The unspoken deal: Trump and Putin have split the world

US President Donald Trump and Russia's Vladimir Putin in a past meeting. [AFP] There were two summits hovering around US President Donald Trump's desire to end the war in Ukraine. First was the summit in Anchorage, Alaska, between Trump as the host and Russian President Vladimir Putin as the guest, on August 15, 2025. It was a turning point in geopolitical configuration. Second was the summit in Washington, also on Ukraine, with Trump as the host and seven European leaders with interests in the Ukraine war. In Anchorage, the two men have similarities and get along. Each is decisive, likes exercising power in his respective country, and is reportedly inclined to the New Right Movement. Each entertains a sphere of influence attitude where security-related matters are concerned. While Trump wants to control the Western Hemisphere, Putin has interest in Eurasia. The challenge is for the two to agree on the geopolitical line of demarcation. Geopolitical observer In the Washington summit, Trump confronted angry leaders of a Europe that had declined into a geopolitical observer of world events. Although Trump did not start it, he seemed to enjoy and accelerate that European decline. It boosted his ego and he was amused by the seven leaders rushing to Washington, in the name of security for Europe, to slow down Trump's rapprochement with Putin. They somehow had turned the feud between Moscow and Kiev into their mortal feud, and needed American help in continuing to 'contain' Russia. They had problems convincing Trump that he should embrace a war that Joe Biden had reportedly instigated in order to fix the Russians. In doing so, Biden had ignored the advice and warnings from former prominent American policy makers, the wise in America. The warning was that Biden's action was likely to lead to a serious war, with Ukraine as the sacrificial lamb. With Ukraine President Ukraine President Ukraine President Volodymyor Zelenskyy as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) proxy, the provocation worked and although Russia has suffered some economic and military blows, it is Ukraine that is being destroyed. Right from the beginning, Trump was clear that the provocation was a mistake and he was determined to correct the mistake. That determination did not please the assembled European leaders. Trump therefore had to handle two interlinked Euro problems, one with Russia over new spheres of influence, and the other with Western Europe on the need to put 'boots' near the Russian border with Ukraine. Previous 'great' countries such as Britain, France, and Germany do not like the idea that they are no longer serious players in world affairs. The three were involved in various wars in effort to hem Russia. There was Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812, the French and the British in the Crimean War of 1853-1856 on the side of the Ottomans, Anglo-French attempt to strangle the Bolsheviks in their revolutionary cradle, and Adolph Hitler in June 1941. The three former imperial powers were under the American Cold War umbrella for roughly 50 years. They are not happy that Trump is talking to Putin without their input. The term NATO was a geographical misnomer in that the countries under its defence umbrella included those on the Mediterranean Sea like Italy, Greece, and Turkey. NATO was thus not confined to those on the Atlantic Ocean partly because France, with its strange claim to Algeria, was responsible for geopolitical interpretation of the meaning of 'Atlantic'. During the Cold War, so argues John Lewis Gaddis then of Ohio University, there was 'long peace' because big powers did not directly fight each other. In the almost 50 years of the West containing the Soviet Union, however, there were occasional 'hot' wars outside Europe. There included occasional engagements between Russia and China, China and India, China and Vietnam, the US and China in Korea, the US in Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan, or the US-Soviet nuclear confrontation in Cuba. The two main protagonists, probably because each had the 'mad' capacity, remained peaceful to each other even as they worked hard to undermine each other elsewhere. The Americans eventually won the Cold War. To win, the Americans had tricked the Soviets into Afghanistan to give the Soviets a Vietnam of their own but had not counted on the likely negatives. The victory ushered in a sense of triumphalism without considering the consequences of that triumph. Among those consequences was that Osama bin Laden, previously an anti-Soviet American ally in Afghanistan, felt so jilted that he turned his wrath against the United States. Using his Al Qaida to end American triumphalism, Osama plunged the world into the uncertainty of world terror symbolized by attacks on symbols of American power in Nairobi in 1998 and in New York and Washington DC in 2001. Initially in 1998, a small dispute between Nairobi and Washington arose as to the reason Osama hit the American symbol in Nairobi. That was before the same Osama hit New York and Washington in 2001 and hit harder than he had done in Nairobi. In attacking global symbols of American power, Osama inadvertently boosted the New Right Movement that helped to propel Trump into the presidency. Billionaire Peter Thiel, the seeming high priest of the New Right in America, funded Trump-connected activities and such Neo-reactionary operators as Ohio Senator JD Vance who in 2024 became Trump's vice president. As Vice President, Vance attracted attention by berating Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit at the White House. Stressing America First, the New Right likes strong authoritarianism and has little respect for democracy or what Thiel calls a 'myth of diversity'. Israeli attacks Other than in Ukraine, the US and Europe appear to be drifting apart over Israeli attacks on, and intentions in, Gaza. It would not be the first time that the US and Europe differed over happenings in Palestine. The US and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) fully endorsed the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the Zionist harassed Britons were not amused. While the Europeans, with a sense of guilt associated with World War II racism and holocaust, find it difficult to watch Israel commit genocide in Gaza, the New Right in Washington does not have that sense of guilt. Instead the New Right in America includes billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel whose South African apartheid experience enables them to claim that post-apartheid South Africa has mounted genocide against white people. It seemingly longs for the good old days when Rudyard Kipling's 'White Man's Burden' meant colonising those who were not white or creating 'white man's country' on the Equator. Racist practices For them, being white, in the days before there was 'diversity' and 'independence', was a pleasant reality to go back to. They have no sense of guilt over past poverty creating racist practices. The two summits, in Anchorage and in Washington marked the end of a post-World War II era of Americans and Western Europeans being tied together in everything. The growing differences between Europe and Trump's America over Ukraine and Gaza, tends to free the United States from having a sense of obligation to look after Europe's wellbeing. Since the logic of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO ended with the end of the Cold War and the destruction of the Soviet system, each region became free to look after its interests the best way it knows how. For Trump, prolonging a Biden-linked war in Ukraine in order to continue hemming Russia, please European geopolitical egos, and boost Zelenskyy's self-importance, made little sense. Besides, Trump and Russia's Putin appear to have an understanding on how the world should be; Trump to dominate the West and Putin to dominate the East or Eurasia. -Macharia Munene is professor of international diplomacy

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