Despite running for office promising to resolve the conflict in Ukraine within “24 hours,” US President Donald Trump and the special interests he serves intended before even taking office to continue the war in Ukraine – while also pivoting eastward to pursue a similar conflict with China in the Asia-Pacific region.
U.S. allies must take far greater responsibility for their conventional defense. U.S. allies must play their part not only in dealing with China, but also in dealing with threats from Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
And that it was important to:
…transform NATO so that U.S. allies are capable of fielding the great majority of the conventional forces required to deter Russia while relying on the United States primarily for our nuclear deterrent, and select other capabilities while reducing the U.S. force posture in Europe.
Just weeks after taking office, and despite the Trump administration insisting it sought an end to the conflict in Ukraine, President Trump’s secretary of defense Pete Hegseth would deliver a contradictory directive to Washington’s European partners in Brussels, explaining:
The U.S. is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, recognizing the reality of scarcity, and making the resourcing tradeoffs to ensure deterrence does not fail.
It also noted:
As the United States prioritizes its attention to these threats, European allies must lead from the front.
Together, we can establish a division of labor that maximizes our comparative advantages in Europe and Pacific, respectively.
To “lead from the front,” Secretary Hegseth urged Europe to spend more on defense including spending up to 5% of each nation’s GDP on NATO as well as for Europe to “double down and re-commit” to “Ukraine’s immediate security needs,” as well as expand Europe’s defense industrial base.
More alarmingly, Secretary Hegseth called for European troops to serve as “peacekeepers” in Ukraine as part of a non-NATO security guarantee.
While Secretary Hegseth specifically said during his remarks in Brussels that “this must not be Minsk 3.0,” what he was describing couldn’t be called anything else.
The obvious intention was to freeze what was and still is a failing US proxy war against Russia, with European troops sent into Ukraine to deter further Russian advances. With the conflict frozen, the US and Europe could rearm, expand their respective military industrial bases, and also rearm and reorganize Ukraine’s armed forces up to and until a point in the future when factors on the ground tilted better in Washington’s favor and hostilities could resume.
A similar strategy delivered success to Washington as recently as last December in Syria, where a US-engineered proxy war had raged since 2011. Having failed to topple the Syrian government in the opening years of the conflict, US and Turkish forces invaded and occupied Syrian territory, freezing the conflict and providing the US with time to rebuild and rearm its proxy forces allowing it to make one last and successful push toward Damascus in 2024.
Following Secretary Hegseth’s remarks in mid-February, European nations immediately set out to fulfill Washington’s directive with nations like Germany, the UK, and France pledging to drastically increase military spending, expand military industrial production, and prepare European troops as part of a “coalition of the willing” to enter into Ukraine and create a long-desired Syria-style buffer-zone.
Trump’s Peace Talks Predictably Unravel
Despite Washington’s obvious intentions to salvage and ultimately continue its own proxy war with Russia, the Trump administration posed as “mediators” amid it, attempting to lure Russia into a temporary ceasefire European troops could use as a window of opportunity to deploy to Ukraine.
Washington’s diplomatic efforts were also used to depict the US as seeking “peace” while all other parties – including Russia, Ukraine, and even Europe – were blamed for undermining a possible peace deal.
Russia remained open to negotiations but refused to make concessions that would allow the US to carry out plans to freeze the conflict, rearm Ukraine, and continue the conflict at a later date.
Predictably, with Washington’s empty negotiations having run their course, the Trump administration has finally and openly picked up where the Biden administration left off, preparing tens of millions of dollars in arms deals with Ukraine in addition to US-based arms manufacturers selling weapons to Europe to then transfer to Ukraine.
A pause in large-scale Ukrainian drone and missile attacks using Western arms, enabled by US military assets, and directed by US military commanders – as reported on by the New York Times – has ended, with a wave of strikes targeting Russia including the use of several British Storm Shadow cruise missiles. This is likely to continue in the weeks and months ahead, along with continued attempts to pressure the Russian economy through additional sanctions as well as pressure placed on nations continuing to trade with Russia.
Russia’s Slow and Steady War of Attrition
Russia, for its part, is continuing its strategy of attrition. The Wall Street Journal admits that Russia’s military industrial base continues to expand, with over 300 T-90 main battle tanks alone produced each year – up from just 40 in 2021. Artillery pieces and rounds are also being produced in greater numbers, alongside at least as many drones as Western sources claim Ukraine is producing or acquiring.
While missiles are not mentioned by the Wall Street Journal, strikes across Ukraine have steadily increased, indicating cruise missiles and ground-launched ballistic missiles like the Iskander are likely being built in the dozens each month.
The same article admits that Russia’s armed forces are recruiting anywhere between 30,000 and 40,000 soldiers each month. The Wall Street Journal admits this additional manpower allows troops to rotate on and off the battlefield – a luxury Ukrainian troops do not enjoy. Troop rotations and a large reserve allow for longer and better training. Ukraine’s inability to recruit or press into service sufficient numbers of troops is a contributing factor to the declining quantity and quality of Ukrainian soldiers, in turn leading to the steady, incremental collapse of Ukrainian lines.
The current trajectory of the conflict appears to lead to an eventual collapse of Ukraine’s fighting capacity, allowing Russian forces to move relatively unimpeded across what remains of Ukrainian-held territory. It is difficult to tell exactly if and when this will occur – however, the urgency in Washington and Brussels over the introduction of Western troops on Ukrainian territory to freeze the conflict may point to sooner rather than later.
Determining factors include Russia’s ability to continue sidestepping US-European attempts to undermine its economy, including the prospect of Western warships attempting to interdict or blockade vessels transporting Russian hydrocarbons. It also includes Russia’s ability to continue outproducing the collective West in terms of military industrial production. And while Russia appears to be succeeding in regard to the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine, the US continues applying pressure to Russia all along its geographic, political, and economic peripheries.
The 2019 RAND Corporation paper, “Extending Russia,” lays out a long list of “measures” meant as a way of “stressing Russia’s military and economy and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad.” They include “providing lethal aid to Ukraine,” the paper acknowledged could force Russia to “counter-escalate” which it did in 2022, thus precipitating a war the paper warned could, “produce disproportionately large Ukrainian casualties, territorial losses, and refugee flows,” and that, “it might even lead Ukraine into a disadvantageous peace.”
The paper also suggested “increase support to the Syrian Rebels.” Because the US has applied both of these measures and many others suggested in the paper, Russia has indeed been “extended.” The conflict raging in Ukraine was prioritized by Moscow over the conflict the US also deliberately escalated in Syria, forcing Russia to make the difficult decision of sacrificing one for the other.
In the days, weeks, and months ahead, the US will continue applying pressure not just in Ukraine, but all along Russia’s other peripheries, hoping to create additional dilemmas and difficult decisions for Moscow with the ultimate hope of precipitating a Soviet-style collapse of the Russian Federation itself. The outcome of this strategy will be determined not only by Russia’s ability to counter these provocations, but its ability to cooperate with other nations targeted by the US – including Iran and China – to stabilize and strengthen the emerging multipolar world faster than the US can undermine and destroy it.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.
