Navigating the Vortex

The visit of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House on February 28, 2025, has not gone to plan. There were extraordinary scenes as a press conference between Zelensky and Trump descended into acrimony, with the US president loudly berating his opposite number, accusing him of “gambling with world war three” — a familiar Russian talking point.

“You either make a deal or we’re out,” Trump told Zelensky. His vice-president, JD Vance, also got in on the act, blaming the Ukrainian president for “litigating in front of the American media”, and saying his approach was “disrespectful”. At one point he asked Zelensky: “Have you said thank you even once?”

Reporters present described the atmosphere as heated with voices raised by both Trump and Vance. The New York Times said the scene was “one of the most dramatic moments ever to play out in public in the Oval Office and underscored the radical break between the United States and Ukraine since Mr Trump took office”.

Underlying the angry exchanges were differences between the Trump administration and the Ukrainian government over the so-called “minerals deal” that Zelensky was scheduled to sign, and in particular over what the US would offer Ukraine in terms of security guarantees in the event of a peace deal with Russia.

With the meeting between the two presidents and their teams cut short and Zelensky leaving Washington early, the deal seems off the table for now. Trump all but closed the door on Zelensky when he posted on his Truth Social platform that Zelensky could come back “when he is ready for peace.”

How much of a loss is this for Ukraine?

The deal looked more like a memorandum of understanding that leaves several vital issues to be resolved later. On offer was the creation of a “reconstruction investment fund”, to be jointly owned and managed by the US and Ukraine.

Into the proposed fund were to go 50% of the revenue from the exploitation of “all relevant Ukrainian government-owned natural resource assets (whether owned directly or indirectly by the Ukrainian government)” and “other infrastructure relevant to natural resource assets (such as liquified natural gas terminals and port infrastructure).”

This means that private infrastructure — much of it owned by Ukraine’s wealthy oligarchs — was likely to become part of the deal. This had the potential of further increasing friction between Zelensky and some very powerful Ukrainians.

Meanwhile, US contributions were less clearly defined. The preamble to the agreement makes it clear that Ukraine already owes the US. The very first paragraph notes that “the United States of America has provided significant financial and material support to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022”.

This figure, according to Trump, amounts to $350 billion. The actual amount, according to the Ukraine Support Tracker of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, is about half that.

Western and Ukrainian analysts have also pointed out that there may be fewer mineral and rare earth deposits in Ukraine than are currently assumed, and they may be less accessible. The working estimates have been based mostly on Soviet-era data.

Since the current draft left details on ownership, governance and operations to be determined in a future fund agreement, future rounds of negotiations were inevitable.

From a Ukrainian perspective, this should have been seen as more of a strength than a weakness. It left Kyiv with an opportunity to achieve more satisfactory terms in future rounds of negotiation. Even if improvements would only be marginal, it would keep the US locked into a process that is, overall, beneficial for Ukraine.

Take the example of security guarantees. The draft agreement offers Ukraine nothing anywhere near Nato membership. But it notes that the US “supports Ukraine’s efforts to obtain security guarantees needed to establish lasting peace”, adding that “participants will seek to identify any necessary steps to protect mutual investments.”

The significance of this should not be overstated. At its bare minimum, it is an expression of intent by the US that falls short of security guarantees but still gives the US a stake in the survival of Ukraine as an independent state.

But it was an important signal both in terms of what it does and does not do — a signal to Russia, Europe and Ukraine.

Trump did not envisage that the US will give Ukraine security guarantees “beyond very much”. He seemed to think that these guarantees can be provided by European troops. While the Kremlin had already cast doubts on this idea, European leaders, including the British prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, had carefully prepared the ground for this with Trump.

This meant that the idea was not completely off the table. On the contrary, because the US commitment is so vague, it gives Trump leverage in every direction—if he and Zelensky find a way forward, which is by no means certain.

Trump can use it as a carrot and a stick against Ukraine to get more favourable terms for US returns from the reconstruction investment fund. He can use it to push Europe towards more decisive action to ramp up defence spending by making any US protection for European peacekeepers contingent on more equitable burden-sharing in Nato.

However, the row in the White House is also likely to have done yet more damage to the transatlantic relationship. Most European leaders have rallied behind Zelensky again, and there is now a very real chance that Trump will abandon both Europe and Ukraine when he cuts a deal with Putin.

The deal also gave Trump the opportunity to signal to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, that the US is serious about making a ceasefire deal stick—and that higher American economic stakes in Ukraine and a US corporate presence on the ground would mean US-backed consequences if the Kremlin reneges on a future peace agreement and restarts hostilities. This argument, too, has lost much of its credibility after the shouting match between Trump and Zelensky.

That these calculations will ultimately lead to the “free, sovereign and secure Ukraine” that the agreement envisages was not even a given before the fall-out between Trump and Zelensky in the White House.

For now, the answer to the question of whether Zelensky has gambled away more than just a deal on his country’s minerals looks very uncomfortable for Ukraine and its European allies. How uncomfortable will ultimately depend even more on whether Europe can step up and take care of its own security without the US.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on February 28, 2025.

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There has been much and justified focus on the implications of a likely deal between US president Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and the overwhelmingly negative consequences this will have for Ukraine and Europe. But if Trump and Putin make a deal, there is much more at stake than Ukraine’s future borders and Europe’s relationship with the US.

As we are nearing the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s future is more in doubt than it has ever been since February 2022. For once, analogies to Munich 1938 are sadly appropriate. This is not because of a mistaken belief that Putin can be appeased, but rather because great powers, once again, make decisions on the fate of weaker states and without them in the room.

Similar to the pressure that Czechoslovakia experienced from both Germany and its supposed allies France and Britain in 1938, Ukraine is now under pressure from Russia on the battlefield and the US both diplomatically and economically. Trump and his team are pushing hard for Ukraine to make territorial concessions to Russia and accept that some 20% of Ukrainian lands under Russia’s illegal occupation are lost. In addition, Trump demands that Ukraine compensate the United States for past military support by handing over half of its mineral and rare earth resources.

The American refusal to provide tangible security guarantees not only for Ukraine but also for allied Nato troops if they were deployed to Ukraine as part of a ceasefire or peace agreement smacks of the Munich analogy. Not only did France and Britain at the time push Czechoslovakia to cede the ethnic German-majority Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. They also did nothing when Poland and Hungary also seized parts of the country. And they failed to respond when Hitler – a mere six months after the Munich agreement – broke up what was left of Czechoslovakia by creating a Slovak puppet state and occupying the remaining Czech lands.

