What does Trump really intend?  What is bluff, braggadocio, and bargaining and what is not?  Because he does not have a philosophy or a national-security strategy, and often doesn’t seek pre-conceived objectives, observers from left to right are often confounded.  Trump is the very epitome of “transactional,” his one immutable focus being himself.  Accordingly, assessing such aberrational behavior, what’s really happening inside his head, can be nearly impossible.  Media, politicians and businesspeople alike frequently persuade themselves he is simply posturing, but are continually surprised by what he does.  Consider Ukraine, NATO, and tariffs.

Trump, many said, would never embarrass himself by a Ukraine settlement that conceded too much to Russia.  During the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly boasted that the Ukraine war (and the Middle East war) would never have occurred had he been President, thereby criticizing Biden’s (and, later, Kamala Harris’s) weakness.  However, neither Trump supporters nor opponents perceived his obsession with resuming his personal friendship with Vladimir Putin.  To Trump, good personal relations between leaders signify good relations between their countries, an enormously oversimplified view of the world.

But he wanted better ties with Putin.  Putin said he wanted peace, and Trump accepted it(https://www.voanews.com/a/russia-intensifies-attacks-as-us-ukraine-prepare-for-talks/8002466.html). That is why Trump has made so many concessions to Russia, and why Volodymyr Zelensky rightfully feels so beleaguered.  This is the personal motivation so many observers missed, speculating instead on “policy” reasons why Trump would not change America’s Ukraine policy.  He had no desire to vindicate Ukraine’s freedom and independence, and felt no imperative to show strength against Russia’s unprovoked invasion to deter, for example, China’s irredentism regarding Taiwan.  

Moreover, starting in his first term, Trump has wanted a Nobel Peace Prize.  He envied Barack Obama’s award, in his first year in office for no apparent reason, and felt he deserved one too.  Accordingly, Trump saw resolving either Ukraine or the Middle East as possible paths in his second term’s opening months.  This is likely the reason Trump often bragged  that he could resolve Ukraine on his first day in office, or at least in twenty-four hours after getting Putin and Zelensky alone in a room.  It also explains why, in his March address to Congress he called the war “senseless”(https://www.whitehouse.gov/remarks/2025/03/remarks-by-president-trump-in-joint-address-to-congress/).  Obviously, such a war is easier and quicker to end than one where real issues are at stake.  This is a man in a hurry for his Nobel.  

Those who believed Trump would not undercut Ukraine or, even worse, shift sides to support Putin, were repeatedly surprised.  They took comfort, for example, when Trump’s named long-term advisor Keith Kellogg as his chief peace negotiator.  But Moscow objected that he was too “pro-Ukraine,” and he was swept aside, purged one might say.  Kellogg showed Trump unwavering fealty, but that was, as always, insufficient for Trump.  Personnel decisions are not safe predictors of how he will act.

On NATO, observers said, Trump was merely bargaining when he declared America wouldn’t defend members not meeting the 2%-of-GDP military-spending target.  And so too, they said, he was just bargaining when he raised the target to 5%.  But Trump means what he is saying here.  NATO is not safe from US withdrawal, especially if allies fail to grasp that the potential for withdrawal is still top-of-mind for Trump. 

Then there’s Trump’s fascination with tariffs.  The damage Trump has caused Ukraine and NATO pales by comparison to what his tariffs will do to America’s economy and the entire international economic system.  If Trump had acted on April 1 instead of 2, he could quickly have said it was all an April Fool’s Day joke, thereby saving the global economy trillions of dollars of damage when markets started heading south.  Unfortunately, however, Trump is totally serious(https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/how-trumps-30-year-fixation-on-tariffs-began-with-japan/2025/04/01/405961e9-d836-4d40-bcaa-ede5b7658214_video.html), a fact evident long before “Liberation Day.”  

Here too, “experts” and anxious businesspeople steadfastly ignored Trump labelling “tariff” the dictionary’s most beautiful word.  Tariffs, they said, will be targeted, carefully calibrated, and he’ll do deals quickly.  It’s all a bargaining tactic, Treasury Secretary Bessent said in October, 2024:  “escalate to de-escalate”(https://www.ft.com/content/fa08cc45-e6d1-4e19-b49b-047c5a23ca39).  Even as global stock markets drop like rocks, experts are still rationalizing what his “strategy” is. 

Wrong again.  Trump is more likely to win the Nobel Prize for literature than for peace. As with Ukraine, Trump listens primarily to himself, not to others.  He creates his own world, this time an imaginary trade world, and then lives in it.  Trump isn’t lying so much as he is ruling a parallel universe(https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/04/03/tariffs-trump-global-trade-talks/), like a boy’s tree house, where numbers mean what he says they mean.  He doesn’t react well when the real world’s numbers don’t match:  after all, who’s in charge here?  

Trump can’t tell US friends from its enemies, either politico-militarily or economically, and doesn’t seem to care.  What matters are Trump’s friends and enemies, which are manifestly not the same as the America’s.

This article was first published in the Daily Telegraph on April 7, 2025. Click here to read the original article.

T.S Eliot would not have minded Robert Kaplan expropriating the title of his most
famous poem for his latest book, Waste Land. Kaplan’s focus on the decline of the West and the
birth of modernism were among the poem’s themes(175), and his latest tour de force on the
unhappy state of the world is decidedly pessimistic on many fronts, even while dwelling only
occasionally on Donald Trump.

