Redburn Reads (Feb. 20, 2025)

Who's side is Donald Trump on?

“Kamala is for ‘they-them,’ Donald Trump is for you.”

I believe that tag line to Trump’s frequently aired anti-trans campaign ad persuaded enough voters on the margin to win him the election. But now that he is in the White House the far more important question is who Trump is for – and it’s not you, me, or most of the people who voted for him.

At first I thought the answer was fairly simple: Trump was for himself and his fellow billionaires. That’s still true, but we now have to accept the even harsher reality: Trump’s “they-them” also includes Vladimir Putin and other Russian leaders.

Credit: CNN

Donald Trump has almost no firm convictions, but he has been consistent on two issues throughout his public life: he likes tariffs and believes in merchantilism and he considers Russia (and, since he took power, Putin) a friend. The connection that binds the two is that pursuing both ideas will undermine – and probably end – the liberal, open international order that the United States has led since the end of World War II. Traditional American foreign policy has committed a lot of blunders, but the alternative to it will be a lot worse.

With the Trump administration’s abandonment of Ukraine and openness to Russia over the past week, I think it’s time to remind ourselves once again that Trump openly welcomed Russia’s support in the 2016 election (whether there was collusion or not between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives is irrelevant). It’s time to remind ourselves that Trump tried and failed to pressure Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Joe Biden in the 2020 election. And it takes no reminders at all to realize that he is now doing everything in his power to help Putin and hurt Zelensky. To me, Trump truly is the Siberian candidate.

Writing in The Atlantic, Anne Appelbaum is characteristically blunt about what she calls the end of the post war world.

For eight decades, America’s alliances with other democracies have been the bedrock of American foreign policy, trade policy, and cultural influence. American investments in allies’ security helped keep the peace in formerly unstable parts of the world, allowing democratic societies from Germany to Japan to prosper, by preventing predatory autocracies from destroying them. We prospered too. Thanks to its allies, the U.S. obtained unprecedented political and economic influence in Europe and Asia, and unprecedented power everywhere else.

The Trump administration is now bringing the post–World War II era to an end. No one should be surprised: This was predictable, and indeed was predicted. Donald Trump has been a vocal opponent of what he considers to be the high cost of U.S. alliances, since 1987, when he bought full-page ads in three newspapers, claiming that “for decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.” In 2000, he wrote that “pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.” . . .

Europeans have contributed more resources to Ukraine’s military and economic survival than the U.S. has—despite Trump’s repeated, untruthful claims to the contrary—but would presumably be cut out of this deal [for Ukranian mineral rights]. The Ukrainians, who have suffered hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties, whose cities have been turned to rubble, whose national finances have been decimated, and whose personal lives have been disrupted, are offered nothing in exchange for half their wealth: No security guarantees, no investment. These terms resemble nothing so much as the Versailles Treaty imposed on a defeated Germany after World War I, and are dramatically worse than those imposed on Germany and Japan after World War II. As currently written, they could not be carried out under Ukrainian law. Zelensky, for the moment, did not sign.

The cruelty of the document is remarkable, as are its ambiguities. People who have seen it say that it does not explain exactly which Americans would be the beneficiaries of this deal. Perhaps the American government? Perhaps the president’s friends and business partners? The document also reportedly says that all disputes would be resolved by courts in New York, as if a New York court could adjudicate something so open-ended. But the document at least served to reiterate Vance’s message, and to add a new element: The U.S. doesn’t need or want allies—unless they can pay. . .

Sometime in the future, historians will wonder what might have been, what kind of peace could have been achieved, if Trump had done what he himself suggested doing a few weeks ago: keep up military aid for Ukraine; tighten sanctions on Russia; bully the aggressors, not their victims, into suing for peace. Perhaps we might also someday find out who or what, exactly, changed his mind, why he chose to follow a policy that seems designed to encourage not just Russia but Russia’s allies in China, Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Cuba, and Venezuela. But now is not the moment to speculate, or to imagine alternate storylines. Now is the moment to recognize the scale of the seismic change unfolding, and to find new ways to live in the world that a very different kind of America is beginning to create.

This is a big deal and there’s no point in sugarcoating our new reality. What are the consequences of this change? Nobody really knows, but Jonathan V. Last, writing for The Bulwark, an essential newsletter these days, has one answer: The world will go nuclear.

I know that most people don’t care about foreign policy, but this is kind of important. Yesterday it became clear that America hasn’t abandoned its allies so much as switched sides. . .

It is not the case that America is retreating into splendid isolationism. No, we are still taking sides in world affairs. But now we are holding hands with the Russians and the Chinese and opposing the countries to which we have long-standing treaty obligations. . .

As of this week the Trump administration has folded up the nuclear umbrella. That’s the real meaning of sending Marco Rubio to collaborate with the Putin regime over the fate of Ukraine and JD Vance to Munich to put our NATO allies on warning.

The message is unambiguous: America will no longer protect you. Figure something else out.

There’s only one “something else.” Nuclear weapons. Let’s game out the logic of where this leads.

Now American foreign policy is making moves that will push Germany toward creating its own nuclear arsenal while the American president, vice president, and shadow president are actively meddling in German politics in an attempt to boost the neo-Nazi party to power.

Let me answer that question I just asked: I actually don’t think these people are that stupid. I think they know the score and this is what they want. They want a nationalist, aggressive, nuclear Germany. Because that’s the kind of country they believe will be their natural ally in the same way that they see Putin’s Russia as an ally and Xi’s China as an ally.

Because they see their real enemy as liberal democracy. “The enemy within,” as Vice President Vance put it.

2. Can We Turn Back the Clock?

Short answer: No. This is the new world we live in. There is no going back.

The problem here isn’t Trump, or Musk, or Vance. The problem is the American people.

At the end of the day, alliances between democracies don’t depend on politicians. They depend on the willpower of the citizenry.

An alliance is just a piece of paper. If America guarantees the security of Ukraine, but Russia believes that the American people will not tolerate supporting Ukraine, then Russia will invade Ukraine anyway. We’ve seen that.

From 2021 until 2024 it appeared that Russia had made a miscalculation concerning the character of the American people. But over time Russia’s initial analysis has been validated. Americans are too weak, stupid, and decadent to tolerate the extremely small sacrifice of giving old military equipment to the Ukrainians so that we can pay American workers to build new military equipment.

Even that was too much for the American people.

Once the seal is broken, it cannot be resealed. Let’s pretend that in 2028 Americans elect the beau idéal of a tough internationalist president—a guy who is Joe Biden, John McCain, and Scoop Jackson rolled into one.

That’s not going to solve anything because Americans have now proven to the world—twice—that they cannot be trusted. At best it might move America from being adversarial to temporarily friendly. But no nation can make long-term security plans that rely on the whims of American voters. The American people, society, and culture have proven soft and inconstant. Proving that they can be hard and dependable is the work of decades.²

All of which is to say that the old world order—the Pax Americana that lasted from roughly 1946 to 2024—is finished. And it ain’t never coming back.

This is the world we Americans are bequeathing to our children and grandchildren.