There is every indication that Putin is unlikely to stop in or with Ukraine. And it is worth remembering that the second world war started 11 months after Neville Chamberlain thought he had secured “peace in our time”.

The Munich analogy may not carry that far, however. Trump is not trying to appease Putin because he thinks, as Chamberlain and Daladier did in 1938, that he has weaker cards than Putin. What seems to drive Trump is a more simplistic view of the world in which great powers carve out spheres of influence in which they do not interfere.

The problem for Ukraine and Europe in such a world order is that Ukraine is certainly not considered by anyone in Trump’s team as part of an American zone of influence, and Europe is at best a peripheral part of it.

For Trump, this isn’t really about Ukraine or Europe but about re-ordering the international system in a way that fits his 19th-century view of the world in which the US lives in splendid isolation and virtually unchallenged in the western hemisphere. In this world view, Ukraine is the symbol of what was wrong with the old order. Echoing the isolationism of Henry Cabot, Trump’s view is that the US has involved itself into too many different foreign adventures where none of its vital interests were at stake.

Echoing Putin’s talking points, the war against Ukraine no longer is an unjustified aggression but was, as Trump has now declared, Kyiv’s fault. Ukraine has become the ultimate test that the liberal international order failed to pass.

The war against Ukraine clearly is a symbol of the failure of the liberal international order, but hardly its sole cause. In the hands of Trump and Putin it has become the tool to deal it a final blow. But while the US and Russia, in their current political configurations, may have found it easy to bury the existing order, they will find it much harder to create a new one.

The push-back from Ukraine and key European countries may seem inconsequential for now, but even without the US, the EU and Nato have strong institutional roots and deep pockets. For all the justified criticism of the mostly aspirational responses from Europe so far, the continent is built on politically and economically far stronger foundations than Russia and the overwhelming majority of its people have no desire to emulate the living conditions in Putin’s want-to-be empire.

Nor will Trump and Putin be able to rule the world without China. A deal between them may be Trump’s idea of driving a wedge between Moscow and Beijing, but this is unlikely to work given Russia’s dependence on China and China’s rivalry with the US.

If Trump makes a deal with Xi as well, for example over Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea, let alone over Taiwan, all he would achieve is further retrenchment of the US to the western hemisphere. This would leave Putin and Xi to pursue their own, existing deal of a no-limits partnership unimpeded by an American-led counter-weight.

From the perspective of what remains of the liberal international order and its proponents, a Putin-Xi deal, too, has an eerie parallel in history – the short-lived Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. Only this time, there is little to suggest that the Putin-Xi alliance will break down similarly quickly.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on February 24, 2025.

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The last week has left European leaders in little doubt that they will be mostly on their own when it comes to providing security guarantees to Ukraine when Russia and the US have made a deal on the future of the country. This will most likely be a deal negotiated largely in the absence of both Europe and Ukraine. And it will be a deal that looks, at least in the short term, more like a Russian victory.

These are worrying prospects to begin with. They are further exacerbated by the fact that Europe is ill-prepared for a future without a significant US security presence on the continent that has, since the end of the second world war, kept America’s NATO allies in Europe safe—first from Soviet and then from Russian aggression.

For these past 80 years, since the ‘big three’ allies of the second world war divided Europe into a Soviet and an American sphere of influence in Yalta, the bill for European security has mostly been footed by Washington—much to the annoyance of US presidents past, and especially present.

Even three years into the largest land war on the continent since 1945, European defence spending is dwarfed by America’s. There have been significant and real-term increases in military budgets in Europe since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But even then, defence expenditure in Germany—now the largest spender on defence among European NATO members—stands at below 10% of that of the US. Where Washington committed over $900bn in 2024, Berlin spent less than $90bn.

The story is similar when it comes to combat-ready forces. Poland has the largest standing army among EU member states with around 200,000 soldiers, half of whom are land forces that would be critical for both providing peacekeepers to Ukraine and deterring a future Russian aggression against another European country. Yet, Poland has already ruled out sending troops to Ukraine. Other EU countries, including Germany, Spain and Denmark, have been more circumspect about whether they would be willing to put boots on the ground in Ukraine.

The clearest commitment so far to contribute ground forces to secure a ceasefire in Ukraine has come from the UK. However, the British prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has not given any details on actual numbers yet. With the size of the British army now below 80,000 soldiers and reportedly fewer than 20,000 ready to deploy in combat, he will be hard pressed to commit British troops in significant numbers.

Compare that to Russia’s armed forces with an overall personnel strength of 1.32 million soldiers, including land forces of 550,000—and the scale of the problem for Europe becomes clear.

The necessity to step up and assume greater responsibility for its own security has been recognised by European leaders for some time now. Their increasing determination to do something about it was also evident at a meeting hastily arranged by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, on Monday, February 17, 2025, in Paris.

Necessity and willingness to one side, Europe’s ability to act, however, remains in doubt. The meeting in Paris, much like a joint statement last week by the so-called Weimar+ group (Germany, France, Poland + Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, the EU’s diplomatic service and the European Commission) is indicative of how divided Europe is becoming over what course to chart between Russia and the US.

There is an emerging “coalition of the willing” who are determined to invest in the continent’s defences in an effort to deter Russia from future aggression and provide Ukraine with badly needed security guarantees once a deal has been agreed between Trump and Putin. This coalition shapes up to be a mix of the Weimar+ group, those countries and institutions invited to the emergency meeting in Paris on Monday (Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark, as well as the NATO secretary-general and the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission,) and NATO’s other Baltic member states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as recent joiners Sweden and Finland).

Potentially, this is a formidable alliance. But as the debate over the commitment to ground forces already indicates, this coalition is far from a unitary force. And even if they were, their ability to act fast and decisively is hampered by the financial constraints they face. Several of them are highly indebted countries, including France, Italy and Spain who are among the EU members with a government-debt-to-GDP ratio above 100%.

Germany, on the other hand, has a debt brake in place that prevents the federal government from exceeding an annual borrowing limit of 0.35% of GDP. While temporary emergency exemptions are possible (and were enacted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic), changing this permanently to enable sustained higher defence spending would require a constitutional amendment.

