Washington D.C.
For Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, it’s a case of today Ukraine, tomorrow the world. In their much-hyped telephone call this week, the Russian leader didn’t appear to give much away: a step towards a sort-of ceasefire, a prisoner swap and a few other bits and bobs. But Putin knows that Trump wants a lot more than just an agreement on the Donbas. Settling the most significant conflict in Europe since the second world war is merely a prelude to a much bigger deal in the Holy Land, a truly historic arrangement that could satisfy the Donald’s desire to be thought of as a peace legend.
That’s why Trump sent Steve Witkoff, his special envoy to the Middle East, to Moscow to pre-negotiate with Putin last week. It struck many as odd that, as Witkoff, Putin and Trump jawed about stopping war in Ukraine, renewed hostilities broke out between Israel and Hamas and Trump ordered a new bombing campaign against the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.
Yet it makes sense. Because the Ukraine war is just one part of the new Great Game of the 21st century, which is now centred on the Middle East. On Sunday, the Russia-Ukraine-US ceasefire talks resume in Jeddah, and the host, Saudi Arabia, is emerging as a more important power-broker than Britain, say, or France, never mind Brussels. Keir Starmer wants credit for persuading Ukraine to accept Trump’s initial ceasefire proposal, but it was Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince, who really turned Volodymyr Zelensky’s head by offering Ukraine a multi-billion investment scheme.
Trump and Putin may have spent most of their 90-minute call wrangling over energy plants on the Dnipro river or naval manoeuvres in the Black Sea, but the subject of Iran seems to have been at least equally important. Putin agreed to intensify pressure on Tehran, Russia’s ally in the region, and to hamper its nuclear weapons programme. ‘The two leaders shared the view that Iran should never be in a position to destroy Israel,’ said the White House read-out from the call, which the Kremlin confirmed.
For more than a decade, Putin has been conducting a ‘maximum pressure’ campaign against Ukraine, which culminated in the war that now may or may not be ending. Trump, Witkoff and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, aim to do something similar with the Iranians, cutting them off from everyone, bar perhaps China. The plan is to bankrupt Tehran, empower Israel and make friends with the Arab states. Just a few hours after he got off the telephone with Putin, Trump, in his words, ‘warmly welcomed’ the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan to the White House for talks and dinner. The sheikh didn’t take off his sunglasses but nobody seemed to mind.
It’s Trump’s Concert of Arabia, and the centre of global diplomatic gravity has shifted eastward. America, Russia, China and Turkey will vie for influence over greater Israel, an enfeebled Iran and a newly empowered Arab League, while the petro-dollars keep everything pumping. At the same time, India, the world’s fifth-biggest economy, is also meant to be a key player in Trump’s new world order. It was interesting that, as Trump spoke to Putin, his director of intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a Hindu, was in Delhi talking to Narendra Modi about deepening US-India ties and achieving ‘peace through a strategy rooted in realism and pragmatism’.
Europe and Britain, meanwhile, are notable for their increasing unimportance. Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron’s quixotic campaign to form a military ‘coalition of the willing’, now apparently moving towards an ‘operational phase’, is regarded in Trump circles and the Kremlin as an attempt to keep war going by other means – at best unhelpful; at worst, apocalyptically reckless. America doesn’t seem interested in providing the security ‘backstop’ against Russian aggression which Starmer desperately wants. Trump is all for Europe spending more on defence, but doesn’t want any moves that might disrupt his agenda for world peace.
The plan is to bankrupt Tehran, empower Israel and make friends with the Arab states
Macron and Starmer’s hope must be that, with all the emphasis on how Putin has ‘played’ Trump by keeping him waiting on the phone and then not quite agreeing to US demands, the Commander-in-Chief’s pride will be stung into a new hostility towards Russia and a dramatic recommitment to Nato’s eastern deterrence. But Trump is not nearly as thin-skinned as his critics make out. He may well fall out with Putin in the coming days, in the way he fell out with Zelensky, by posting angry words on Truth Social or giving another ‘fire and fury’ press conference. That, however, would mostly be just to add a twist to the reality TV drama of his presidency. Blow-ups are good for ratings.
The bigger point is that Trump and the Make America Great Again movement do not share Europe’s fear and loathing of Putin. ‘I don’t like Russia’ is how Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point chief executive and de-facto voice of the MAGA Youth, put it on Tuesday afternoon. ‘They’re not a free society. It’s run by a bunch of gangsters and thugs. [But] they do have some rich culture that is worthy of recognition and appreciation. Tolstoy is a real thing. Dostoevsky? Real thing. Tchaikovsky? Real thing. War and Peace? Real thing. That’s real stuff: real beauty, real art.’
Kirk and other figures in Trump’s orbit are much more interested in standing up to a bunch of gangsters and thugs closer to home – namely the Mexican cartels who have been funnelling masses of illegal drugs and migrants into southern America in recent years. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and others have been warning the Mexican government to deal with these rogue actors or face US military action. The Trump administration would pitch such an attack on Mexico’s sovereignty in much the same terms as Russia talked of its ‘special operation’ in Ukraine in 2022. But the effect would be similar: a great power flexing its muscles and stretching its borders. And given Trump’s interest in acquiring Canada and Greenland, it would become increasingly hard to deny that his America is expansionist. War in the western hemisphere and peace elsewhere? That’s real stuff: real beauty, real art.
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