By JOSÉ LUÍS FIORI*
From a geopolitical point of view, the Trump project may be pointing in the direction of a grand tripartite “imperial” agreement between the US, Russia and China.
Two months into the new US administration, Donald Trump’s histrionics and the Europeans’ bewilderment create a doubly false impression regarding the Ukrainian War. On the one hand, the American president behaves as if the US were the “winning country,” demanding “war reparations” from the defeated country, Ukraine, which was his great ally until the day before yesterday.
On the other hand, Europeans, in a state of panic, attribute to Trump’s betrayal and his decision to end the war the responsibility for their division and imminent defeat. As if it were possible to make, unmake and remake real history through the manipulation of “narratives” that are invented and repeated tirelessly by the powers that have become accustomed to controlling the “collective imagination” of the world system.
In fact, what we are witnessing is the American recognition of a fait accompli: Russia’s victory on the battlefield against Ukrainian troops and NATO weapons, even though Ukrainian resistance and occasional attacks continue. At this moment, the US is demanding that its vassals surrender, in the initial form of a “ceasefire,” but in reality it is a Russian victory over the US itself, which provided most of the military equipment, logistical bases, intelligence support, and financing that allowed the Ukrainians to resist for three years, promoting a military escalation that came close to an atomic war at the end of Joe Biden’s administration.
At this point, the situation is still very confusing, but it is still possible to reconstruct the paths and main steps that led to this war. A story that began in 1941, with the signing of the Atlantic Charter by the American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, in Newfoundland, near Canada. The Atlantic Charter became the “cornerstone” of the “strategic alliance” between the USA and Great Britain (GB), which was victorious in the Second World War, and which was subsequently sealed by the American atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An unbreakable alliance that lasted 80 years and was at the origin of the globalist project of building a unified world under the protection of the Anglo-Saxons, following the rules and values of “Western civilization”.
This Anglo-Saxon project changed course, however, after Winston Churchill's speech in Fulton, Missouri, USA, in March 1946, when the former British Prime Minister proposed to his North American allies the construction of a military containment barrier – which he called the “iron curtain” – separating the “Western world” from the communist zone of influence of the Soviet Union. An English policy of demonization and permanent confrontation with Russia, which was first formulated shortly after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, a century before the Soviet Revolution.
The great novelty of this proposal, therefore, was the conviction and mobilization of the North American government of Harry Truman in favor of this strategy that started the Cold War in 1947, followed by the formation of a bloc of North Atlantic countries, consecrated by the creation of NATO in 1949, and by the inauguration of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, the embryo of the European Union, which would be formalized in 1993.
Forty years later, at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1993, the two great Anglo-Saxon powers returned to their 1941 project. This was when people spoke of the “end of history” and the definitive victory of democracy and liberal Anglo-Saxon capitalism, especially after the devastating military victory of the US in the Gulf War of 1991/2, when the Americans showed the world their new technology of remote-controlled warfare, equivalent to the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in terms of its impact on the world system.
From then on, the US abandoned its commitment to the United Nations and the rules of operation of its Security Council, and gradually transformed NATO into its armed wing for intervention in the Balkans, the Middle East, Central Asia and Eastern Europe.”[I]. First it was Bosnia in 1995, and then Yugoslavia in 1999, which was bombed by NATO without the approval of the UN Security Council. And the same thing happened again in 2003, when the US and Britain invaded and destroyed Iraq, despite the veto of the UN General Assembly and Security Council, and the opposition of Germany, France and several other traditional allies of the Anglo-Saxons. There began the “endless wars” of the US, Britain and NATO in the Greater Middle East, and continued until their “withdrawal” from Afghanistan on August 30, 2021.
The same thing happened in Europe, where NATO expanded steadily, multiplying its military bases in the direction of Eastern Europe from Russia’s western border. Despite the promise made by US Secretary of State James Baker to Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, shortly after the end of the Cold War, that NATO would not advance into Eastern Europe, in 1994, President Bill Clinton authorized its first expansion, and in 1999 NATO began its “march east” with the incorporation of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic.
And in 2004, NATO incorporated Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Slovakia, while experimenting with its new forms of intervention through the so-called “color revolutions” against governments unfavorable to American interests – as was the case with the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia in 2003; the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004; and the “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan in 2005.
Finally, in April 2008, in the city of Bucharest, NATO announced its checkmate, with the incorporation of Georgia, and especially Ukraine, which Zbigniew Brzezinski[ii] (the great geopolitician of the American Democratic Party), considered it to be a central piece in the dispute between the US and Russia for control of Eastern Europe and the entire Eurasian continent. So important that Brzezinski even proposed that Ukraine be conquered by the US and NATO by 20151 at the latest2014 – which ended up happening after the XNUMX coup d'état that overthrew the elected government of Viktor Yanukovych, considered hostile by the US and NATO.
