'Russia has the cards,' said US President Donald Trump on 20 February, 'because they've taken a lot of territory.' In the trouncing of Volodomyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office a week later he told Ukraine's president: 'You don't have any cards.' One of Trump's favourite metaphors is that international relations are a card game. He was at it again today: 'I'm finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine and they don't have the cards... it may be easier dealing with Russia, which is surprising because they have all the cards.' He has used the metaphor in respect of Mexico and North Korea as well in the past. It reflects his zero-sum and transactional view of world politics.
I argued previously that US foreign policy under Trump does have a strategy (see my blog post on 22/2/25). The strategy is all about China and, as I wrote in the earlier post, 'US strategy strives to prevent China establishing itself as a peer challenger [to the US] in international politics.' In order to be best placed to face down the challenge from China, the US needs to retrench on its European commitments. Senior US politicians confirm this interpretation of what they are doing. Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, says that the US is not 'primarily focused' on Europe but on 'prioritising deterring war with China in the Pacific.'
I want to try to strengthen that argument. Others have made a similar argument and described it as a 'reverse Nixon': as President Richard Nixon prised China from the Soviet grip, so Trump's administration seeks to prise Russia from a Chinese grip. While there are historical objections to that analogy, I think those objections unnecessarily pedantic. They rely on details that obscure the bigger picture. More problematic for the claim that the US is pursuing a strategy are two arguments specifically about Trump.
With Trump it's personal
The main objection I can see to the argument is that everything seems to boil down to Trump's personal ambitions. In 2019 Trump ordered a stop of military aid to Ukraine until Zelenskyy opened an investigation into Hunter Biden. Trump insists there was no 'quid pro quo' and the two details were unrelated but I think we can reasonably assume otherwise. That decision to stop military aid then had nothing to do with US national interests. It was about Trump's personal interests.
In the past few days, Trump has ordered a stop of military aid to Ukraine and intelligence sharing. Again, the motives appear to be selfish. Trump wants to secure access to Ukraine's mineral wealth. The deal remains unsigned because Trump thinks he can squeeze more out of Ukraine, even though to most of us the deal looks heavily one-sided in the US's favour. We should acknowledge, though, that the consequences of Trump's 'personal' motives here coincide with what the posited US strategy would dictate (retrenchment in Europe). The posited US strategy is a military one which gets tangled up in economic policy: that does not so much contradict the strategy as reveal its contingency.
Another objection is that Trump's blatant imperial rhetoric is inconsistent with the strategy. This is the Trump who renamed the Gulf of Mexico and banned the Associated Press from White House briefings because it refuses to use the new name. This is the Trump who said in his address to Congress on Tuesday that America needs Greenland for its national security 'and I think we're going to get it, one way or another.' Trump promises 'to forge the most dominant civilisation ever to exist on the face of this earth.' It is ugly and unconcealed imperialism. But it is not incompatible with the grand strategy outlined. When Trump talks about Panama he always asserts that China controls the canal. In the case of Greenland, too, control of the Arctic is part of the grand strategic contest with China.
There is hope here that he will have to change his policies should the personal or imperial dimensions overreach. Hope that, if Trump deviates too far from the posited strategy in pursuit of other goals, people round him will start to rein him in. That may be hard to see at present but Trump cannot rule entirely through executive orders; there are slow-moving Congressional processes of oversight and constraint that could kick in. That underscores something very important for my argument: I am talking about US strategy; it is not Trump's strategy.
There is also the hope that when Trump's team negotiate with Russia's Vladimir Putin they might recognise that the policy on Ukraine cannot work because it could leave Europe in tatters. That might yet evince sympathy and pressure from US citizens, forcing Trump to reverse his position and restore US engagement in Ukraine. Again, admittedly it is difficult to imagine a reversal happening when the evidence all points in the other direction.
Russia: 'strong signals they are ready for peace'
For sure, Trump appears to agree with Putin's public argument about the cause of the war. He and those round him seem to believe that stopping the fighting in Ukraine will be an end of the matter and allow them to focus on the real challenge: China. Trump's administration has shown little care for Ukrainians' plight because he sees it as a distraction. To salve his conscience(!), the US president says he sees 'strong signals' the Russians are ready for peace and he wants us to believe peace is his goal. I will come back to why I think this is disingenuous shortly. But first let's return to the idea the war in Ukraine is a distraction for the US...