Factoring in the inter-imperialist interests behind the war in Ukraine, Brian O’Boyle uncovers what drives both Trump’s MEGA doctrine and Putin’s military aggression – shoring up their rule at home in uncertain times.
On 12 February, the US President, Donald Trump, shocked his European counterparts by talking to Vladimir Putin without their consent. Following a phone call with the Russian President, Trump confirmed that peace negotiations would begin between their respective Administrations more or less immediately. On the same day, the US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, told a meeting of NATO leaders that while the US remains committed to an ‘independent and prosperous Ukraine’, it was no longer realistic for Ukraine to return to its pre-2014 borders. He also dismissed the idea that Ukraine could join the Western Military Alliance, less than a year after NATO chiefs claimed it was on an irreversible path towards membership.
Trump’s actions have confirmed that this has always been a proxy war between two Imperial blocs. He has dropped the façade that America’s defence of Ukraine was ever about national liberation, in favour of a strong man version of global security. Indeed, Trump’s decision to go over the heads of the Ukrainian Prime Minister, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and those of his NATO allies, was calculated to reveal important truths about his ‘America First’ agenda for three different audiences.
For the neoliberal establishment that continues to rule most of the European Union, his message is that ‘there is a new sheriff in town’, and ‘he no longer plays by the rules established in the post-war era’. Europe will have to pay more for its own security; European economies can no longer expect to run transatlantic trade surpluses without being challenged, and they must reckon with an American super-power that will seek to dominate the Western Alliance under the principle that ‘might is right’. For the authoritarian right in Europe, his message is that America is now fully behind their attempt to undermine the continent’s liberal-democratic norms, articulated recently by J.D. Vance when he insisted that the biggest danger to European security is the (progressive) ‘enemy within’.
For his own domestic supporters, meanwhile, Trump wants to present himself as a charismatic leader with an almost superhuman capacity to reshape the world in his (and their) own image. He wants to appear as the undisputed leader of the world’s most powerful state, who alone can decide what happens to the lives of millions of ordinary people, even when this involves a longstanding rivalry with a major imperialist opponent.
To unpack the logic of Trump’s ‘America First’ strategy, it is useful to understand the history of the imperialist rivalry between Russia and the West, alongside the Biden strategy that Trump is definitively rejecting.
The Cold War
The US emerged from World War Two as the world’s major economic and military power. To maintain this hegemony, the American ruling class set about achieving three related geo-strategic objectives.
- They wanted to limit the spread of communism, particularly in Europe and Southeast Asia.
- They wanted to rebuild the capitalist economic order with American institutions at its centre.
- They wanted to bring weaker states (both in Europe and in the developing world) into the US sphere of influence.
In Europe, they calculated that a capitalist economic association (The EEC) and an American led military alliance (NATO) would make up for their significant geographic disadvantages vis-a-vis the USSR. Western European states would integrate their economies into American capitalism in return for US (Marshall) Aid and the security guarantee of the US military. For the next forty years, a Cold War between the US and the USSR shaped the contours of European politics, but by the late 1980’s it was becoming clear that the rivalry was taking its toll on the Soviet Union.
A much weaker economy was coming under pressure from a US arms race at the same time as the populations of the old Communist bloc were increasingly raging against the police states that had controlled them for generations. The crucial moment came with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In return for allowing East Germany to move out of the waning Communist sphere of influence, NATO gave guarantees to respect the remaining security interests of the Soviet Union. Their key objective was to secure the reunification of Germany as a member of NATO, but when the USSR itself collapsed in 1991, they made an entirely new set of calculations.
Recognising their chance to humble their major rival, the neoliberals in Western Imperialism sponsored an extremely aggressive form of free market capitalism to replace the state controlled Communist economies. The result was a form of ‘Shock Therapy’ that created chaos in the lives of ordinary Russians, many of whom suffered a major collapse in their economic fortunes and in their life expectancy. The hubris of the Western elites went as far as assuming that they could bring Russia into their own sphere of influence, but the chaos that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet system allowed many of the old ruling classes to reinvent themselves as capitalist oligarchs.
It also threw up a new hardened political elite, anxious to use the humiliation of the Soviet Union as the glue to bind themselves to the wider population and to bring the newly wealthy oligarchs to heel. If Trump has been able to forge a popular right-wing base through the idea of ‘Making America Great Again’, Putin was the originator of this strategy in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like Trump, Putin presents himself as a patriotic strong man who promises to make Russia Great Again by using the power of the state to bully its rivals.
At the same time as the West was attempting to re-engineer the Soviet system internally, it was also driving home its advantage within the Russian sphere of influence. Because many of the old Soviet states viewed Russia as an imperialist aggressor they often looked to NATO as their natural ally. And despite giving guarantees to respect Russian security concerns in the wake of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, NATO took advantage of this new dynamic by expanding relentlessly to the East.
In 1990, the US Secretary of State, James Baker, famously promised that NATO would not move ‘one inch to the East’, but by 2004, 10 former Communist States had joined the military alliance which had moved its borders 800 miles closer to Russia. It is these twin decisions (to impose ‘Shock Therapy’ and expand NATO) that have helped Putin to shore up his own reactionary ruling class by presenting himself as the strong man necessary to repel ongoing Western aggression. It was also in this context that Putin’s own wars of imperial aggression have always made sense. They have helped to forge a conservative unity at home and reminded the West that Russia would not be pushed around in its immediate sphere of operations.
