Last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Washington for a pre-planned friendly yet carefully calibrated meeting with United States President Donald Trump. The meeting, which started as a free-flowing, open-ended exploration, quickly devolved into a heated exchange on the terms of the ceasefire in the Ukraine-Russia war. As the Oval Office went into meltdown, there was an evisceration of all notions of decency or morality that characterise diplomatic exchange. The media attention garnered by it fed a sadistic spree of both reactionary outrage and communal, contagious celebration of cruelty on the internet.
This diplomatic blow-up transpired due to two fundamental yet flawed assumptions persisting in public diplomacy: first, an ‘engagement delusion’, that a genuine rather than contrived dialogue can take place between asymmetrical powers. Second, that ‘control mutuality’ can prevail, which allows all entities in an engagement process to possess a reasonable degree of rightful power that can be utilised to influence one another. Mimicking the one-way communication typical to the post-9/11 Bush era, Trump utilised the public engagement with Zelensky mainly for persuasion and coercive bargaining, displaying an acute intent to utilise the power asymmetry between the two countries to his advantage. While this certainly bolstered Trump’s reputation within his domestic constituency of being a tough negotiator who always puts ‘America first’, these tactics also come at the cost of undermining American effectiveness in the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
America’s Strategic Surrender
Under Trump, America’s approach to war has been perplexing. Firstly, the US administration signalled a strong intent at being the sole arbiter to ending this conflict while arguing that Europe alone must financially aid and enforce an outcome it has not been involved in determining. Secondly, by setting stringent limitations on the resources it is willing to commit, America pre-emptively weakened its negotiating position. Thirdly, completely antithetical to his suggestion in his book The Art of the Deal, in which Trump mentions that “the worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it”, Trump is showing an urgency and desperation to end the war that is only going to enable Russia to manipulate this haste, gradually escalate the price, and compound on the concessions it exacts from agreeing to stop the war.
Through this policy of extending unilateral concessions to the aggressor, America is, in essence, preemptively ceding long-held positions to Russia in the possibility of ending a conflict it is not even fighting. This policy of ‘orderly capitulation…to obtain political concession’ is not a novel one but one that none other than the United States intelligence community in 1957 deemed a policy of ‘strategic surrender’.
Trump’s New Isolationism
America withdrawing its support to Ukraine in its war against Russia, as a function of Trump’s cultural conservatism, anti-globalist vision and antipathy towards all liberal institutional arrangements, including NATO, threatens to squander hard-won gains in the Western hemisphere. It also erodes American initiative, which is the willingness and capability to mobilise other states to solve common problems, and, inadvertently, damages foreign policy instruments painstakingly built over the past 50 years. These instruments lent competence and global acceptability to America’s decisions. Even though Trump’s transactional foreign policy will succeed in extracting a better bargain from countries that seek security guarantees, it will also give perceived allies exit options to those allies that are persistently growing more independent and entrepreneurial in their alignment, thus potentially pushing them towards rival great powers.
This US posture to the first full-scale war in Europe since the Second World War will not only endanger Europe, America’s largest trade and investment partner, but will also globally enhance Russia’s power and attractiveness as an ally, bolstering its resolve to fulfil its vision of forging, as Putin puts it, a “completely new world order … unlike what we know from the past, for example, the Westphalian or Yalta systems”. The international order is already in flux in ways that are outside of American control, and in this period of transition, it needs a nuanced sense of the powers and advantages it possesses as a country.
Trump’s antipathy towards liberal institutional arrangements coupled with his unilateral and transactional foreign policy is voluntarily yielding tools for furthering American interests. It risks destroying the very architecture that has in the past enabled it to weather turbulent change in the international system. Despite the Trump administration’s isolationist instinct, the brand of isolationism currently endorsed by it falls short of the original intentions of isolationism in America in one fundamental respect: preserving freedom of action abroad.
[Abhishank Mishra is a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University and Network for Advanced Study of Geopolitics Fellow (2024-25), Takshashila Institution]
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author