Trump's trap

President Trump's problem during his first term in office was that he confused being the president of a country with running a large company, which led him to clash with the democratic institutions that balance and limit presidential power and to dismiss the executives on his team who warned him about such a collision, resulting in a chaotic perception of his political management. 

The problem at the start of this second term is that the president has confused electoral victory in his country's political institutions with the legitimization of his vision of a Greater America in a competitive international order where the rest of the powers limit his power, while alliances balance it. 

The unfortunate episode in the Oval Office not only weakened the negotiation process in Ukraine, but also exposed the weakness of the US administration to assume the leadership that this historic moment requires. And what is more serious, that weakness was televised live and had maximum audience: a 100% share among rival leaders and international public opinion. 

As Trump has accumulated significant political experience in recent years, he has been careful to share the dirty work in front of the cameras and in the first international forums with collaborators such as Vice President Vance, or Elon Musk himself. This gives him some personal leeway to rectify some of the tactical mistakes he has made. 

But the thing is that tactical decisions make sense in domestic policy, but in international affairs, decisions are not tactical, they are strategic. If US foreign policy hands Ukraine over to Russia, European geopolitics would enter a phase of transformation that would last for at least a decade and would be more open to future armed confrontations. 

If the negotiation process is not supported by a stronger NATO with a greater commitment from all the allies, the risks and the likelihood of failure increase. If NATO is weakened, the United States loses its dominance in the only territory outside the American continent where stability is guaranteed. 

If the international order continues to be questioned from Washington, the revisionist powers that want to undo it will propose another, a day before or a day after Trump and Vance stop ranting in the Oval Office. 

The negotiation of a peace deal in Ukraine that Trump was going to achieve in a few days and that part of the Republican Party was demanding in order to reduce the high cost of aid to Zelensky, is not a tactical issue. Russell Hsiao, director of the Global Taiwan Institute, explained it this way in the New York Times: “Taiwan spent the better part of the last three years making the case for how the fate of democracies is intimately tide and what happens in Ukraine affects Taiwan.” 

This means that China has been observing exactly the same thing, but in exactly the opposite sense: that the fate of its aspirations to integrate the island into its sovereignty depends on what happens in Ukraine. If this change in Asian geopolitics were to take shape, the United States would have lost its hegemony in a decade (2001-2010), its supremacy in two (2001-2022) and its global leadership in less than three (2001-2025). 

Similarly, if the strategic decision to restrain Russia in Ukraine and weaken its power by strengthening NATO and European security were reduced to the tactical decision to restrain Russia in order to renegotiate energy and mining interests in Ukraine and then cede control of the country to the Kremlin autocracy, Vladimir Putin would have managed to maintain Russian influence in Europe and globally, and transfer his political regime as a model for the next generation of leaders.

At the same time, if European and Euro-Atlantic cohesion, strategically conceived since the 1990s and fractured in the 21st century by various internal and external challenges, were to break down, the European powers and the most weakened countries would seek new political and commercial allies in China, India, the Middle East and Latin America. 

The offensive realism applied by the new administration in international activity in these first weeks and the stick diplomacy against Zelensky may turn out to be a mere tactical error if Donald Trump rectifies and finds a way to take a more pragmatic turn in his foreign policy. 

If he does not, he may fall into the trap of delusion by believing that his power is greater when it is getting smaller and smaller.