With many European countries domestically constrained to increase their military budgets, the alternative would be a new common European debt to finance the estimated €500bn investment needed in the continent’s defence-industrial base over the next decade. Yet, common borrowing is anathema to many of the fiscally more conservative northern European members of the EU.

As the saying goes, where there is a will, there is a way. And Europe now more than ever needs to find a way. The time for muddling through with, at best, temporary fixes to deep structural problems is well and truly over given that the ultimate US back-stop to European security seems to be disappearing before our eyes.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by Channel News Asia on February 20, 2025.

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European leaders are scrambling to respond to what looks like the end of reliable US protection of the continent. It is unclear what the “main European countries” (including the UK) might be able to agree beyond a hastily convened meeting in Paris on Monday February 17. But individual countries, including the UK and Germany, have come forward to put concrete offers on the table for Ukraine’s security, which could involve putting their troops on the ground to secure a ceasefire.

This unusual circling of the wagons was triggered by the 2025 Munich Security Conference, which ended on Sunday, February 16. It brought to a close a week of remarkable upheaval for Europe, leaving no doubt that two already obvious trends in the deteriorating transatlantic relationship have accelerated further.

What the world saw was unabashed US unilateralism when it comes to the war in Ukraine and unashamed American interference into the domestic political processes of European countries—most notably the upcoming German parliamentary elections on February 23, 2025.

None of that should have come as a surprise. But the full-on, full-force assault by President Trump’s envoys to Europe was still sobering—especially once all its implications are considered. What was, perhaps, more surprising was that European leaders pushed back and did so in an unusually public and unequivocal way.

US unilateralism over Ukraine is leaving Europe out in the cold.

Over the course of just a few days, two of the worst European fears were confirmed. First, the Trump administration is pushing ahead with its idea of a US-Russia deal to end the war in Ukraine, leaving Ukraine and the EU out of any negotiations and to their own devices when it comes to post-ceasefire security arrangements.

On February 12, 2025, Trump announced that he had spoken at length with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and subsequently informed Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky of the conversation. The same day, US defence secretary Pete Hegseth, confirmed at a press conference after a meeting of Nato defence ministers in Brussels that direct negotiations between Russia and the US would begin immediately and not include any European or Ukrainian officials.

Hegseth also poured cold water on any hopes that there would be robust US security guarantees for Ukraine. He explicitly ruled out that US troops would serve as peacekeepers in Ukraine or that any future Russian attack on forces deployed by other Nato members would be considered an attack on the whole alliance and trigger a collective response as provided under article 5 of the Nato treaty.

For once, the European reaction was swift and, at least on paper, decisive. Right after Hegseth’s comments in Brussels, the Weimar+ group (Germany, France, Poland + Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, the European External Action Service and the European Commission) issued a joint statement reiterating their commitment to enhanced support in defence of Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.

On February 14, the EU’s top officials—Antonio Costa and Ursula von der Leyen—met with Zelensky on the margins of the Munich Security Conference. They assured him of the Union’s “continued and stable support to Ukraine until a just, comprehensive and lasting peace is reached”.

The following day, Costa’s speech in Munich reiterated this commitment. Similar to earlier comments by Nato’s secretary general Mark Rutte, Costa underlined Europe’s determination to “to act better, stronger and faster in building the Europe of defence”.

But these declarations of the EU’s determination to continue supporting Ukraine do not reflect consensus inside the Union on what to do and, importantly, how to do it. Weimar+ only includes a select number of EU member states, institutions, and the UK, underlining the continuing difficulties in achieving unanimity on critical security and defence issues.

European unity is fragile and under threat, including from the US.

Unsurprisingly, Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán issued a scathing condemnation of the Weimar+ statement as a “sad testament of bad Brusselian leadership”.

Orbán’s comments play right into many Europeans’ fears about another dark side of Trump’s agenda when it comes to transatlantic relations. As foreshadowed in the influential Project 2025 report by a coalition of conservative US thinktanks, the Trump administration is intent on weakening European unity. This will include preventing the UK from slipping “back into the orbit of the EU” and “developing new allies inside the EU—especially the Central European countries”.

Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, used his speech in Munich to claim that the real threat to European security was not coming from Russia or China, but rather “from within”. He went on to chide “EU commissars” and insinuated that Europe’s current leaders had more in common with the “tyrannical forces on this continent” who lost the cold war.

In Romania, where presidential elections were cancelled after evidence of massive Russian election interference came to light, opposition parties revelled in Vance’s comments that the move had been based on the “flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbours”. These inflammatory, and unfounded, allegations by the second-highest elected official in the US have further exacerbated political divisions in a key European and Nato ally right on the border with Ukraine and done little to assuage fears in European capitals about outright election interference—not just from Russia but also from the US.

Vance’s subsequent meeting with Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) was widely criticised as yet another American attempt in the wake of Elon Musk’s support for the party to boost its chances at Germany’s upcoming parliamentary elections on February 23.

Strong pushback on that front came, among others, from both the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and his defence minister, Boris Pistorius. Referring Germany’s historical experience with Nazism, Scholz defended the need to hold the line against far-right political parties like the AfD. This so-called firewall, a consensus among Germany’s established political parties to exclude extreme right-wing parties from any coalition government, has drawn particular ire from Vance and Musk. Their efforts to white-wash the AfD and downplay the party’s ideological proximity to the Nazis are well-aligned with similar attempts by Putin in this direction.

Europe must find a role and place for itself in a new multipolar world or it will be crushed by Putin, Trump and Xi.

There have been many watershed moments and wake-up calls for Europe in the past. What is different now is that a new multipolar order is emerging, and Europe is not one of its poles. Equally importantly, given the determination of this US administration to upend the existing international order, Europe is not a part of any pole anymore either.

Simultaneously at stake are European unity and the transatlantic relationship, the two key pillars that have ensured European security, democracy and prosperity since the end of the second world war. Out of necessity, Europe will most likely have to adjust to a much-weakened transatlantic relationship. But the European project will not survive without unity.

This is a critical juncture for Europe where the continent needs to define its future place and role in the dysfunctional love triangle of Trump, Putin and Xi that will shape and dominate the new global order.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on February 17, 2025.

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In an unprecedented decision on 6 December 2024, the Romanian constitutional court annulled the November 25 presidential elections after it received credible intelligence of large-scale external interference rigging the results of the first round in favour of a hardly-known far-right candidate, Calin Georgescu. His massive last-minute surge in support was largely blamed on Russian-controlled bots on TikTok.

