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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
Winston Churchill is credited with saying that America does the right thing after exhausting the alternatives. Donald Trump has turned that aphorism on its head. In the past 10 days, he has all but incinerated 80 years of postwar American leadership. Those who thought America was a friend or ally, notably Ukraine and Nato, are dropping once safe assumptions to cope with a world in which America is an unabashed predator. Countries that were treated by Washington as adversaries, notably Vladimir Putin’s Russia, are suddenly America’s friend.
There were hinge moments in history when the US displayed its character as global leader, such as Dwight Eisenhower’s repudiation of Anglo-French imperialism in the 1956 Suez crisis, or Ronald Reagan’s 1987 exhortation to the Soviet Union to tear down the Berlin Wall. They defined the world’s idea of America. Trump’s assertion this week that Ukraine “should have never started” the war is the dark version of those. His account of Russia being provoked to invade Ukraine came straight from Putin’s talking points. So too was JD Vance’s Valentine’s Day speech in Munich in which the US vice-president identified liberal democracy as Europe’s real threat from within.
These moments will live in infamy. What do they tell us about what is coming? First, there should be no doubt that Trump’s contempt for allies and admiration for strongmen is real and will endure. During his first term, Trump’s instincts were curbed by the more traditional Republicans around him. Trump 2.0 is the real article. It is entirely possible that figures like Marco Rubio, his secretary of state, or Mike Waltz, his national security adviser, still believe in the US-led alliance that each once championed. Their private thoughts are irrelevant. Each displayed fealty to Trump’s predatory vision of America at talks with Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia this week. Ukraine, the subject of the negotiations, was not invited. Nor was Europe. If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.
Second, Trump is only getting started. His dismissal of Zelenskyy as “a dictator without elections” portends the disturbing outline of a peace settlement. Vance called Zelenskyy “disgraceful” for accusing Trump of living in a “disinformation bubble”. The idea that Ukraine has been under brutal assault and faces possible extinction is dismissed as liberal virtue signalling, like DEI or constitutional guardrails.
Trump is instinctively committed to the idea that the world is a jungle in which the big players take what they want. As such, it would be wrong to trivialise his repeated designs on Greenland, the Panama Canal, the Gaza Strip and even Canada. He divides the world into spheres of interest. There is a consistency to Trump’s sympathy with Putin’s claims on Russia’s backyard. There is also a symmetry in Trump’s reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine in which the US has domain over the western hemisphere.
Some have projected on to Trump a clever chess move in which he is luring Russia away from its “no limits” partnership with China in a reverse of what Richard Nixon did in the cold war. But that is wishful thinking. Any such manoeuvre would make sense only in concert with America’s allies. While promising to lift sanctions on Russia, Trump is readying for a new transatlantic trade war. After three generations of US leadership, it is always tempting to believe that Trump does not mean what he says. Perhaps this is a feint in some grand art of the deal. But allies and erstwhile friends must banish those self-soothing thoughts. With Trump, what you see is what you get. America has turned.
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