In this extended essay, Kaplan makes three broad points. First, he analogizes the current
world, all of it, to Germany’s inter-war Weimar Republic. He argues that, as Weimar was in
permanent crisis, so, analogously, the entire planet is now “an interconnected system of states in
which no one really rules(14).” Of course, that has long been true, but extraordinarily dense and
rapid communications capabilities now make “closeness(34)” inevitable in a way that prior
history did not experience. And since “complexity leads to fragility(42),” instability and conflict
are riskier and more pervasive than in bygone days when the earth’s enormous size prevented
diverse conflicts from becoming global.

Second, Kaplan argues that America, China and Russia, the three great powers, are all in
decline, although at varying rates and for widely different reasons. The United States, he writes,
suffers from “decay in the culture of public life, especially the media…[A]s the media has
become less serious, so have our leaders(93).” The most graphic contrast between recent
Presidents, for example, is Dwight Eisenhower, general and war hero, compared to Trump, who
represents “the epitome of self-centered, emotional impulses(49).”

Analogizing to the late Ottoman Empire, Kaplan calls contemporary Russia Europe’s sick
man(81). He stresses that Russia’s decline “is of a different scale entirely(96),” and “on a far
more advanced state of rot(101)” than the US, although both had their own “disastrous wars of
choice(90)” in Ukraine and Iraq respectively. The good news for us is that Iraq was not nearly
so important to America as Ukraine was to Russia. US decline is “subtle and qualitative,” while
Russia’s civilizational slide is “fundamental(107).” Tracking America’s worsening political
leadership, Kaplan contrasts China’s Deng Xiaoping, whose record remains underrated, with his
successor Xi Jinping: “nothing if not a Leninist ideologue(113)” who has “returned China to the
die-hard authoritarianism, bordering on totalitarianism,” of Mao Tse-tung(115).

This competition among great powers, even receding ones, may sound like most of pre-
20 th century history, but it sets the stage for Kaplan’s third point: his lengthy diagnosis of the
West’s decline, starting with the originator of that phrase, Oswald Spengler. Kaplan sees global
urbanization as “the primary change in geopolitics(129),” with cities as “the conservative’s worst
nightmare(134).” Although we shouldn’t need a reminder, Kaplan provides it: technology and
civilization are not the same thing(170).

Through both physical and communications proximity, crowd psychologies and
“excitable public opinion(136),” create a kind of “mob(139),” that accelerates especially
America’s decline: “It is the masses speaking through one voice that are the danger(138).” In
the US, Kaplan distinguishes between the conflicting views of those living in cities versus those
dwelling in what F. Scott Fitzgerald called “that vast obscurity…where the dark fields of the
republic rolled on under the night(149).” All of this is compounded, as George Orwell
depressingly writes in Nineteen Eighty-Four, because “History has stopped. Nothing exists
except an endless present(169).”

Enormous consequences flow from Kaplan’s take, perhaps none more important for the
United States than its place in the wider world. For someone who earlier wrote a book called
The Revenge of Geography, it is telling that Kaplan’s thinking today concludes that “the finite
earth is gradually losing the race against technology and population growth(89).” This ever-
increasing “closeness” increases the importance of what once seemed distant: “Every place,
every river and mountain range, will be strategic(34).” The cyber age means “the enemy is now
only one click away rather than thousands of miles away(117).”

With so many in the United States now seeking escape from both history and geography,
these should be chilling words, but probably are not. The isolationist impulse currently at full
flood in political debate is increasingly less and less intelligible. Policies sensible in a world
where enormous distances meant conflicts could be contained are today not merely outdated but
dangerous. This shift has been underway for some time, of course. Neville Chamberlain was
wrong for many reasons to describe Germany’s 1938 lust for Czechoslovakia as a “quarrel in a
far-away country,” when it was already in Great Britain’s backyard. Vice President Vance’s
recent condescending lecture( https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/world/europe/vance-europe-
immigration-ukraine.html ) to Europeans in Munich referred to election controversies in what he
labelled “remote Romania,” reprising Chamberlain’s glib, arrogant and ultimately debilitating
lack of situational and strategic awareness.

Faced with major, nuclear-armed adversary powers, and numerous lesser threats along a
broad spectrum, America’s grievances against its own allies must be taken in perspective against
the broader menaces we face together. Complaints that allies are not carrying their fair share of
the common-defense burden are accurate and have domestic political appeal, but mere
complaining is not strategic thinking. The answer, in Kaplan’s “close” world is not that allies do
more and we do less, which is Trump’s hazy view, but that everyone on “our side” does more,
because the global threat level is high and rising.

Contemporary policy prescriptions are not Kaplan’s immediate objective, but his broader
analysis inevitably provokes them. His seemingly inexhaustible capacity to analogize and
extrapolate is compelling and helpful, even if some, like the Weimar analogy, don’t bear the load
Kaplan imposes on them. A closer fit to today’s “closeness” might well be Europe’s post-
Reformation religious conflicts, or Archduke Ferdinand’s 1914 assassination by a rabid Serbian
nationalist that ignited a continent-wide conflagration, thereby literally laying the groundwork
for Eliot’s poem.

Indeed, despite Waste Land’s pessimism, Kaplan’s conclusion is the only correct one:
“we have no choice but to fight on, as the outcome is not given to any of us in advance(186).”
And this is where Eliot’s enduring conservative line, “[t]hese fragments I have shored against my
ruins(159),” remains inspiring.

This article was first published in the Wall Street Journal on March 4, 2025. Click here to read the original article.