This may seem like last year's news, but with elections coming up in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and possibly even Ukraine, there's plenty to worry about -- apart from a new US president who is disrupting Washington and the rest of the world with a flurry of executive orders and foreign policy initiatives that feel more like real estate sales pitches.

Concerns about Russian election interference are nothing new, but so far, the picture of Moscow's success is rather mixed.

Back in January 2017, the US intelligence community was confident that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential elections to get Donald Trump elected. The following year, similar accusations arose in the context of presidential elections in France. But in France, the Kremlin failed to prevent the victory of Emmanuel Macron.

In Georgia, Russian interference contributed to the victory of the incumbent government of the Georgian Dream party in parliamentary elections in October 2024. This sparked widespread and lasting protests in the country and prompted an increasingly brutal government crack-down on media and civil society.

By contrast, Russia failed twice last year to achieve favourable results at the polls in Moldova. Despite alleged Russian interference, the country's pro-Western president won a second term in November 2024. A referendum on a constitutional commitment to EU membership, coinciding with the first round of presidential elections two weeks earlier, was supported by a razor-thin majority of voters.

Opinion polls on perceptions of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, across western democracies also offer some solace. According to a survey carried out by the Pew Research Center in 2024, positive views of Russia and its leader remain very low across EU and Nato member countries. At the same time, approval ratings of the EU and Nato remained high among member countries' citizens.

But these relatively comforting headline figures mask important, and somewhat worrying, trends. In Germany, which holds early parliamentary elections on February 23, positive views of Putin more than doubled from 8% in 2023 to 17% in 2024. This is still a far cry from the 76% who approved of Putin in 2003 or even the 36% who did so in 2019, according to the same survey. The German increase is an outlier among the 13 EU members (plus the US and Canada) that were included in the Pew survey, but in only one of them — Italy — did support drop, and in another — Poland — there was no change.

The same goes for support for the EU and Nato. The median level of support across nine EU members surveyed by Pew stands at 63%, with 36% of participants holding unfavourable views of the EU. Germany, with 63% favourable views, however, recorded the second consecutive decline, down from 78% in 2022 and 71% in 2023. And Germany is less of an outlier here — favourable views of the EU among member states have generally declined over the past two years.

When it comes to Nato, 63% of survey participants in 13 member countries thought more positively of the alliance, while 33% had more negative views. But again, with only two exceptions — Hungary and Canada (where favourability went up) — the share of those with positive views of Nato had declined by between two and eight percentage points since last year.

Does this mean that Putin is winning? No, he is not, or at least not yet. Attitude surveys are less important than election results.

Russia appears to have had some success in changing election outcomes and perhaps most spectacularly recently in Romania. Here, the country’s intelligence services discovered, and made public, clear evidence of voter manipulation. But the Romanian response of annulling the election is also illustrative of how critical it is for democracies to fight back -- and even more importantly to take preventive action.

And this is a lesson that seems to have sunk in. On January 30, the foreign ministers of twelve EU member states sent a joint letter to Brussels urging the European Commission to make more aggressive use of its powers under the Digital Services Act to protect the integrity of democratic elections in the bloc. Article 25 of that act, crucially, establishes an obligation on online platforms to design their services free from deception and manipulation and ensure that users can make informed decisions.

While the commission has yet to demonstrate its resolve under the Digital Services Act, a Berlin court on Friday, February 7, 2025, ruled against Elon Musk's X and ordered that information needed to track disinformation be released to two civil society groups who had requested it.

This highlights a broader point: if Putin is winning, he is not winning on his own. Democracies are not only under threat from Russia. Musk — an unelected billionaire wielding unprecedented influence under Donald Trump — has repeatedly been accused of interfering in European debates and election campaigns.

But does this mean that Musk and Putin share the same values? Not necessarily. What they have in common is their deep dislike of open liberal democracies and a cunning ability to employ technology to further their goal by promoting so-called anti-establishment political parties.

Where they differ is that Musk focuses on the far-right — Germany's AfD or the UK's Tommy Robinson. Putin's decisions who to back are more a function of what he sees as serving Russian interests: above all weakening western unity and influence. This leads to the Kremlin lending support to leaders on both the far right and far left ends of the political spectrum. Politically united mostly in their pro-Russian leanings, Hungary's Viktor Orbán and Slovakia's Robert Fico exemplify this divide in the EU and Nato.

But more often than not, Putin's and Musk's proteges are the same. In the case of the German AfD, it was no accident that Putin echoed comments in a Musk speech at an AfD election rally that Germans should move beyond their war guilt. Both were keen to remove the stain of being too close to Germany's Nazi past from the AfD and make it not just electable but also coalition-able, much like Austria’s far-right Freedom Party which has a long history of more-than-amicable relations with Putin. And what Musk can do openly on X, Putin tries to achieve with a campaign of his bot army on the platform.

Perhaps the most significant similarity between Musk and Putin — and others who have been accused of election interference, like Iran and China — is that they tap into a growing reservoir of discontent with liberal democracy. And this is a trend well beyond the global west.

According to a 2024 survey of 31 democracies worldwide, 54% of participants were dissatisfied with how they saw democracy working. In 12 high income countries — Canada, US, and 10 EU member states — dissatisfaction was even higher with 64% and has been increasing for the fourth consecutive year.

Pushing back against the kind of blatant election interference by the likes of Putin and Musk is vital. That alone, however, will not be enough to reverse persistent trends of decline in the support for democracy and its standard bearers like the EU and Nato. It is imperative to resist and prosecute election rigging. But it is also crucial that this effort goes hand-in-hand with digging deeper into why people are dissatisfied with democracy — and to do something about it without delay.

Donald Trump never fails to surprise. But the bombshell that he dropped at his press conference with visiting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on February 4, 2025, was of a completely different magnitude.

He suggested that the United States take over the Gaza strip, develop it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”, and take a “long-term ownership position”. “This could be so magnificent,” he said. It’s not every day that foreign policy sounds like a real estate sales pitch.

If this wasn’t already enormously controversial, Trump also reiterated that Palestinians currently living in Gaza should be relocated, appealing to countries “with humanitarian hearts” to accommodate them. This is particular ironic and hypocritical, given that Trump on the same day signed an executive order to withdraw all funding from the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

Contrary to his usual reluctance to deploy US forces abroad, he also said his administration would “do what is necessary” when asked about sending troops there. By Wednesday, the administration was already walking back parts of the proposal and sought to clarify that any resettlement of Palestinians would only be temporary. There was also some pushback from Republicans, including Senators Rand Paul and Lindsay Graham and former national security advisor John Bolton.

