Trump’s political agenda isn’t just disruptive — it’s destructive
Watch how Donald Trump’s negotiations with Vladimir Putin play out as if your life depends on it – because it may well.
In the context of Vladimir Putin’s relentless design to conquer the sovereign state of Ukraine and Make Russia Dominant Again, Xi Jinping told his fellow dictator, “We have the chance to bring about changes more radical than any in the past 100 years.” US President Donald Trump wants to join them in this, it seems. For that reason alone, all bets are off as to where things go from here.
Let’s be clear that the fiscal misgovernment of the US and its growing internal polarisation meant something had to give sooner or later. It has.
The Trump wrecking ball is demolishing not only a bloated US bureaucracy, the so-called Deep State, the “progressive” state that dates back to presidents Theodore Roosevelt (Republican, 1901-09), Woodrow Wilson (Democrat, 1913-21) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat, 1933-45), but also the liberal international order of trade and the international alliance and collective security architecture that the US created after 1945.
We have to take stock of all of this and radically reassess our own national interests and outlook.
Among the many shocks Trump has delivered since taking office a little more than a month ago, the single most consequential has been his treatment of Ukraine and his outreach to Putin.
It has shocked Ukraine profoundly, it has shaken NATO to its core and it has involved the stunning spectacle of the US voting with brutal dictatorial states against a majority in the UN to condemn a resolution blaming Russia for the war in Ukraine.
No one seems quite sure what to make of all this. But one thing is clear, whatever Trump thinks he is up to: he has blatantly lied about the roots of the Ukraine war, the person of Volodymyr Zelensky, the political regime in Ukraine and the motivations of Putin.
As numerous pundits have remarked, including Paul Kelly in this newspaper on Wednesday, Trump appears to have been parroting nothing less than the propaganda of the Kremlin. This has most of us stunned and Putin breathing a sigh of relief. What remains to be seen is whether it will lead to a stabilising peace settlement or a cascade of crises beyond anything we have seen in Europe or the world at large since 1945. Put your money on the second.
There are many, of course, who, having imbibed Kremlin propagandist memes, believe Russia acted in self-defence against NATO aggression in invading Ukraine. Self-professed realists hold the opinion that Ukraine is naturally within Russia’s sphere of influence and that it has been naive and futile for the West to buttress it against Russia’s hegemonic designs. University of Chicago political science professor John Mearsheimer is the leading spokesman for this line of thinking.
Others again, while deploring Putin’s aggression, argue that it is important to stop the killing, that Ukraine cannot win and, therefore, it should be made to accept a ceasefire on almost any terms. This would, of its nature, entail accepting Putin’s aggression and wringing one’s hands, saying, “There is nothing to be done but stop the killing and hope it won’t resume.” How pious. The problem is that it will resume unless it is deterred.
The fundamental reality is that when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Ukraine opted, by a democratic process, for national independence – though urged by president George HW Bush, in his so-called Chicken Kyiv speech, to remain in a union with Russia.
There was a referendum on December 1, 1991, in which 84 per cent of the eligible voters participated and 90 per cent of them voted for independence. The new state voluntarily gave up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for recognition of its sovereignty and security guarantees from Russia regarding its borders. Putin has cast aside those guarantees and sought to overthrow the legitimate government of Ukraine.
Finnish President Alexander Stubb argues lucidly that it is flatly false that Russia needed to do this to protect itself against NATO. Mearsheimer, he argues, is wrong and his realist theory of international relations fatally flawed.
Stubb, a former prime minister, finance minister and foreign minister of Finland, is on leave from his other job as professor and director at the School of Transnational Governance, at the European University Institute, in Florence, Italy.
He says the only reason the war was launched is because Putin is emulating Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Joseph Stalin in the cause of Russian imperialism and self-aggrandisement. The issue isn’t NATO. It’s MRDA.
Until Trump took office in January 2025, NATO was unified in steadfastly opposing Russian aggression in Ukraine but restrained in its actions. The aim was to enable Ukraine to defend itself without triggering a wider war, in the hope that Putin would see sense and pull back – or at least negotiate a mutually workable and stable settlement. He didn’t and the war has reached its third anniversary.
The cost has been staggering, but Ukraine has held its ground and Russia has suffered enormous losses. Ukraine wants freedom and security guarantees. Russia needs peace and liberation from dictatorship. Russia undertook what Putin termed a “special military operation” intended to decapitate the Ukrainian state, killing Zelensky and other top leaders, within 72 hours and to install a puppet government beholden to Moscow.
Three years on, that operation has utterly failed. Putin’s war has cost Russia upwards of 800,000 military casualties, which is 15 times what it suffered in its brutal nine-year occupation of Afghanistan and more than twice the total number of casualties the US suffered in its 20 years of commitment in Vietnam.
This has been a disaster for Russia and a monumental blunder by Putin. Yet Trump has offered to cut a deal with Putin to end the war, while declaring that Zelensky and his countrymen should never have started the war, that Zelensky is a dictator and that Ukraine had best accept what terms it is offered or it is likely soon to cease to exist as a state. These claims beggar belief.
