The future of a European democracy was being determined in Alaska last night without the presence of either that democracy or its European allies.
President Trump has decided he can best secure his idea of a peace deal for Ukraine by negotiating one-on-one with President Putin, the Russian dictator and warmonger.
As I write, the outcome is unknown. But, whatever happens, the ‘summit in the snow’ speaks volumes for the shape of geopolitics to come: a battle for supremacy between an America unapologetically in pursuit of its own self-interest and an alliance of authoritarians who think their time to shuffle America aside and dominate global politics has come. It’s a battle for the 21st century in which Europe – including Britain – has already been consigned to the sidelines.
You might think Trump would want to marshal America’s European allies in this existential fight between democracy and autocracy. But that is not the Trump way. He regards the Europeans as an inconvenience, an encumbrance.
In his eyes, they are too squeamish to go along with the harsh, might-is-right realpolitik deals he’s prepared to do with the dictators (whatever the consequences for democracy, human rights, sovereignty or the rule of law), yet too weak to stand up to them on their own.
He considers Ukraine to be a sideshow. He wants America out. He has bigger fish to fry elsewhere and if he can extricate the US with a Nobel Peace Prize under his arm and lucrative US access to Russian and Ukrainian minerals under his belt, then so much the better.
If the Europeans don’t like it, that’s their problem. Putin’s imperial ambitions are to re-establish Russian dominance over what Moscow calls its ‘near abroad’ – those border countries (like Ukraine) which used to be part of the Russian Empire. That is very different from the global ambitions of Soviet communism.
For Trump that makes Russia a regional problem – and the region is Europe. As Vice President JD Vance made clear while on holiday in Britain this week, Americans have had enough of ‘paying’ for Ukraine.
President Trump has decided he can best secure his idea of a peace deal for Ukraine by negotiating one-on-one with Russian President Putin
They’re ‘sick’ of it, he said, claiming the US was ‘done funding Kyiv’. If European states don’t like Trump’s version of peace they’re free to continue supporting Ukraine on their own, including with US arms. Indeed, they can fill their boots – provided it’s cash up front.
But the geopolitics of the mid-2020s and beyond is about much more than Ukraine. The bipolar world of the Cold War, dominated since 1945 by America and the Soviet Union, came to an end in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Russian communism.
There followed a unipolar period in which the US was the world’s sole, undisputed superpower – or ‘hyperpower’ as one French politician designated it.
Then, from the start of this century, came the steady rise of China. For a time it looked as if we were returning to a bipolar world, this time dominated by Washington and Beijing. But the Chinese communists do not seek global dominance in the way the Soviet communists once did.
What they want is supremacy in their own backyard – East Asia and the Asian Pacific – and a world in which the rules are more favourably inclined to them rather than, as they have been since the end of the Second World War, America. To this end, China has enlisted a number of nations, all led by dictators or elected ‘strongmen’ (it’s always men), who also have an interest in curbing American power and reconfiguring a global architecture more to their liking.
Enter an alliance of the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – which first met in 2006 (though South Africa did not join until 2010) and expanded to ten countries when Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates joined last year, and Indonesia in January.
Between them they account for 50 per cent of the world’s population and 40 per cent of global GDP.
Their aim is a shift in international economic power from America and the West to the developing world, of which they are the most important members. It would also be a shift to a less democratic world.
This century was meant to usher in the universal triumph of democracy. Instead its most persistent and dismal characteristic has been the march of the autocrats.
This has helped augment the power and influence of the BRICS which are all either autocracies (Russia, China, Iran) or democracies led by authoritarians (Brazil, India). That most brutal dictatorship of all, North Korea, is even allowed to tag along as an eager little brother.
The extent to which they already operate as a mutually supportive alliance is not widely appreciated. It can be most clearly seen in the Ukrainian conflict.
Iran supplies Russia with thousands of drones, China provides machine tools for its war industries and North Korea furnishes an incredible 40 per cent of its ammunition (plus 12,000 soldiers on the front line).
India obliges, too. It has never condemned Russia for the illegal invasion of Ukraine and it remains a major customer of Russian military hardware (it has just taken delivery of two Russian-built warships).
And since the invasion it has helped Russia dodge sanctions by buying millions of barrels of Russian oil at a generous discount, which it resells on the global market at prevailing rates.
This has become such big business that India, which has very little oil of its own, is now Europe’s largest oil supplier, having overtaken even Saudi Arabia.
Trump knows all this, which is why he regards not just China but the BRICS alliance as one of the greatest 21st century threats to American predominance.
You might think he’d want to give this alliance a bloody nose in Ukraine, but this is not a war of his choosing and he doesn’t really care about the outcome. He wants to end it swiftly with whatever terms he can get away with and regroup his resources for battles to come.
He has already imposed 50 per cent tariffs on Brazil and India, which will hurt both countries and he might well refuse to go to the next meeting of the G20 because it is in South Africa, whose government he loathes.
