There has been a lot of discussion about the ramifications of a potential agreement between US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and the increasingly damaging effects it will have on Ukraine and Europe.
There is much more at play than just the potential borders of Ukraine and US relations if Trump and Putin reach a deal.
As we are nearing the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale war, Ukraine’s prospect is more in question than it has ever been since February 2022. For once, comparisons to Munich in 1938 are unfortunately correct.
This is not due to a false idea that Putin may be appeased, but rather because wonderful powers once more decide the fate of weaker states without their presence.
Ukraine is now under stress from Russia on the ground and the US, both socially and economically, in the same way that Czechoslovakia was subjected to in 1938 by Germany and its alleged allies France and Britain.
Trump and his team are working fervently to get Ukraine to concede geographical rights to Russia and declare that about 20 % of the Ukrainian territories that Russia has occupied are lost. Trump also demands that Ukraine give back half of its metal and rare earth resources in exchange for its previous military support.
If allied NATO forces were deployed to Ukraine as part of a peace or peace agreement, the United States ‘ refusal to deliver substantial security guarantees sounds like the Munich comparison. No only did France and Britain at the time pressure Czechoslovakia to renounce Sudetenland, which had an ethnic German majority, to Nazi Germany.
When Poland and Hungary seized large portions of the nation, they likewise did nothing. And they failed to act when Hitler, just six months after the Munich deal, created a Czech marionette state and occupied the last of the Czech Republic.
Every evidence suggests that Putin is doubtful to step down from his position in or toward Ukraine. And it is important to keep in mind that the second world war began 11 months after Neville Chamberlain believed he had secured “peace in our day.”
The Munich comparison does not carry that much, however. Trump isn’t trying to appease Putin because he believes he has weaker tickets than Putin, as Chamberlain and Daladier did in 1938.
A more simplistic view of the world, where tremendous power carved out spheres of influence without interfering, seems to drive Trump.
The issue with Ukraine and Europe in a world order is that no one in Trump’s team views Ukraine as a member of an American impact area, and that Europe is at best a foreground.
Trump-eye glass on the planet
Trump’s concern isn’t really about Ukraine or Europe, but rather about re-ordering the global program in a way that fits his 19th-century perspective of the world in which the US life in splendid isolation and is almost unquestioned in the Northern hemisphere.
In this view, Ukraine is the image of what was wrong with the ancient purchase. Trump believes that the US has engaged itself in too many different international activities where none of its essential interests were at play, echoing Henry Cabot’s protectionism.
Echoing Putin’s talking items, the war against Ukraine little more is an unfair anger but was, as Trump has then declared, Kyiv’s problem. The most important test the democratic global order has to move has been Ukraine.
The conflict with Ukraine is undoubtedly a sign of the decline of the progressive global order, but it is hardly its single cause. It has become the tool that Trump and Putin use to offer it a devastating blast. But while the US and Russia, in their present political combinations, may have found it easy to destroy the existing order, they may find it substantially harder to create a new one.
Even though Ukraine and other important Western nations may appear trivial at this point, the EU and NATO have robust institutional foundations and deep pockets even without the US.
Despite the justified criticism of Europe’s largely ambitious responses thus far, the continent is built on much stronger politically and economically than Russia, and the vast majority of its citizens have no desire to live in the conditions that Putin’s want-to-be empire has.
Without China, neither Trump nor Putin will be able to rule the world. Trump does use a package to scuttle a wedge between them and drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing, but this is unlikely to work given China’s growing ties to China and Russia’s growing conflict with the US.
All Trump would accomplish is a more US-to-West continent resurgence if he reached a deal with Xi as well, for instance regarding Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea, allow alone over Taiwan. This may leave Putin and Xi to do their own, existing package of a no-limits relationship unimpeded by an American-led counterpoint.
From the standpoint of what remains of the progressive global order and its adherents, a Putin-Xi deal, also, has an strange parallel in past – the short-lived Hitler-Stalin alliance of 1939. Only this time, there is little to recommend that the Putin-Xi ally will break down as quickly.
Stefan Wolff is professor of global surveillance, University of Birmingham
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