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“The problem for Europe is that the White House is occupied at the moment by a Russian asset.”
This statement was made not by an excitable politician looking for a headline but by the ambassador of a major European nation at a private lunch among diplomatic representatives to NATO in Brussels this year. Tellingly, nobody around the table (which did not include the US ambassador) disagreed.
I was told this anecdote by a guest at that lunch, with whom I caught up in the Estonian capital Tallinn this month. Marko Mihkelson is the long-serving chair of his parliament’s foreign affairs committee. A Russia scholar and journalist who once served as a foreign correspondent in Moscow, he is one of his country’s leading strategic thinkers.
I met Mihkelson as part of a visit to the Baltic nations, following the Yalta European Strategy conference in Kiev. The program – a week of discussions with politicians, senior officials, military leaders, journalists and think tanks – had been arranged by the Latvian embassy under the auspices of the foreign minister Baiba Braze , whom I got to know when we were diplomatic representatives in London.
The NATO ambassador’s remark captures in blunt language the exasperation which so many European leaders and diplomats feel about Donald Trump. It was not intended to advance a conspiracy theory, but to dramatise an observable truth: that Trump’s foreign policy – more likely through foolishness and ignorance than deliberate intent – could hardly be more serviceable to the interests of Vladimir Putin.
We have grown used to cringing at Trump’s urge to seek the approval of the world’s apex political predator. But this is much more serious than the neediness of a man manifestly unfit for the office he holds. In abandoning any pretence that, on his watch, America sees its role as a champion of liberal democracy and a defender of the global rule of law, Trump has comprehensively played into the hands of Putin and the other dictators with whom Russia is in concert.
A fortnight after my conversation with Mihkelson came Trump’s decision to buy diesel from Russia – thereby helping to fund the Russian war machine – and suspend sanctions against it. In doing so, he undermined the strategic posture of America’s NATO allies, united in their appreciation of how vital it is to European security that Russia’s war against Ukraine not succeed.
Among the Europeans, none feel this more acutely than the Baltic countries – those nations bordering Russia and its client state Belarus, for whom the issue is literally existential. In their eyes, America’s attitude to Ukraine is the best predictor of how the US would respond to any future Russian attack on them. “Ukraine for us is a litmus test of America’s attitude to us in the Baltics,” Artis Pabriks , a former defence minister, told me.
There is an important difference: the Baltic nations, as NATO members, enjoy the mutual security guarantee in Article 5. Ilze Milta, the current Latvian national security adviser, resists speaking of the Baltic nations as a bloc, as if they stand in a different relation to Russia than other NATO countries. An attack on any one of them would simply be an attack on NATO.
“It’s not about the Baltic states being next. It’s NATO that is next. The Baltic states do not stand alone,” she told me. She did not predict imminent Russian aggression. But, like all the officials I met, she expressed uncertainty and concern over Putin’s intentions beyond Russia’s engagement in Ukraine – whenever, and on whatever terms, it ends.
Baltic leaders understand, much better than some of their counterparts in southern and Western Europe – who do not feel the Russian threat with the same immediacy – that its war against Ukraine is not a limited territorial claim based on Putin’s idiosyncratic reading of Russian history. Nor is it merely a step towards reconstituting the old Soviet empire, the dissolution of which Putin famously described in 2005 as “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the century”. It is the major opening gambit of a grand strategy to fragment and weaken the West.
As the NATO analyst Carlo Masala wrote in If Russia Wins – an essay published last year which became a bestseller in Europe: “[T]here has long been a refusal to acknowledge that Russia’s war of aggression is much more than just a war to destroy Ukraine. In essence, it is a conflict over the world order – over the future structure of the international system. The states that want to maintain the liberal world order are going head to head against those that want a radical overhaul of the system. Political leaders [in Western Europe] have been far too slow to grasp this.”
The Baltics understand this. So does Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary-general. Too many Western leaders do not. Trump is at best ignorant, at worst complicit.
I spent an intense hour with Krisjanis Karins , Latvia’s prime minister at the time of the Russian invasion. (It was Karins who gave the order to send Ukraine most of Latvia’s arsenal of Stinger missiles, which enabled the Ukrainians to deny Russian paratroopers a decisive foothold at Hostomel Airport, near Kyiv, in the early days of the invasion. Had they not been thwarted, Kyiv would probably have been undefendable.)
Karins, American-born and superbly educated – summa cum laude and PhD from an Ivy League university – despairs at the failure of so many Western politicians to appreciate the scale of Putin’s ambition and the magnitude of the threat his geopolitical strategy poses to their free societies.
People in his country do not lack that appreciation. He quoted Janis Joplin: “‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’. We have everything to lose.”
George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is a professor at the ANU’s National Security College.
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