancies of American power.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.
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