MOSCOW—Many American elites, their media allies and card-carrying Democrats are convinced that a second Trump presidency would present Vladimir Putin with only opportunities. The reality is that a Trump 2.0 administration would likely bring more problems than the Russian leader has at present.
This soft-on-Putin narrative stems from the “Russiagate” conspiracy theory alleging that Trump was either a full-blown Russian agent or easily manipulated by Putin during his first term. Check the record, though, and it’s clear that Trump imposed more sanctions on Russia than any US president before him until Joe Biden.
Trump failed to implement campaign pledges to improve ties with Russia due to the pressure applied on him by the Russiagate accusation and the way in which some permanent members of the US military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies, spelled “deep state”, subverted his policy vision.
Trump also bombed Syria early in his presidency in response to what Russia considered to be a false flag chemical weapons provocation, which Barack Obama balked at doing in 2013 and thus called Russia’s bluff from back then.
Another irritant in bilateral ties was the sanctions that Trump imposed on the Nord Stream II pipeline, motivated by his bid to poach the European energy market from Russia for American producers.
Russia was also displeased that Trump did nothing to encourage France, Germany and Ukraine to implement their obligations under the Minsk agreements to resolve the conflict between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine.
These and other issues caused Russia to regard Trump’s first presidency as a lost opportunity to enter into a meaningful rapprochement and to be bitter about it in hindsight.
Biden’s term was much worse for bilateral relations, but it didn’t start that way. Biden and Putin met in Geneva in June 2021, shortly after the US leader waived Trump’s sanctions on Nord Stream II, following which Putin publicly defended his American counterpart’s cognitive state in response to a question about them.
But anti-Russian “deep state” hawks ultimately preferred prioritizing Russia’s containment over China’s, sustaining America’s security dilemma in Europe. Putin’s security guarantee requests from December 2021 were rejected, which set into motion the events that would lead to his decision to launch his “special military operation” in Ukraine in February 2022.
It’s beyond the scope of this analysis to rehash the run-up to that fateful decision, but it’s sufficient to say that the events that followed have completely changed the nature of Russia-US relations. If Trump returns to office, he’ll inherit a much more difficult bilateral situation than he did during his first tenure.
The precedent set by his inability to prevent anti-Russian “deep state” hawks from subverting his envisaged rapprochement bodes ill for his possible second term from Moscow’s perspective, considering the much greater power these officials now wield over policymaking on all Russia-related matters.
Russia’s fears that they could stage a major provocation for escalating the Ukraine conflict if Trump wins, whether before or after he’s reinaugurated, explain why Putin endorsed Biden and then Kamala Harris.
Contrary to his image in the Western mind, Putin is a very cautious leader who considers himself the consummate pragmatist. That explains why he only authorized conventional military interventions in Syria and Ukraine at what he thought to be the last possible minute before perceived windows of opportunity closed.
He’s even been constructively criticized by nationalistically minded Russians and their supporters abroad for waiting too long with both military interventions, arguing they might have been more successful had they had been launched earlier.
Putin’s endorsements of Biden and then Harris weren’t part of some “5D chess master plan”, like some have speculated, but rather were sincere reflections of his preference for dealing with the proverbial devils that he already knows than a return to Trump uncertainty.
Not only might Russia fear that the “deep state” could stage major provocations to subvert Trump’s stated plan for ending the Ukraine war within months of taking office, but Trump himself might flirt with “escalating to de-escalate” on his own.
These same “deep state” forces have wisely applied a “boiling the frogs” approach to the latest phase of the already over-decade-long Ukrainian conflict by gradually escalating US involvement and always signaling such in advance so that Russia could prepare and not overreact.
This managed warfare has helped Russia and the US manage their worsening security dilemma caused by American mission creep in the conflict, thus avoiding an apocalyptic World War III scenario sparked by miscalculation – at least up until now.
That could change if Trump is re-elected, at least from Russia’s perspective, since either he or the “deep state” could ignore these prior guardrails by escalating to de-escalate in very dangerous ways. The purpose would be to coerce concessions from Russia ahead of a seemingly inevitable grand peace deal.