Russia protested in vain against these successive NATO advances on its western border. And in 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin personally warned the Western powers that Russia would not tolerate NATO advances in Georgia and Ukraine. His warning was ignored once again, and the following year, Russia was forced to make its first direct military intervention in the Autonomous Republic of South Ossetia to prevent its incorporation into NATO. And later, in 2015, Russia intervened directly again against the coup d'état supported by the US and NATO, occupying and incorporating Crimea into Russian territory.
Finally, on December 15, 2021, Russia delivered a memorandum to the American and NATO authorities, and to the leaders of the European Union, proposing to stop NATO expansion, withdraw its troops from Russian borders and demilitarize Ukraine. There was no response to this memorandum and the silence of the “Western powers” was the trigger that triggered the Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory, initiating in effect a “proxy war” between Russia and the USA.[iii]
Three years after the start of the war, there is no doubt that Russia won on the battlefield, but also in the field of military-technological competition with regard to equipment supplied to Ukraine by the US and NATO countries. In addition, Russia also won the economic war against the sanctions imposed on it by the Western powers, and its economy has been growing systematically ahead of other European countries.
There is no doubt that Russia’s victory has accelerated and consolidated in the last two months: (1) with the US withdrawal from the war and the rupture of its “strategic marriage” with Great Britain; (2) with the internal division of NATO and the threat of US withdrawal; (3) with the weakening of the European Union, following its estrangement from the US; (4) and finally, with the dismantling of the “Western bloc” and its global hegemony exercised over the last 200 years. As a consequence, it is most likely that the negotiations post-bellum between Russia and the US become the first step towards a new “multipolar” and “post-European” world order, the most important of all Russian demands and victories.
Reagan and Trump and “Innovative Destruction”
“Every hegemonic situation is transitory, and more than that, it is self-destructive, because the hegemon itself ends up getting rid of the rules and institutions it helped create in order to continue expanding and accumulating more power than its followers” (José Luís Fiori, Global power and the new geopolitics of nations)
In the 70s, the United States suffered a series of military, economic and geopolitical setbacks: it was defeated in the Vietnam War; it was surprised by the Yom Kippur War and the creation of OPEC and the rise in international oil prices; and it was surprised once again by Ayatollah Khomeini's Revolution in Iran in 1979; followed by the American “hostage crisis” where Americans were held prisoner for 444 days in the US embassy in Tehran, culminating in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
Many analysts spoke at that time of a “final crisis of American hegemony.” Faced with this situation of relative decline in power, however, the United States destroyed the world order it had created after the Second World War and adopted a new international strategy with the aim of maintaining its global primacy. First, it accepted defeat, surrendered and signed a peace agreement with Vietnam; at the same time, it abandoned the dollar standard that it had imposed on the world at Bretton Woods in 1944; then, it pacified and reestablished relations with China; and it definitively buried its developmental economic project, imposing an opening and financial deregulation of the international economy, while initiating a new arms race, known as the Second Cold War, which culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union. A true conservative and neoliberal typhoon, which began under the government of Richard Nixon and reached its peak during the government of Ronald Reagan, radically changing the geopolitical map of the world and irreversibly transforming the face of global capitalism.
Now again, in the second and third decades of the 2021st century, the United States has been suffering new and successive military, economic and geopolitical setbacks. It was defeated in Afghanistan and forced into a humiliating withdrawal from the city of Kabul in August XNUMX; it is being defeated irrevocably in Ukraine; it has suffered a significant loss of moral credibility around the world, after its support for the Israeli massacre of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip; it has been undergoing a sharp process of deindustrialization and its currency, the dollar, has been questioned for its use as a weapon of war against competing countries or countries considered enemies of its interests; and finally, the United States has lost important positions in its technological-industrial and space competition with China, and in its technological-military dispute with Russia.
At this moment, once again, the US government of Donald Trump is proposing to reestablish its primacy through a new radical change in its international strategy, combining very high doses of destruction with some disruptive and innovative proposals in the geopolitical and economic fields, starting from a position of strength and without ethical or missionary pretensions, and guided only by the compass of its national interests.
Donald Trump’s main campaign slogan – “make America great again” – is in itself a tacit acknowledgement that the US is facing a situation of crisis or decline that needs to be reversed. And his first measures are all defensive in nature: whether in the case of his mercantilist economic policy or in the case of the “ballistic barrier” that he is proposing to build around the US territory. And the same can be said of his verbal aggressions and threats, which have been directed against his closest and most unconditional neighbors, allies and vassals.
In any case, the most important thing has been the overwhelming and destructive attack by Donald Trump and his closest aides against the rules and institutions of the international order built by the United States in response to its crisis in the 70s. And against the last vestiges of the post-World War II world order, such as the United Nations and its Security Council. With particular emphasis on the American attack and destruction of multilateralism and economic globalism, which have become the main American banner since the post-Cold War. In this chapter of “destruction,” it is also worth highlighting the selective and strategic attack by the Donald Trump administration against all the internal support elements – within the American government itself – of what they call the deep state, the true basis of support and loci of planning American wars.