But by now, the world should have learnt to not to dismiss outright what Trump says, no matter how outrageous it sounds. And true to form, the president doubled down on his proposal on Thursday in a post on his Truth Social network.

Claiming that no US troops would be needed – because the “Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting” – he re-upped the idea of resettling Palestinians and envisioned “the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth” in the Gaza strip. All of this, in Trump’s view, would mean that “stability for the region would reign”.

This is by far the most extreme proposal on the future of Gaza and its people ever to be made by a US president – or any other serious political leader. So much so, that even Netanyahu approvingly conceded that Trump was “taking it to a much higher level.” And shortly after Trump aired his proposal, Netanyahu’s defence minister, Israel Katz, announced on X that he had ordered his troops “to prepare a plan that will allow any resident of Gaza who wishes to leave to do so.”

Elsewhere, of course, rejection of what would amount to the ethnic cleansing of over two million Palestinians and another illegal occupation of Palestinian lands was universal.

This may be more of a problem than Trump imagines because Gaza is just one piece in a much more complicated puzzle of US Middle East policy.

For starters, there are now serious doubts on the future of the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, with talks about its second phase just started. This also raises questions about what Trump meant when he envisaged taking over Gaza from Israel “at the conclusion of fighting”. It is almost as if he assumes a breakdown of the very ceasefire that he claimed his victory in November’s presidential elections was key in achieving (which is true, according to many observers, but leaves one to wonder why it then took more than two months to get there).

In the longer term, the injustice that Palestinians would rightly feel over experiencing another large-scale forced displacement – comparable in scale to the 1948 Nakba – would lead to yet more radicalisation among them.

A future US occupation of Gaza – already questionable from an international legal perspective – would not confer sovereignty, let alone what Trump calls a “long-term ownership position”. Deportations, in particular, are illegal under the fourth Geneva convention of 1949, to which the United States is a signatory.

Even if it were legally and logistically possible to relocate over two million Palestinians, the impact on Trump’s preferred recipients – above all Egypt and Jordan – would be highly destabilising to their social cohesion. It would also further strain their struggling public services, potentially beyond breaking point. The region is already reeling from the freezing of USAID programmes that Trump mandated in an executive order on the day of his inauguration. In 2024, Jordan received $1.4 billion of aid from USAID, Egypt $215 million, and the West Bank and Gaza $918 million.

Not only is the future of this US support to the region much in doubt but humanitarian assistance has also generally become less of a priority to many governments in the global north. With the rebuilding Gaza estimated to cost billions of dollars and to take many years, Trump’s proposal looks even less like a carefully considered plan.

The combined impact of the drying-up of foreign assistance and the proposed mass displacements of Palestinians from Gaza risks to condemn millions of people and the communities receiving them to decades of deprivation and suffering. The resulting desperation would be the perfect breeding ground for violence and a rich environment for recruitment efforts by terrorist organisations.

Trump’s plan for Gaza also imperils the broader Middle East strategy that he has articulated so far. It does clearly not sit very well with the idea of achieving normalisation between Israel and its Arab neighbours, especially Saudi Arabia.

Even before his shocking announcement on February 4, the foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, as well as the Secretary General of the PLO, had written a joint letter to Trump’s secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and urged him to work with them on implementing the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that Trump now has all but doomed.

While Rubio backed Trump’s plan, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohamed bin Salman condemned it in no uncertain terms, unequivocally ruling out normalisation with Israel in the absence of a viable Palestinian state.

Without Saudi backing, Trump’s other signature Middle East policy – a regional, US-backed alliance against Iran to force Tehran “to make a great deal” – will also struggle to get off the ground. A return to his maximum pressure campaign against Iran is now certain following an executive order to this effect. But without broader Arab-Israeli rapprochement, the success of this policy will be more limited.

For years, Tehran has managed to exploit the plight of the Palestinians and the lack of Arab support for their cause. Iran has forged an alliance of proxies and enlisted them in the fight against Israel while also mobilising anger among ordinary Arabs and channelling it against the ruling monarchies in the Gulf states.

The regime in Tehran may be weaker now than at any time in the past decade as a result of repeated air strikes against by Israel and the wars against Hamas and Hezbollah, but the conditions that allowed it to become a dangerous regional power are still there.

The atrocities committed by Hamas during its attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s disproportionate retaliation afterwards have intensified the salience of the Palestinian cause across the Arab world. Ruling regimes across the region would ignore this at their peril, and Trump will lose valuable US allies if he persists with his plans for mass-deportations of Palestinians and the establishment of a US presence in Gaza.

At its heart, Trump’s outline of the deal he envisages for Gaza builds on his 2020 plan for the Middle East and the Abraham Accords. But rather than making either of these more workable, it only holds the prospect of more human suffering, alienates important partners and allies in the region and beyond, and potentially may even require the US military to the kind of overseas expedition that Trump normally detests.

It is not a policy that makes anyone safer in the region or serves American interests. Trump of all pe…

Three weeks before the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, EU leaders came together for their first-ever meeting solely dedicated to defence issues. At that February 3, 2025 gathering in Brussels, it was clear that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was only the tip of an iceberg of security challenges that Europe faces. Not only has war on a scale not seen in Europe since 1945 returned to the continent, but Russian sabotage of everything from critical infrastructure to elections is at levels reminiscent of the cold war and the future of the EU’s most important defence alliance, Nato, is uncertain.

In light of these challenges, let alone the ongoing instability in the Middle East, Western Balkans, and South Caucasus, it’s hard to disagree with the observation by EU council president António Costa that “Europe needs to assume greater responsibility for its own defence”.

And yet, at the end of the day, the outcome of what was ultimately only an informal meeting was underwhelmingly summarised by Costa as “progress in our discussions on building the Europe of Defence”.

This does not bode well for Ukraine. US support is unlikely to continue at the levels reached during the final months of the Biden administration. In fact, ongoing debates in the White House on Ukraine policy have already caused some disruption to arms shipments from Washington to Kyiv.

