Russia has lost the war and the U.S. sees the Cold War as closed for good

Donald Trump's attitude towards Vladimir Putin and Russia, especially with regard to the war in Ukraine, has often been interpreted as that of someone who is whimsical and unhinged. There has been more willingness to accept the Russian president's rationality in invading the neighboring country than to admit that, in threatening to abandon Kiev, Trump is also operating rationally. Putin is easily interpreted as having made decisions in the light of the realist theory of international relations (whether the threatening NATO advance was real or imaginary), while, on the other hand, the American president's boorish ways lead one to see him simply as an irascible and conceited leader. But like his Kremlin counterpart, Trump would be following geopolitical requirements. As John Mearsheimer has pointed out in his latest book, 'How States Think', rarely is the foreign policy of countries irrational; it is not the work of madmen, as Putin and Trump have often been labeled.

The actions of President MAGA (Make America Great Again) follow a syllogism which starts from a fundamental observation: Moscow has lost the war. Tested for the first time since 1945 in a European theater of war, Russia has shown itself to be incapable of conquering a country clearly inferior in military power; it thus discovers its nakedness under the bearskin. Russia will hardly constitute a mortal threat to Europe (if it tries, it can be answered, as we have seen) and it is no longer the existential rival it was for the United States. If the end of the Cold War had already been declared on several occasions, this moment definitively decrees its end. In the Cold War, fearing an attack on its own soil if the Russians extended their control over continents and seas, the entire U.S. strategy consisted of helping international economic development in exchange for its partners' contribution to the Soviet containment effort. Since that risk no longer existed - and China, as formidable a competitor as it is, does not match the threatening potential that the USSR could exert from the Eurasian 'heartland', in Mackinder's terms - the United States withdrew and returned to pre-World War II isolation. It no longer needs the world because it no longer has to face an enemy with planetary reach.

Geopolitical imperative

This argument has been put forward with particular clarity by George Friedman, a geopolitical foresight analyst, known for having created the Stratfor signature , from which he later split to launch Geopolitical Futures. Friedman had a special echo some time ago (in 2009 he published 'The Next Hundred Years' and in 2011, 'The Next Decade'), but he would deserve more constant attention. In his latest work, 'The Storm Before the Calm' (2020), Friedman predicted the disruptive moment in which the United States was entering; without even knowing that Trump would be candidate again -and win the election- Friedman warned of a change of economic and institutional cycle such as had not occurred in the country in decades. He does not defend Trump, nor does he consider him to be particularly clairvoyant, but he recognizes a certain intuition when it comes to interpreting the signs of the times. And in the field of foreign policy Trump would only be adapting to the flow of geopolitics, which is not static: sometimes it moves with the imperceptible slowness of a glacier and at other times with the lightning speed of lightning.

As Friedman points out, presidents come and go, come and go, and what remains are the geopolitical imperatives. The United States' imperative is to prevent another great power from being in a position to attack its territory - the great central strip of North America - something that can only be done by sea (let us leave aside, for the moment, nuclear missiles and satellites). The threat of a growing European power that could use the old continent as a watchtower or of a territorially encompassing Asian power explains the urgency of the United States to fight Germany and Japan in the world wars; the risk that the USSR could pose was even greater.

U.S. withdrawal

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian danger to the United States was diluted and, with the status sedimented after the onslaught of Islamic terrorism in the years following 9/11, US presidents began the consequent withdrawal of military presence in the world: Obama started, followed by Trump and Biden. The fact that they were presidents of both parties and quite different from each other indicates that this is an undercurrent, not an ideological one. Friedman argues that in this the person of the president matters little: yes, each one has his preferences and sets his own pace, but the geopolitical imperative, because it is real and not a mental construct, makes its way, adapting to the conjuncture.

The beginning of U.S. withdrawal under Obama unsettled those who place idealistic voluntarism above geopolitical constraints. Robert Kagan lamented this retreat of the Democratic president, warning that "superpowers do not retire". With his book 'The jungle is back' (2018) he wanted to note that the jungle was beginning to once again cover the international liberal order that the United States had helped to create. Kagan from neconservatism, but also the authors of the liberal theory of international relations start from an illusion: to think that Washington built the Breton Woods system out of ideology (even admitting that it was mixed with economic interest). In truth, the world order put in place at the time obeyed geopolitical and power interests (in the last written request, security takes precedence over Economics). These interests may well go hand in hand with a political formulation - the extension of freedoms in the world - but when they turn then the latter remains an empty shell which, when it collapses, sometimes with a crash. This is what happened when George W. Bush wanted to prolong a unipolar moment that was no longer based on solid foundations, since the underlying assumptions were already changing. Then "the great disillusionment" broke out, as Mearsheimer called it: the frustration that the world is not governed by the principles we would like it to be.

