The New Year has brought a flurry of international diplomacy by world leaders. Before he is even inaugurated, Donald Trump has told reporters his team is setting up a president-to-president meeting with Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, European leaders are huddling. Sir Keir Starmer had dinner with President Macron at Chequers on Thursday evening, and next month he will be the first UK prime minister for five years to join in a meeting with all his EU counterparts. The Foreign Secretary is constantly travelling, and even the Chancellor Rachel Reeves is in Beijing this weekend.
The meetings and summits are not the result of the usual stock-taking and resolutions which most of us embark on with the return to work in January. They are happening now for one reason only: the imminent return of Trump’s disruptive force to the most powerful political office in the world.
Trump is talking tough. All that matters to him are American interests, which the US is entitled to because, in the words of his aggressively outspoken aide Sebastian Gawker, it is “the most powerful nation in the world”. America’s allies in Nato and the G7 are trying to work out if this assertiveness will be all bad news for them, or whether Trump’s bombast can be made to work to their advantage.
Trump is flexing his muscles in advance of his return to the Oval Office on 20 January. He has mused out loud about literally making America greater by annexing Greenland and the Panama Canal, and perhaps even Canada. The easy part will be rebranding the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. On Ukraine he appears to be limbering up to do something about his oft repeated over-promise to end the war in a day.
Trump is speaking the language of Putin and Xi with his Greenland comments
Read MoreNo wonder the US’s main allies in Europe are apprehensive. Greenland is an autonomous part of Denmark and thus covered by the EU. France and Germany rushed to condemn his plans for territorial expansion by force or economic coercion if necessary. “There is obviously no question that the European Union would let other nations of the world attack its sovereign borders, whoever they are”, the French foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot declared.
His British counterpart took a less forthright tone while condemning “destabilising” rhetoric, including Trump’s. David Lammy is introducing a doctrine of “progressive realism” at the Foreign Office. In this case his realism concludes that a US military assault on Greenland is “simply not going to happen”.
Lammy may well be correct. Trump is surely trying to get his way with threats and the coercion of allies who, in Lammy’s view, are “required” to work closely with the US. In practice Trump is both personally and politically conflict averse.
President Zelensky of Ukraine and his supporters, including the UK Government, are anxious because of Trump’s actions the last time he was in the White House. In his eagerness to get American troops from harm’s way, he went above the heads of the government of Afghanistan to sign the Doha Accord with the Taliban. This led directly to the US withdrawal, the total takeover by the Taliban and to some of the worst human rights abuses in the world. Conveniently, President Biden was saddled with the blame because the withdrawal took place on his watch.
Many in Trump’s team, including vice president elect JD Vance, nominee defence secretary Pete Hegseth, and Ukraine-Russia envoy Keith Kellogg are dismissive of Ukraine. Others in the embryonic administration led by nominee Secretary of State Marco Rubio are staunch supporters. If and when it comes to Trump’s talks with Putin, Trump will be caught in a dilemma. In the words of the eminent US historian Robert Kagan: “Trump must now choose between accepting a humiliating strategic defeat on the global stage, and immediately redoubling American support for Ukraine”.
Bluntly put, the Ukraine conflict is a stalemate, or as Trump puts it “a bloody mess”. Neither side has the means for a knockout blow. Both expect to run out of resources by the end of this year – although as the much larger entity, Russia hopes it can outlast Ukraine.
Ukraine will not be “settled” before Trump becomes president, as he once boasted. Nor will a deal be done on day one in the Oval Office. As yet neither side has firm plans for the Putin-Trump meeting. Lammy does not expect it until Easter time, which is in late April this year. The incoming Trump administration is obsessed with appearing strong, ready to “fight, fight, fight”. There is a growing realisation in Mar-a-Lago that abandoning Ukraine would not be a good look.
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Read MoreIf the meeting ever takes place, chances of a deal look slim. Putin has already resisted Trump’s pressure. The Trump camp now refuse to confirm that a phone call between the two men took place last year, in which Trump is alleged to have warned Putin “not to escalate”. Russia launched a hypersonic missile attack on Ukraine the next day.
There is no indication that Putin is in a position to compromise now. Territorial concessions in Donbas and Luhansk have always been a possibility but those have never been Putin’s war aims. He wants the annihilation of Ukraine as an independent sovereign state and the installation of a pro-Russian puppet government with no links to Nato and the EU. Trump may have no love for either of those institutions, but the “most powerful” leader in the free world could never accept such a humiliation. It would mean open season for Russia and China to expand their territorial ambitions and completely undercut the credibility of Trump’s ambitions for Greenland, Panama or Mexico.
Standing firm now against Putin would be in the US’s strategic interest. Indeed, it might be the best way to further Trump’s “America First” agenda, by demonstrating that Trump is as strong as he says he is. Some analysts also believe that Putin is in a much weaker position than he purports to be. Trump the dealmaker may get a whiff of this if they ever eye each other across a table.
Either way, the UK faces hard choices, as do the EU member states. In their own interests they cannot countenance a sell-out of Ukraine. Lammy has written that “keeping the British people safe means standing up to the Kremlin, working with our friends and allies to deter Putin’s mafia state”. That cannot be done without America’s continued support.
There will be a price to pay so Trump can say he is “a winner”. The UK will have to spend significantly more on its own defence, which will be painful for the Labour Government in these straitened times. Lammy says Trump is “right on defence”, while shrewdly pointing out that since the US itself spends only 3.38 per cent of GDP, Trump may ask for 5 per cent but will do a deal closer to 3 per cent.
There will also have to be an uncomfortable rethink of the alliance-based liberal worldview. There are indications that the Starmer government is more prepared for this than most US allies, as Lammy talks of “transactional, hard-headed diplomacy”. On balance America’s interests still align with the UK’s, and Russia and China’s do not. Trump’s worldview must be given a hearing.
The usual demeaning scramble among allies for an early audience with the new president is already underway. Starmer is expected to cross the Atlantic early in February. He, at least, appears to have a clear and pragmatic grasp of how to work with Donald Trump.
Adam Boulton presents Sunday Morning on Times Radio
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