If there is a silver lining for Ukraine here, it is Trump’s continuous search for a good deal – his latest idea being that Ukraine would pay for US support with favourable concessions on rare earths, and potentially other strategic resources, such as titanium, iron ore and coal, as well as critical minerals, including lithium. Whether this is a sustainable basis for US support in the long term is as unclear as whether it will make any material difference to Trump thinking beyond a ceasefire and to an actual peace settlement.

The other ray of hope for Ukraine is that there is a much greater recognition in EU capitals now about the need for a common European approach to defence. A greater focus on building a ‘coalition of the willing’ including non-EU members UK and Norway is a potentially promising path.

But hope, as they say, is not a winning strategy. In a Trump-like transactional fashion, Brussels, in exchange for a deal on defence with London, insists on UK concessions on youth mobility and fishing rights. It’s unlikely that this will prove an insurmountable stumbling bloc, but it will create yet more delays at a moment when time is of the essence for Europe as a whole to signal determination about security and defence.

This is further complicated by two factors. On the one hand, there is the looming threat of a trade war between the US and the EU. That the UK may be able to avoid a similar fate, according to Trump, may be good news for London, but will also put the UK in a potentially awkward position as it seeks an ambitious post-Brexit reset with the EU and hopes to improve relations with China. With Trump clearly hostile towards both Brussels and Beijing, this may become an impossible balancing act for the British government to pull off.

On the other hand, EU unity has become more fragile. Trump’s victory has emboldened other populist leaders in Europe, notably the significantly more pro-Russian Slovak and Hungarian prime ministers, Robert Fico and Viktor Orbán. The same applies to the UK, where the opposition Reform UK party has overtaken the ruling Labour party in the latest public opinion polls. Nigel Farage, the party’s pro-Trump leader, is known for his Ukraine-sceptical views.

Add to that a weak government in France and likely protracted coalition negotiations in Germany after parliamentary elections there at the end of February, and the prospects for decisive EU and wider European action on strengthening security and defence capabilities become vanishingly slim.

Seen in the light of such multiple and complex challenges, it is astonishing how much the EU is still trapped in a wishful thinking exercise – and one that appears more and more disconnected from reality. Contrary to Costa’s fulsome pronouncements after the EU leaders’ meeting, there is little evidence that the US under Trump will remain Europe’s friend, ally and partner.

Nor is there much evidence that the American president shares the values and principles that once underpinned the now rapidly dismantling international order. Other countries’ national sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of their borders are not at the forefront of Trump’s foreign policy doctrine.

If, as Costa proclaimed, “peace in Europe depends on Ukraine winning a comprehensive, just and lasting peace”, then the future looks bleak indeed for Europe and Ukraine.

The EU and its member states are a long way off from being able to provide Ukraine with the support it needs to win. This is not just because they lack military and defence-industrial capabilities. They also lack a credible, shared vision of how to acquire them while navigating a Trumpian world.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on February 5, 2025.

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We are now well beyond the 24 hours that Donald Trump had promised it would take him to secure an end to the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. But Trump’s first week since his inauguration on January 20, 2025, has nonetheless been a busy one regarding Ukraine.

In his inauguration address, Trump only made a passing and indirect reference to Ukraine, criticising his predecessor Joe Biden of running “a government that has given unlimited funding to the defence of foreign borders but refuses to defend American borders”.

Trump’s first more substantive statement on Ukraine was a post on his TruthSocial network, threatening Moscow with taxes, tariffs and sanctions if his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, didn’t agree to a deal soon. Trump reiterated this point on January 23 in comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos, adding that he “really would like to be able to meet with President Putin”.

Trump’s approach of putting pressure on Putin if necessary to bring him to the negotiation table has been well-established for some time and echoed by key members of his administration. His special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg — a retired lieutenant general of the US army and former chief of staff on Trump’s national security council — published a detailed peace plan in May 2024. And Trump’s now-confirmed nominee for treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, specifically emphasised increasing sanctions on Russian oil companies “to levels that would bring the Russian Federation to the table” during his Senate confirmation hearing on January 16.

On January 24, Putin responded by saying that he and Trump should indeed meet to discuss Ukraine and oil prices. But this was far from a firm commitment to enter into negotiations, and particularly not with Ukraine. Putin alluded to an October 2022 decree by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, banning any negotiations with the Kremlin after Russia formally annexed four regions of Ukraine. Zelensky has since clarified that the decree applies to everyone but him, thus signalling that he would not stand in the way of opening direct talks with Russia.

Yet, Putin is likely to continue playing for time. The most probable first step in a Trump-brokered deal will be a ceasefire freezing the line of contact at the time of agreement. With his forces still advancing on the ground in Ukraine, every day of fighting brings Putin additional territorial gains.

Nor are there any signs of waning support from Russian allies. Few and far between as they may be, China, Iran and North Korea have been critical in sustaining the Kremlin’s war effort. Moscow now has added a treaty on a comprehensive strategic partnership with Iran to the one it had sealed with North Korea in June 2024. Meanwhile, the Russia-China no-limits partnership of 2022, further deepened in 2023, shows no signs of weakening. And with Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko winning a seventh consecutive term on January 26, 2025, Putin will retain additional leverage both on Ukraine and Belarus’s EU neighbours.

Putin is unlikely to be too worried about additional US sanctions. Pressure on oil prices would be more detrimental for the Russian war economy, but it is unlikely that OPEC will quickly accede to Trump’s demands for increased outputs that would drive global prices down. And while the EU has just renewed its sanctions against Russia for another six months, Hungary and Slovakia, two of Putin’s allies inside the EU, could derail future decisions for a roll-over of existing sanctions — required every six months — or the approval of new sanctions.

Zelensky, like Putin, may play for time. Trump’s threat of sanctions against Russia is likely an indication of some level of frustration on the part of the US president that Putin seems less amenable to cutting a deal. This will make it less likely that Trump’s ire will be directed at Zelensky for standing in the way of a deal and makes the continuation of at least some US military support for Kyiv more likely. Russia may continue to make territorial gains in eastern Ukraine, but it has not achieved any strategic breakthrough.

The significant increase in US military assistance to Ukraine since September 2024, as well as commitments from European allies, including the UK, have also likely put Kyiv into a position that it can sustain its current defensive efforts through 2025. Ukraine may not be able to launch a major new offensive but could continue to keep costs for Russia high. On the battlefield, these costs are estimated at 102 casualties per square kilometre of Ukrainian territory captured. Beyond the frontlines, Ukraine has also continued its drone campaign against targets inside Russia, especially the country’s oil infrastructure.