The Proxy War
The War in Ukraine is the sharpest point of these imperial war games. As NATO has encroached further to the East, so Putin has attempted to radicalise his own population by emphasising the need for Russia to defend itself – often through its own forms of external aggression. In 2008, Putin showed his willingness to invade his neighbours when he went into Georgia. He simultaneously fomented anti-Western sentiment in the Ukraine, particularly in Crimea and the Donbas, where ethnic Russians have always been a sizable part of the population.
The seeds of the Ukraine War were sown in a turbulent period from 2013-2014. Responding to overtures from the Western elites, members of the Ukrainian parliament passed an Association Agreement with the European Union in 2013. Putin responded with the threat of military aggression and then, in quick succession, the Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, withdrew from the EU agreement in favour of closer ties with Russia, and then fled the country as a popular uprising led to the re-installation of a pro-Western leadership. Putin duly annexed the Crimea and supported pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas, effectively shaping the hostilities that led to the invasion in 2022.
The Western response came straight out of the Cold War playbook. Recognising Putin’s invasion as the perfect pretext to strengthen NATO, Western governments have cynically provided just enough military support to drag the Ukrainian army into a war of attrition, without providing enough support to actually win the war or ignite the region into a major conflagration.
Biden calculated that this goldilocks level of military support would achieve two interlocking objectives. By creating a long and grinding conflict, Biden assumed that Western imperialism would be strengthened in Europe without having to put any Western boots on the ground. This part of his calculation has largely come to pass, with Finland (2023) and Sweden (2024) both joining NATO and the European defence industry successfully lobbying for a ratcheting up of military investment. His second calculation was that a drawn-out conflict would destabilise the Russian ruling class as Western sanctions and heavy military losses would make the war unpopular at home. This part of the calculation has proven badly mistaken, however.
Far from creating internal pressure on the Putin regime, the war has allowed him to strengthen his grip. Western imperialism refuses to acknowledge its own role in the aggression, but this is central to the experience of ordinary Russians many of whom blame the West for destabilising Russia and then capitalising on her weakness through NATO expansionism. Western sanctions have also been largely ineffective, as Russia has successfully pump-primed its economy through military investment while benefiting from a massive increase in the prices of oil and gas. Far from Russia sinking under the weight of Western sanctions, it has grown more quickly than all of the Western economies with a growth rate of 3.6 percent in 2023 and 4.1 percent in 2024. This has allowed Putin to increase real wages even as the Russian state diverts massive resources into the military economy. Putin has also been strategic in selecting those who are likely to die. Conscious of the political importance of the wealthier cities of Moscow and St Petersburg, Putin has concentrated his conscription efforts on the poorer (Eastern) regions of the Russian State and on non-Russian ethnic minorities. The result, according to Russian opinion polls, has been support for his ‘Special Military Operation’ (although the extent of this is difficult to know given the repressive regime), alongside a slow grinding advance on the battlefield. Putin now controls 20 percent of Ukraine; Trump has calculated that now might be the time to cut and run.
The American Ruling Class First
The idea that America could do a deal over the heads of the Ukrainians has shocked the Western liberal establishment, but it begins to make sense when viewed in terms of the different audiences mentioned at the outset. With his own domestic base in mind, Trump calculates that a quick resolution to the conflict would not only fulfil one of his many pre-election campaign promises, it would also confirm his own unique ability to resolve a problem that plagued the Biden Administration for nearly three years.
The subtext here, for the Trump Administration, is the bankruptcy of Western liberalism. Despite its claims to moral superiority, liberalism (read Western imperialism) has stood over a bloodbath in Ukraine with hundreds of thousands dead and no end in sight. Biden’s strategy of being ‘first among equals within the NATO Alliance’ has also failed as Putin has been strengthened and is now confident that he can last the course on the battlefield.
Leveraging US military strength in a more unilateral way than his predecessor, Trump may view a deal with Putin as a chance to reassert US hegemony in Europe at the same time as he can claim credit for ending the war. His aim may be to force his European ‘allies’ to ‘police the peace’ and if he succeeds in this Trump will have won with his MAGA supporters two times over. Not only will he confirm himself as the arch deal-maker – the man who knows how to get things done – he will also have re-balanced relations within NATO by forcing wealthy European states to ‘pay their fair share’ in the military alliance.
Beyond these immediate considerations, Trump has drawn a second conclusion from the failure of the (neo) liberals to outfox their authoritarian opponent. Although the West has vastly more resources than the Russian Federation, Trump sees his ‘allies’ as much weaker states, hamstrung by ‘decadent’ populations, democratic checks and balances, a liberal free press and the rule of law.
In stark contrast, he marvels at the ability of his authoritarian opponents (Putin and Xi Jinping in particular) to wield forms of internal power that his own Administration can only dream about. By promising to make their own nations great again, Putin and Xi Jinping have both become (more or less) Presidents for Life. They have become figure heads for wider ruling class projects that have been able to weaken workers’ unity at home and create jingoistic nationalism abroad.
Trump sees MAGA as the only appropriate response for his own inner circle and for the Western elites more generally. He sees MAGA as the best way to make the US ruling class great again, primarily by rolling back American democracy and by mimicking the authoritarianism of his imperialist rivals. Western commentators like to portray Trump as a vain man with a penchant for authoritarian leaders. It is better to understand him as a symptom of an American capitalism in decline; a system that no longer provides for the material advancement of millions of American workers but still requires their loyalty for its success.
The modern United States no longer promises workers a shot at the ‘American Dream’. Instead, it offers them a reactionary project to ‘Make America Great Again’ – a populist authoritarianism that was initially perfected by Putin and is now being enthusiastically adopted by Trump.