Trump is also threatening the other BRICS members with penal tariffs if they dare even to think about launching a rival currency to the dollar (a highly unlikely development, though it’s one that he takes seriously).
Of course all this comes at a cost. India is inevitably drawing closer to Russia again after decades of Washington encouraging it to loosen its Moscow ties. Brazil and South Africa now regard China as a more reliable ally than America. But none of this matters very much to Trump. What does, above all else, is his own backyard.
Putin wants to establish Russian dominance over what Moscow calls ‘near abroad’ – those border countries (like Ukraine) which used to be part of the Russian Empire, says Andrew Neil
It’s a fool’s errand to try to construct from the accumulated grievances and destructive narcissism that guide Donald Trump a coherent, over-arching geopolitical strategy. At times, mere presidential whim seems the best explanation of his actions and attitudes. But there is some method in the madness.
In so far as there is a Trump world view – not one he has ever articulated but which we can broadly discern from his priorities and prejudices to date – it is scarily similar to the dystopian world of George Orwell’s seminal novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In Orwell’s grim scenario, the globe is dominated by three totalitarian behemoths: Oceania, the Western Hemisphere with the UK tacked on; Eurasia, in which Europe is dominated by an overpowering Russia; and Eastasia, made up of China and the Eastern Pacific Rim, including Japan, South Korea and even parts of northern India, but dominated by Beijing. Trump World is beginning to take shape with some of these configurations.
Europe is being left to its own devices to deal with a revanchist Russia, which Trump does not see as a threat to the USA. Nor does Europe’s fate seem to trouble him.
Much to Trump’s annoyance, Ukraine has dragged America back to Europe just as it was pivoting to the Pacific – where America’s real 21st century geopolitical challenges lie.
Equally irritatingly, the fallout from events in Gaza has forced America to become more deeply involved in the Middle East again – despite the fact, as Trump never tires of telling us, the US is now self-sufficient in oil and gas. For Trump, Europe and the Middle East are so 20th century.
Nor is Trump overly exercised about an Eastern Pacific Rim dominated by China, which does not bode well for Taiwan should Beijing try to take it by force or strangle it with sanctions. His tariff wars are not designed to curb the expansion of Chinese influence in the East Pacific since he’s slapped them on friend and foe alike.
If anything, they will reinforce China’s position, as those powers on that Rim – America’s allies, such as Japan and South Korea – make their peace with China because they fear America is no longer a reliable ally.
But Trump has an overriding quid pro quo for all of this: if China and Russia are to be allowed relatively free rein in their backyards then so must America in its backyard – by which he means the whole Western Hemisphere.
We are moving towards a new geopolitical structure in which the US will have retreated from Europe and East Asia as spheres where it exercised influence and projected power, but is asserting imperial ambitions closer to home. Hence the emphasis, from the first days of his second administration, on Greenland, Canada and Panama, all of which are urged – perhaps even threatened – to come under US tutelage, one way or another.
Just as Trump has drawn inspiration for his tariffs from a late 19th century president, William McKinley, so his worldview is shaped by an earlier 19th century president, James Monroe, who gave his name to the Monroe Doctrine, which essentially amounted to America telling the rest of the world: ‘The Western Hemisphere is our hemisphere – keep out.’
A lesser known part of this doctrine is that it also contained its own quid pro quo, committing America to staying out of European disputes or conflict which, of course, we can also see is part of the Trump inclination to isolationism (of which JD Vance is a true believer).
So there we have it. A new geopolitical architecture for a more multi-polar world in which Trump is content to let rival power centres flourish provided they leave America and its hemisphere alone and US economic and military power remains predominant.
Where all this leaves Europe in general and Britain in particular is unclear, though probably not in a good place. Certainly, the European Union’s pretensions to become a great power in its own right have come to naught.
Remember the Lisbon Agenda, devised by Brussels 25 years ago? It projected how the EU would vault past the US to become ‘the most dynamic and competitive knowledge economy in the world by 2010’.
Instead, the US economy has left Europe in the dust while a hollowed out European military struggles desperately to re-equip itself for a world in which it cannot rely on America.
Overall, the EU is now midway through a second lost decade and in relentless economic decline.
Britain, of course, supposedly cut itself free from Brussels after the 2016 Brexit referendum. But we continue to decline along with the rest of Europe, and we are dominated by a political, administrative and cultural elite that still hankers after a return to the EU’s dubious embrace.
Their ignorance of Europe’s true plight is remarkable – and it means opportunities to be more agile, distinctive and opportunistic in a new multipolar world have been largely squandered.
‘A great game is under way,’ says one Chinese academic, which will determine not just a new trading system but a new ‘international order’ and the future of ‘how nations govern themselves’ – epochal events in which the BRICS are likely to be more involved than the Brits.
The world is being remade. Democracy is once again under threat. And, as the Alaska talks illustrate all too clearly, we are – for the first time in 500 years – condemned to mere observer status.