This is not to say that intransigence in Moscow and Kyiv will lead to Trump failing in his efforts to end the fighting in Ukraine. But there is a big difference between a ceasefire and a sustainable peace agreement. And while a ceasefire, at some point, may be in both Russia’s and Ukraine’s interest, sustainable peace is much more difficult to achieve.

Putin’s vision of total victory is as much an obstacle here as western reluctance to provide credible security guarantees for Ukraine, be it in the form of Nato membership or a western-led peacekeeping force that could act as a credible deterrent. It is certainly inconceivable that Europe could muster the 200,000 troops that Zelensky envisaged as a deployment in Ukraine to guarantee any deal with Putin. But a smaller force, led by the UK and France, might be possible and act as a tripwire force — similar to Nato troops in West Berlin during the Cold War or US troops on the Korean peninsula.

Kyiv and Moscow continue to be locked in a war of attrition and neither Putin nor Zelensky have blinked so far. It is not clear yet whether, and in which direction, Trump will tilt the balance and how this will affect either side’s willingness to submit to his deal-making efforts.

So far, Trump’s moves are not a gamechanger. However, this is the first serious attempt in nearly three years of war to forge a path towards an end of the fighting. It remains to be seen whether Trump, and everyone else, has the imagination and stamina to ensure that this path will ultimately lead to a just and secure peace for Ukraine.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on January 27, 2025.

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Even before taking office for his second term in the White House, Donald Trump gave some very clear indications of a renewed focus of American foreign policy on the western hemisphere. This included plans to buy Greenland, annex Canada and to resume control of the Panama Canal. Of these three Panama, for now, appears to be the one highest on the US president’s agenda.

In his inauguration speech on November 20, 2025, Trump complained that the United States “have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should have never been made, and Panama’s promise to us has been broken.” As evidence for his claim, he cited that American commercial and navy vessels are “severely overcharged” and that “China is operating the Panama Canal”.

Is Trump right regarding these claims? There is no question that charges for vessels using the Panama Canal have increased over the years and were raised again on January 1, 2025. The reason for this is primarily a severe draught in 2023 which has reduced the water available to enable ships’ transit through the canal (a problem known for over a decade). As a result, the Panama Canal Authority requires pre-booked transit slots, for which it charges a fee. Slots are also offered through an auction process, with congestion sending bids skyrocketing. One company paid a record US$4 million to jump to the front of the queue in November 2023.

Booking fees and transit fees apply to all vessels regardless of their origin, destination, or ownership—but with the US accounting for almost three-quarters of all traffic through the canal, the cost of increasing fees is particularly felt by US companies.

Similarly, Trump is not correct in claiming that “China is operating the Panama Canal”, as he did during his inauguration address. The Panama Canal Authority is the autonomous legal entity that administers the canal. It is based on the Panamanian constitution and an organic law of 1997.

However, China has considerable influence over the operation of the canal. Two of the five ports at the Atlantic and Pacific entry ports of the canal are operated by a subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa, a Hong Kong-based conglomerate with stakes in 52 ports across 26 countries. This has given rise to concerns that a foreign power now has the “ability to turn the canal into a choke point in a moment of conflict”, as Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, noted during his confirmation hearing. Rubio, whose first official trip abroad will include a stop-over in Panama, acknowledged that “technically” China does not control the canal but made the point that Beining wields significant influence through commercial actors that are ultimately “not independent”.

Back in 2017, Panama was the first Latin American country to switch its diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the PRC. Four other countries—the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras followed. One year later, Panama signed up to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, again the first country in the region to do so. By December 2024, another 21 Latin American countries had joined the initiative.

Among China’s signature infrastructure projects in the region is a deep-sea port in Peru, operated by COSCO Shipping Ports, another Chinese logistics giant with stakes in 38 ports globally. But China has not only increased its economic footprint in Latin America but also expanded into even more sensitive areas such as law enforcement and 5G technology.

The claims regarding the Panama Canal may be dubious, and Trump would certainly be on shaky legal grounds if he were to attempt “take back” the Panama Canal. After all, the hand-over to Panama is based on a bilateral agreement, the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaty, and further backed up by an accompanying neutrality arrangement. But as a shorthand for a more assertive Latin America policy, the way in which Trump talks about Panama is an indication of how US foreign policy towards the region is likely to evolve.

Trump’s America first doctrine will feature a return to an earlier version of the so-called Monroe Doctrine and its Roosevelt Corollary – named, respectively, after the fifth and twenty-sixth US presidents – which established the Americas as a sphere of influence for the United States and justified American intervention to prevent other powers from gaining a foothold in the western hemisphere.

Although the policy of intervention was replaced in the early 1930s by the “Good Neighbour” policy, it was never completely abandoned and resurfaced in the US interventions in Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989. Unsurprisingly, countries in the region have reacted with alarm to Trump’s posturing. Panama has taken the issue to the UN Security Council where it currently serves a two-year term as a non-permanent member, ironically together with Denmark which was elected at the same time.

The problem, therefore, is not that the new US administration has misdiagnosed a problem. Growing Chinese influence in the western hemisphere is hard to dispute. But the approach taken by Trump is likely to be counter-productive, or at least unlikely to be as effective as a more cooperative policy. Panama’s current president, José Raúl Mulino, for example, is widely considered a much better ally to Washington than to Beijing. Threatening him in the way Trump has is hardly a recipe for lasting success.

Trump’s vision of America first is beginning to take shape as a foreign policy of insulation and isolation. It is about restoring a secure and undisputed sphere of influence in the Americas and a reduction in Washington’s commitments to Europe and the Middle East. All of this is meant to allow the US to prevail in its rivalry with China. Trump has so far refrained from imposing his threatened tariffs on China and is seemingly softening his anti-China rhetoric keeping the door open to a new deal with his counterpart Xi Jinping.

But both sides are hedging their bets: as the foreign ministers of the Quad countries – Australia, India, Japan, and the US – met in Washington, Xi was on a 90-minute video call with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. As far as the Quad is concerned, this indicates that the US, including Trump’s now-confirmed Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, see a certain value in alliances.

Adopting this approach towards Latin America would be a way to restore US leadership in the western hemisphere and to limit Chinese influence. It would also ensure cooperation from countries in the region on other US priorities, like curbing migration and drug trafficking.

