In his dramatic overturning of established policy, U.S. President Donald Trump effectively served a willing Russia with a new Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in a silver tray. By publicly repeating the talking points of Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin about Ukraine being led by a dictator and being the aggressor, in his month in office, he dismantled a key tenet of the postwar world order: the inviolability of borders by force, which underpinned global security since 1945.
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Countries that may be the target of expansionist autocracies or dictatorships have legitimate fears about the new geopolitical reality brought about by the current occupant of the White House. Azerbaijan has been building up phoney historical justifications for invasion plans it has long harboured and partially executed against Armenia, supported by its ally and ethnic kin, a Turkey led by Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan, who has long shed the reformist skin of his early days and is on the record about his pan-Turkic ambitions, which also includes a now pliant Syria where an Islamist regime is still putting on a show of tolerance and respect for the law. China is even more perilous, as its claims on Taiwan, in the strict sense of the word, do not lack historical and, some would even argue, de jure legitimacy.
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In other words, it is open season for strongmen with megalomaniac aspirations. Trump has laid a verbal claim to Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal. This is all easy to dismiss as bluster, as so many episodes in history were initially written off as propaganda moves or inconsequential displays of military might but which have ended in tragedy.
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Notwithstanding their brutality, most major wars since the end of the Second World War never ended with changes of national borders. South Vietnam was absorbed by the North, an exception that, oddly, confirms the norm. Afghanistan emerged intact following the successive wars that followed the Soviet invasion in 1979. Despite seeing some of the worst combats in the postwar era, Iran and Iraq emerged from their ten year war with their internationally recognised borders intact. Neither did the Gulf wars from the early 1990s to the first decade of the 2000s. So did Lebanon, a warring playground for its neighbours for decades. Some of the very few exceptions include South Sudan, Eritrea, and Timor-Leste. A crucial (if partial) exception includes Kosovo in the European theatre.
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Why Molotov-Ribbentrop as opposed to Yalta? The former pact, signed in Moscow on August 24th, 1939, exactly a week before the outbreak of the Second World War with Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1st, followed by Great Britain’s declaration of war, included a clause of spheres of influence.
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That fits squarely into Trump’s world vision—admittedly, too big a word for the man—who has not held back from the most blatant displays of colonial ambitions that the world had not seen since the 19th century or early 20th century, which include half the reserves of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, which he wants as supposed payback for military aid to Ukraine and without providing security assurances. We should remember here that in February 2024, then presidential candidate Trump had said “one of the presidents of a big country” at one point asked him whether the US would still defend the country if they were invaded by Russia even if they “don’t pay.”
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“No, I would not protect you,” Trump recalled telling that president. “In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”
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Notwithstanding Marx’s famous and trite reference to history as tragedy being repeated as farce, historical parallels cannot hold up. Every instance is different.
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Yet comparisons may shed some light on current developments if they involve at least some of the same actors and comparable circumstances. In that sense, the Trump-Putin division of the world into spheres of influence is more reminiscent of Molotov-Ribbentrop as it has the potential of unleashing new wars of conquest in a world where global security rules have been reset.
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The Yalta agreement, which indeed amounted to a division of spheres of influence, came to settle a new world order that, for all the tensions and localised wars, held up an unprecedented eight decades, with territorial integrity at its core. The use of force to change borders had been discarded, until Trump with a single phone call and a meeting in Saudi Arabia—not casually, a repressive theocratic kingdom—between his Secretary of State Mario Rubio, a novice that can probably be easily intimidated by the vastly more experienced and hardened Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov, upended the world order.
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Trump’s approach to world politics is that of a real estate businessman, who sees countries as rental properties and its people as tenants, as became obvious with his outlandish plan for a ‘Middle East Riviera’ in Gaza, with Palestinians being displaced to other countries and ‘some’ returning one day. Only a few months ago such a line—de facto legitimising ethnic cleansing, as many governments including U.S. allies have warned—would have been dismissed as too ridiculous a plot for a satire, let alone for foreign policy.
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If Trump’s goal by serving Ukraine in a tray to Russia was appeasement, eventually that is going to fail with an emboldened Kremlin, which has all of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in its sights. NATO’s eastward expansion may have been a trigger for the Ukraine war and may point to shortsighted policies by the Western powers, but three years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it has now become an absolutely justified and legitimate goal for any country that feels threatened by Russia.
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It is probably a closely kept secret whether Trump knows modern history (or any history at all) other than the tidbits he may have seen on TV. Yet to judge by his language and his judgments—calling Zelensky a ‘modestly successful comedian’ after three years at the helm of a country fighting the worst war of aggression in Europe since the Second World War—it is clear that he is more in his element discussing showbiz than history or geopolitics. Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say that he has the attention span of a man who zaps from show to show after a long day in the office.
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That should not be a problem though even for the leader of the most powerful country in the world whose decisions are informed by what he sees on his favourite shows on TV. There is footage showing Hitler in the Reichstag in March 1939, in response to a letter by then U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt seeking reassurances against further aggression from Germany after it had annexed Austria and swallowed Czechoslovakia—sold out by the Allies in Munich a year earlier to appease the Third Reich—, listing the countries against which Germany had no hostile intentions: “Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Great Britain, Ireland, France, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iraq, Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Iran.” Hitler was jocular and his generals were in on the joke. As he is reading the list, his audience in the Reichstag erupts in laughter. We have known why for more than eight decades. In Neville Chamberlain’s defence, it can be argued that he was acting in good faith in Munich in 1938 as he tried to prevent a major war, in the honest belief that this pact was the lesser evil. And Chamberlain was true to his word when Poland was invaded. It is anybody’s guess if the current occupant of the White House is as principled.