On the international level, however, the great revolution – if it prospers – will effectively be the change in the relationship between the US and Russia, which has been proposed by Donald Trump's government. A very profound and radical change, much more so than the rapprochement between the US and China in the first half of the 1970s. Because, in fact, in the 1815th century, the US inherited an enmity, competition and geopolitical polarization built by Great Britain against Russia, ever since the victory of the Russians and the English over Napoleon Bonaparte's France was consecrated at the Congress of Vienna in XNUMX.
From then on, the Russians were transformed by the English into their “necessary enemies”, and served as the organizing principle of English imperial strategy. This historical reality was later consecrated by the geopolitical theory of the English geographer Halford Mackinder, according to which the country that controlled the heart of Eurasia, located between Moscow and Berlin, would control world power. This is why the English led the Crimean War, between 1853 and 1856, against the Russians; and again led the invasion of Russia after the end of the First World War; and considered doing the same right after the Second World War. This was an obsession of Winston Churchill’s that eventually gave way to the project of building the “Iron Curtain” and NATO.
This English obsession was passed on to the Americans after the Second World War and was at the origin of the Cold War. Since then, the US and the UK (together with their NATO allies) have built a gigantic military infrastructure – material and human – designed to “contain the Russians” and, if possible, defeat them strategically. The latest attempt was made in the Ukrainian War and failed once again. And if Donald Trump’s current project of rapprochement with Russia succeeds, he will be scrapping all this infrastructure along with all the other American alliances built since 1947, with a view to this “final war” against the Russians. This is no small feat, quite the opposite, and many Euro-Atlantic leaders who tried to break this barrier have fallen by the wayside. It is even possible to foresee the possibility of some kind of attack or self-attack, from the Anglo-Saxon world itself, with the aim of blocking this change in American direction.
Yes, because the Anglo-Saxon strategic alliance, which has been fundamental to Western domination of the world since the Second World War, is being broken and buried, while at the same time, like a house of cards, the NATO project, the G7, and perhaps the European Union itself are being dismantled. But none of this ends the interstate competition for global power. Donald Trump's project diminishes the importance of Europe and diminishes the importance of Russia's European border, shifting the fault lines of global geopolitics to the Arctic and the South Pacific.
But Trump’s own greed for Canada and Greenland makes clear his plan to build a large territorial mass equivalent to Russia’s, right in front of Russia’s own northern and Arctic border. At the same time, the joint business project between Russians and Americans, which has been insistently announced, especially in the North Pole region, points to a possible future “market-based” distancing of Russia from China, so as not to allow the consolidation of an unbreakable strategic alliance between Russia and China, or even between Russia and Germany. Because China will continue to be the main competitor and adversary of the United States in the 21st century, on this planet and in outer space.
Will the American strategy of “innovative destruction” be as successful this time as it was in the last century, with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan? It is difficult to know, because we do not know how long the power project of Donald Trump and his followers will last. And secondly, we do not know the global impact of a mercantilist and defensive economic policy, practiced by the world’s largest economy. Economic nationalism has always been a weapon of countries that intend to “rise” in the international hierarchy, and not of a country that does not want to “go down”.
In any case, from a geopolitical point of view, the Trump project may be pointing in the direction of a grand tripartite “imperial” agreement between the US, Russia and China, as well as pointing towards the birth of a new multipolar order that in some ways resembles the history of 18th century Europe. With the big difference that now the “balance of forces” of the system would involve a competition between large-scale atomic powers, almost empires, such as the US, China, Russia, India, and the European Union itself, if it manages to reorganize and rearm under the leadership of England or Germany. And, to a lesser extent, Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. A world that is difficult to manage, and a future that is impossible to predict.
Notes
[I] Victoria Nuland, the American diplomat who became famous for her direct personal participation in the coup d'état in Ukraine in 2014, and who was also the Permanent Representative of the United States to NATO from 2005 to 2008, stated in an interview with the Financial Times in 2006 that “the United States wants to have a force with global projection, to operate throughout the world, from Africa to the Middle East and beyond, Japan, like Australia, has a vocation, like the NATO nations, to be part of this force” (in Chauprade, A., Chronicque du Choc des Civilizations, Chronique Editions, Paris, 2013, p. 69).
[ii] Brzzezinski, Z, The Grand Chessboard. American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, Basic Books, New York, 1997
[iii] The new US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, recently acknowledged that the Ukraine War was in fact a “proxy war” between Russia and the US., in UOL Noticias, noticias.uol.com.br - March 6, 2025.
* Jose Luis Fiori He is professor emeritus at UFRJ. Author, among other books, of A theory of global power (Vozes) [https://amzn.to/3YBLfHb]
Originally published in Bulletin no. 10 of the International Observatory of the XNUMXst Century.
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