Being a good neighbour may not get Trump the Panama Canal, but it may gradually secure him the sustainable sphere of influence that Washington will need to outcompete China in the long run.

Bullying his neighbours may lead to some short-term successes, but it will not bring the “Golden Age” that Trump envisaged in his inauguration address.

This is an updated and expanded version of a commentary published by Channel News Asia on January 25, 2025.

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Donald Trump’s return to the White House on January 20, 2025, is widely seen as ushering in a period of significant upheaval for US foreign policy, and a change in the way diplomacy is done.

Trump’s favoured style of bluster and threats against foreign leaders already seems to have paid off in helping to craft a peace deal, however shaky, in Gaza. The deal was negotiated by Biden and his team, in co-ordination with Trump’s incoming administration. But analysts suggest Trump’s fierce comments on January 7 that “all hell would break lose” if the hostages weren’t soon released were actually a threat to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to get something done quickly. And this forced the Israeli government to commit to a deal.

Trump used this abrasive style before in his first term. And his recent threats to buy Greenland, annex Canada and to resume control of the Panama Canal suggest this will happen again. Not only that, but Elon Musk, one of Trump’s close confidants, is openly bragging about his attempts to change governments in the UK and Germany – in an attempt to shore up a global alliance of populist leaders. This does not bode well, especially for traditional allies of the US.

Add to that a promised deal with Russia to end the war in Ukraine, a renewal of the maximum-pressure campaign against Iran and doubling down on confrontation with China – and you have all the ingredients of a fundamental remaking of US foreign policy.

Three particular aspects stand out and give an early indication of what an actual Trump doctrine of foreign policy might look like.

First is the focus on the western hemisphere. Trump’s focus here appears to be simultaneously asserting US dominance in the affairs of the Americas and eliminating any perceived strategic vulnerabilities. While Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal have dominated the headlines, there are also implications for US relations with Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, with Trump’s pick of Marco Rubio as secretary of state known for his hawkish approach.

Trump may inaccurately hype up China’s role in the Panama Canal, but Beijing has unquestionably increased its (mostly economic) footprint in Latin America. A Chinese-funded deep-water port in Peru has raised US security concerns. Chinese investment in Mexico has created an important backdoor into the US market and contributed to the fact that Mexico is now the largest trade partner for the US. In 2024, US imports of goods from Mexico stood at just under US$467 billion (£383 billion), compared to China’s US$401 billion (£329 billion).

Trump is likely to dial up the pressure in the western hemisphere using a mixture of threatening rhetoric, tariffs and political pressure. In an early demonstration of how serious the incoming administration takes the issue, his allies in Congress have already introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to “authorize the President to seek to enter into negotiations with the Kingdom of Denmark to secure the acquisition of Greenland by the United States”.

The second feature of the emerging Trump foreign policy doctrine is the scaling back of US involvement in regions that the administration considers of secondary importance. The two main areas in this context are Europe and the Middle East.

Trump’s promised deal with Russia to end the war in Ukraine is one key component of his strategy to free up US resources to focus on China and to “un-unite” Russia and China.

A deal with Putin, however, is not a foregone conclusion. Russia has retained the momentum of its campaign on the battlefield and does not appear to be running out of steam anytime soon. In fact, new doubts over western aid and the sustainability of sanctions might sway Putin against any deal, should he have contemplated one.

At the same time, a recent strategic partnership agreement between Moscow and Tehran is hardly likely to please Trump who has vowed to double down on renewing pressure on the Iranian regime. The deal between Russia and Iran, while stopping short of a mutual defence guarantee, however, is likely to provide Iran with something of a lifeline even if it just creates more links between two of the world’s most sanctioned countries.

There are some signs that Trump and his team are aware of these complexities. His insistence that US allies in Nato step up their defence spending, for example, is an indication that the incoming administration continues to place value in transatlantic security. It just does not want to be the one mostly paying for it. And Trump has a point: Washington currently shoulders 68% of all Nato expenditure, compared to European members’ 28%.

Trump’s approach to the Middle East is underpinned by the same calculation of US-brokered deal-making that protects US interests while facilitating a scaling down of commitments. With a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas now in place that will facilitate a release of Israeli hostages, a much clearer path to normalising relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia exists. This is still contingent upon an Israeli nod towards Palestinian statehood. But when it materialises, Israel’s relations with the rest of the Arab world will also improve. This will then shift the burden of containing Iran to a likely more effective and capable coalition of US allies in the region and allow Washington to resume its maximum-pressure campaign against Tehran.

While Trump’s approach to the western hemisphere and to Washington’s future relations with Europe and the Middle East is reasonably clear, there is an abundance of questions over his China strategy. His national security team is generally considered as hawkish on Beijing – with the exception of Elon Musk who has significant business interests in China.

Trump himself oscillates between aggressive and conciliatory rhetoric. Alleged Chinese control of the Panama Canal is one of his justifications for seeking to reassert US control of the strategic waterway. But he also name-checked Chinese president Xi Jinping as being able to help with a Ukraine deal and even invited him to his inauguration. Trump may be open to a deal with China, as he indicated after his first call with Xi since winning a second term in the White House. And China, in turn, has signalled interest in this as well. While Xi himself will not attend the inauguration, his vice president, Han Zheng, will.

Trump and Xi also have a track record of deal-making, even though their 2020 agreement did little more than stop an escalating trade war. The deal took two years to negotiate and left many of the tariffs imposed by Trump early in his first term in place, albeit in some cases at a reduced rate. Something similar could happen again now with Trump fulfilling one of his campaign pledges for higher tariffs on Chinese goods and simultaneously starting negotiations on a new deal with Beijing.

In all likelihood, this is Trump’s last term as president. For the next two years, at least, he controls both the Senate and the House of Representatives. He has every incentive to make good on his promises – and he faces few, if any, restraints. He sees himself as a disrupter, and his Maga base expects him to be just that.

Trump’s deal-making philosophy has little, if any, place for win-win outcomes. For him, it is all about winning, being seen to be winning, and being able to brag about it. This will complicate much of the deal-making required for his foreign policy doctrine to work. Nor is it clear whether any deals would stick, and if Trump, or his successors, would be able to enforce them.

What is not clear, therefore, is whether Trump’s vision of an ultimately more stable international order with clearly delimited spheres of influence for the great powers of the day – the US, China, and possibly Russia – will emerge, let alone whether such an outcome would be desirable.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on January 17, 2025.

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