Apologists or the incredulous may say it is simply realism on Trump’s part or some disguised stroke of genius to get Putin to the negotiating table, where the Russian leader will be made an offer he can’t refuse. But there is no reason to believe either claim. Trump has never been subtle. He doesn’t have it in him. He doesn’t actually comprehend international relations, any more than he does economics or constitutional government.
We are, in sombre fact, being confronted by a geopolitical disruption. Rationalise it as you will, it has stark implications. There are preliminary indications that the European states, starting with Germany, may step up and take full responsibility for their own collective security, but that will require a massive energisation of languishing militaries and defence industries. And should this occur, NATO will break apart, Europe will be returned to a situation disturbingly similar to that which generated the first and second world wars, and the Anglosphere will be torn apart.
Indeed, given Trump’s treatment of Canada – which he spoke of annexing – the old ties already are coming apart.
All this pivots on Trump’s courting of Putin. If we, in Australia, seeing the dismay and the ructions in Europe and Canada, believe – as well we might – that Trump has actually defected from NATO and chosen the other side, then the implications for Australian security are dire. For we are every bit as disarmed and complacent as the Europeans (starting with Britain, as former head of MI6 Alex Younger, pointed out this week). British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has declared an increase in defence spending, but the UK is starting from way behind.
It’s all very well for our Prime Minister to decry what Trump has done. But what shall we do about our national security?
The recent Chinese live-fire naval exercises in the Tasman Sea and hazing of our aeroplanes in the South China Sea and the Coral Sea, as well as Xi’s avowed aim of suppressing the democratic state in Taiwan, are alarming enough without Trump defecting to the dictators. We were entirely unprepared for this new development and its implications. It is a profound irony that we abandoned a submarine deal with Emmanuel Macron’s France and contracted to acquire Anglo-American nuclear-powered submarines at great expense so recently, only to see Trump turn on Ukraine and the European democracies, on Canada and on the EU as trading partners.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent to which these developments jeopardise all our expectations, wherever we stand on the political spectrum. Those who, for a spectrum of reasons, hail Trump as the Great Disruptor may see much of this as a salutary wake-up call or even cheer him on. Such are the times in which we live.
Substacker Martin Gurri, in a piece titled Covering the Revolution, argues this week that Trump has the intention of effecting a political revolution in the US that must be understood on its own terms and not merely decried because it is overturning the applecart of New Deal, Great Society and New Left big spending and big government. The pointy end of the spear, as we can all see, is the mercurial Elon Musk – he who wields a chainsaw.
But as I argued in these pages on January 4 regarding Javier Milei’s reforms in Argentina: “Chainsaws are one thing. Coherent, disciplined policy is quite another.”
Trump is all over the map with his disruptions. A coherent policy agenda would have been comparable to that by FDR after he took office in March 1933. Trump would have called for a broad social coalition, declaring that experiments would be made and, if they didn’t work, others would be tried, but the looming bankruptcy of the country would be dealt with and America made solvent again. FDR made many changes. No other president, until Trump, has come into the White House initiating so many in such a hurry. The question is whether Trump’s changes make coherent sense.
Discussion of his domestic agenda and foreign trade agendas is vital. But his geopolitical agenda is our concern here. It isn’t only disruptive; it is destructive. If it galvanises the liberal democracies, including this country, to stand tall, co-ordinate our concerns about collective security and diplomacy, and buttress our own capabilities down here in the Indo-Pacific, it may serve a useful purpose. But it would be delusional to think that Trump is attempting to simply give us all a wake-up call.
Watch how his negotiations with Putin now play out, as if your life depended on it – because it may well. Everything is at stake for Ukraine. Zelensky, whatever the outcome of the “peace process”, will, for the rest of his days, consider himself a marked man, unable to trust the US intelligence and security services, whether in office or in civilian life. The EU and the NATO states of Europe will have to arm up, facing predation from both East and West. Imagine the Cold War with Washington sympathetic to Moscow.
But our sphere is the Indo-Pacific. Our security concern, as Beijing keeps gently showing us, is Xi’s China. Our Ukraine is Taiwan.
And the nature of the current disruption means that, however many friends we have in America, we can neither rely on nor trust the judgment of Trump. That’s a grim outlook and none of our institutions is configured to even think through or frame policy adequate to it.
Do we therefore take up Gurri’s clarion call and hail the Great Disruption, perhaps seek to trigger one here? There’s clearly the need for fundamental reforms and national revitalisation in this country.
But rather than embrace the kind of polarisation and institutional upheaval we are witnessing in Washington right now, we need leaders to make the case for serious changes, to enrol the citizen body in the whys and wherefores, to create a new comprehension, from the schools upward, of what citizenship, liberty and responsibility are about. And the time is now. Now, fellow citizens.
Paul Monk is a former senior intelligence analyst and consultant in applied cognitive science. He is the author of a dozen books, including The West in a Nutshell: Foundations, Fragilities, Futures (2009), Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018) and Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (second edition, 2023).
More Coverage