Putin has staked his reputation on at least obtaining control over the entirety of the four former Ukrainian regions that Russia now claims so he will be very reluctant to freeze the conflict before that is secure on the battlefield.
Perhaps a series of mutually acceptable compromises between Russia and the US (which could coerce Ukraine into complying with whatever Washington agrees with Moscow) might be reached under Trump. But even if the “deep state” doesn’t subvert such a deal, other problems might quickly arise for Russia.
If the aforementioned compromises aren’t paired with sanctions relief for Russia, then Trump might revert to his preferred use of these means to pressure India, Turkey, the UAE and others into sanctions compliance to Russia’s detriment.
His well-known dislike of Iran could also see him repeat his prior “maximum pressure” policy against Tehran at the expense of Russia’s efforts to develop the North-South Transport Corridor (NSTC), which runs through Iran and connects Russia with the Gulf States, India and further afield to Africa and Southeast Asia.
In that scenario, Russia would risk becoming even more disproportionately dependent on China than it arguably already is, which it has sought to hedge and avert by using India as a counterweight in various ways.
A Trump 2.0 presidency would only present opportunities for Russia if none of those three scenarios – “escalating to de-escalate”, doubling down on sanctions enforcement, and choking off the NSTC – transpires, a fair compromise ends the Ukraine war and the US “Pivots (back) to Asia” and out of Europe pronto.
Trump’s plan for NATO, as reported by Politico, could enable Russia to more effectively manage their security dilemma in Europe with a view toward negotiating a new security architecture there.
American troops could thus be freed up for redeployment to the Asia-Pacific to contain China, shifting the center of the New Cold War to the other side of Eurasia and relieving some of the pressure applied on Russia over the past two and a half years.
Moreover, encouraging the Europeans to take more responsibility for their own security could lead to a thaw of sorts in their ties with Russia, as would the lifting of some sanctions.
US prioritization of China’s (and to a lesser extent Iran’s) containment over Russia’s in a second Trump presidency would relieve pressure on Russia in Europe, though at the cost of creating new problems that might threaten its interests further afield.
The heightened risk that a hot war could break out by miscalculation between the China and the US, or at least between China and some of the US’ top regional partners like Japan, the Philippines, and/or Taiwan, would destabilize the world much more than the Ukrainian conflict has over the past two and a half years.
That’s because the Asia-Pacific is the center of global economic growth, and a major conflict there would likely disrupt key supply chains. This is especially so for the tech sector, specifically with regard to the high-end chips that power the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” as well as state-of-the-art military equipment, thus limiting Russia’s supply even more than currently due to US-led sanctions and raise the risk it falls further behind peers and rivals.
Even if a hot Asia war is avoided and supply chains remain intact, Trump would be expected to apply tremendous pressure on Russia to distance itself from China, perhaps through a carrots-and-sticks approach of the sort that he implied during his live interview with Tucker Carlson on Thursday night during a fundraiser in Arizona.
At the event, Trump claimed that Biden “allowed them (China and Russia) to get together. It’s such a dangerous thing. The stupidity of what they have done… I’m going to have to un-unite them, I could do that too.”
Considering the trade war that Trump waged against China during his first term and his explicitly declared goal of ending the Ukraine war “as soon as possible” if he’s re-elected, Trump might try to meld the two initiatives to “un-unite” China and Russia as part of a new divide-and-rule strategy.
This could put Russia in a dilemma of either accepting whatever deal Trump might propose at the expense of reversing some of the bilateral progress made in with China since 2022, or rejecting it at the cost of Trump dangerously escalating to de-escalate in Ukraine with the potential for a hot war with the US and associated miscalculation risks.
Cautious and pragmatic Putin might thus prefer to retain the presently more predictable trajectory of US-Russian ties in the New Cold War under Harris than risk a new era of global uncertainty under Trump.
Andrew Korybko is a Moscow-based American political analyst who specializes in the global systemic transition to multipolarity. He holds a PhD in political science from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.” Follow him on X at @AKorybko