(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Derk Jan Eppink: Snel een vredesakkoord met Poetin en daarna de blik richting China: Trump is er klaar voor)
From Washington, after the election of Donald Trump, a new wind is on its way toward Europe to thaw the eastern front in Ukraine. But the sitting president Joe Biden provided some continued frost for a while with the delivery to Ukraine of long-range missiles (350 kilometers), which have meanwhile also been deployed. The Russian president Vladimir Putin thereupon lowered the threshold for the use of atomic weapons, while in The Hague an NSC comedy was staged around Pieter Omtzigt: is he coming back or not?
Trump is sworn in on 20 January 2025 in Washington as the 47th president of the US, but he is already sketching the contours of a new policy now. His motto is ‘Peace through Strenght’, the kind of slogan that recalls the Reagan era (1981-1989).
In the long series of appointments Trump has designated Mike Waltz (50), a congressman from Florida and a decorated soldier, as national security adviser. Waltz can start right away because his position is not subject to Senate approval. According to Waltz the danger comes from the Pacific under a Chinese flag. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine he was in favor of large arms deliveries, but has since changed his mind. He advocates ‘recalibration’, because China is the strategic opponent.
The American position in that region was strikingly captured by the group photo of heads of government who took part in the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in Peru. President Biden stood all the way at the back in the corner in the last row. Prominently at the front the Chinese president Xi Jinping. That would not happen to Trump. As a former wrestler he would, if need be, fight his way to the front. In the group photo of the G-20 in Rio de Janeiro Biden was even absent.
In which direction is the American course on Ukraine going? The war is stuck in the trenches like the First World War once was. Every offensive brings great losses. Until recently few in Europe dared to talk about a ‘way out’, because that seemed a betrayal of Ukraine. That sound now comes from the ‘president-elect’. There must be a peace settlement, and that can only come about through the United States.
Europe is once again a hutch with rabbits running around. The Netherlands is admittedly in the leading group of countries that actually support Ukraine, but most other countries profess that support mainly with their mouths, such as France, Italy and Spain. The Germans in turn are always ‘verzweifelt’. ‘The West’ is in practice only as strong as America is. The division of labor between the American president and the NATO secretary-general is crystal clear: Trump is the general and Mark Rutte the secretary.
At the eastern front, understandably, discouragement prevails. According to The Wall Street Journal 80,000 Ukrainian soldiers are said to have been killed. On the Russian side there are no reliable figures; there is talk of hundreds of thousands. Ukraine is exhausted, after the Russian ‘Blitzkrieg’ stalled and turned into a war of attrition that gave Moscow – with more men and materiel – the upper hand.
The war does not seem popular in Russia, and president Putin does not dare risk new rounds of mobilization for fear of resistance. So came the formula of the North Korean troop force of 10,000 men, for which Russia pays in money and raw materials. Russia traditionally saw Ukraine as a ‘region’; not as a state. Through Putin’s invasion Ukraine has become a nation state, with its independence written in blood.
Both countries are weakened, but Ukraine had a hard time of it. Parts of cities and infrastructure have been destroyed, just before winter. Ukrainian citizens want a peace settlement, whatever it takes, and most Russian citizens as well. Trump’s remarks therefore fall on fertile ground. The time is ripe for a ‘peace deal’. And America can enforce that with the will of the president.
Among the Democrats that will was barely there. They regarded Putin as a villain (which is correct) and Trump as his ‘asset’, a kind of pawn. Thus, according to the Democrats, Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 elections to Trump because he was on Putin’s leash. That became a myth that the Democrats cherished, but wrongly, because Clinton really lost because she labeled her own base as ‘deplorables’. Now that the Democrats have lost again, the awareness is growing that the real causes lie with the party itself. A step forward.
Trump can put pressure on Moscow with far-reaching economic sanctions if it does not cooperate on a peace settlement. Such as pumping more oil so that the world price drops, and with it Russia’s revenues. Putin fears the power factor Trump and prefers negotiations, partly under pressure from China.
The Chinese model is stagnating, with lower growth, large state enterprises that are in trouble and a real estate crisis caused by a mass migration of tens of millions of Chinese from the interior to the (far too) numerous residential towers in large cities along the Chinese coast. The economy has to keep running, and it runs in China because the country is a major exporter on the world market. The Chinese have meanwhile, quietly, built up a global infrastructure network with ports (also in Europe) and enormous influence in developing countries. At the APEC summit president Xi stood at the center of the group photo, and not for nothing. At the G-20 too.
Negotiations over Ukraine can proceed along well-trodden paths: a ceasefire, demarcation lines, negotiations over territories, the choice for residents along the demarcation line as to which country they want to live in, and hopefully possibilities for family visits. In the border region there have been millions of mixed marriages. The negotiations over the border will proceed with difficulty.
It is unlikely that Russia will give up Crimea. The peninsula in the Black Sea was historically Russian, but was transferred to Ukraine in the 1950s by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. With the breakup of the Soviet Union Crimea fell under Ukrainian authority, but was occupied by Russia in 2014.
For the Donbas too it will be quite a job to draw a map that both parties agree to. Putin wants to divide Ukraine into pieces: a nonstarter. Ultimately there is the danger that the eastern border of Ukraine becomes a new ‘iron curtain’, running from Northern Finland to the bottom of the Black Sea. Then follows the question: may Ukraine join NATO and/or the EU? The latter will be easier, subject to all the accession conditions, than the former.
Europe looks on and was itself considerably weakened in this Ukraine war. On 24 June the EU adopted the 14th sanctions package against Russia, but how effective were all those measures? The sanctions caused the oil and gas price to rise, which within the EU caused a considerable wave of inflation that undermined the purchasing power of ordinary citizens. A high oil price makes Russia (read: rich Russians) richer, but Europe poorer. And that while our energy and climate policy – thanks to all the expenditures described as ‘investment’ – already weakens the competitiveness of European companies.
The most telling example is Germany, which is going backwards economically, with an infrastructure that is crumbling. The political situation in the country is unstable, as in the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Meanwhile the EU is a machinery that produces grandiose plans (‘ambitions’), such as the ‘Draghi Plan’ of 800 billion euros, which, however, evaporate because they are unaffordable.
The sanctions against Russia were perhaps a moral imperative, but proved economically and politically destructive. The EU must recalibrate, not through daydreaming but through economic realism: with a modern industrial future and as an innovating trade bloc. The material basis and cultural cohesion of Europe is crumbling, while on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean the economy is being put into higher gear. Under Trump, Europe is not high on the American agenda. It is ‘America First’ and the gaze turns toward the Far East.
Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.