Convincing Putin

Beyond the execrable shut-ins in the Oval Office, part of Trump's behavior in foreign policy has its justification. If the American president concludes that Putin has lost the war in Ukraine and that this verifies that Russia is no longer a threat to the United States (neither directly, nor by grabbing part of Europe and then turning it into a bridgehead, something that also today seems beyond Russia's reach), then the White House may be interested in sending signals to the Kremlin to convince it that it considers the Cold War over and that from now on it would like to normalize the mutual relationship. Therein lies Trump's insistence on treating Putin with special consideration, trying to give credibility to these gestures by accompanying them with their opposites: aggressiveness towards Zelensky and the Ukrainian cause. After all, it may be in the interest of the United States that Putin survives, weakened as he is, and that the oligarchs do not end up invoice him for the defeat, of which they are aware.

Putin may not believe the hand extended by the new administration, but other White House decisions corroborate that the United States no longer sees any need to stand up to Moscow; if anything, it leaves that to the Europeans. NATO is no longer the same priority for Washington as before (not, of course, if it has to assume the same responsibility of expense, something already questioned by Obama) and that explains Trump's disaffection with the Atlantic Alliance. On the other hand, while the tariff war has an economic purpose (to reindustrialize the nation itself), it also makes official the disregard for the fate of the allies, who are no longer treated as such because they are not necessary to contain Russia.

What about China?

One wonders whether, given the emergence of China and the normal desire of the United States to avoid a 'sorpasso' not only economically but also militarily that would threaten to engulf the hitherto world's leading power, Washington might not be interested in reissuing a Cold War, seeking allies once again to contain China this time.

Friedman does not venture further in time; he only suggests that China, for geographical reasons, is less of a geopolitical threat to the United States than the Soviet Union was. On the other hand, there is also a limit to China's rise, which could be reaching its zenith and then beginning to decline. This is the view of Peter Zeihan, who trained with Friedman at Stratfor and now runs his own consulting firm. Zeihan takes for granted a coming collapse of China, generated above all by its demographic crisis. Moreover, Zeihan considers the process of de-globalization in which the world finds itself irreversible. America's lack of interest in the rest of the planet will possibly lead it to cease to be the sheriff of the seas, and with it, maritime trade routes will tend to become fragmented. His vision of the future is an atomized world, in which there may be clusters of countries around certain powers. The non-re-creation of two blocs as in the Cold War -as long as the United States normalizes its relationship with Russia and the latter does not act in complete alignment with China- reduces the scope of a Chinese threat for Washington.

The goal for Washington, therefore, would not be to articulate a front of allies against Beijing, but to make sure that the United States continues to be a superpower and that, as far as possible, its opponent does not have a particular advantage over it. In this context, the threat to the United States would no longer be a territorial web woven from the Eurasian heartland - the real mainland of the planet, according to MacKinder's conception - from which to attack the outer island that is America, but rather the war that could be launched from space. But for space warfare (in or from abroad) it no longer matters properly speaking whether it is geographic dominance on Earth or control of its seas: as some updates of Mahan's doctrines point out, space is the new ocean sea.

Defeat should deter the Kremlin

The argument put forward here is based on a disputed perception. Certainly there are elements to see the Ukrainian war, at least so far, as a conflict won by Russia, because although Moscow has not achieved its ultimate objectives, it has conquered territory, consolidating the decisive possession of Crimea and gaining for it a convenient 'hinterland', up to the Dnieper. There is also room for a more Solomonic judgment that divides up victory and defeat and distributes them among the contenders. However, the geopolitical vision cannot but be severe with Russia, since gaining the eastern edge of Ukraine does not solve the Russian imperative to neutralize the whole country, while NATO itself, at least through the presence of European military capabilities, will have come closer to the Russian border, which for Putin was precisely the greatest risk to be avoided.

Friedman himself is surprised that, given the clear ineffectiveness of the invading army, there are European countries in which a sort of fatalism about a Russian aggression has taken hold. But it is easier to disregard the danger when one is a few thousand kilometers away than to do so from a neighboring territory: although a Russian attack could be basically repelled, as has been demonstrated, it would also entail a B for the attacked country. We must therefore be prepared and not let our guard down, but if we accept that Putin was rational in his purpose, he need not cease to be so in the coming years; if he invaded Ukraine on the basis of faulty information, now all the information he has in principle would dissuade him from further adventures on European soil. And the reality is that Russia is weaker today than it was ten years ago.