In recent weeks, President Trump has appeared to speedrun detente with the establishment. He horrified the ‘restrainer’ wing of the MAGA movement by sending B-2 bombers to strike nuclear sites in Iran, shocked long-time supporters by dismissing the significance of the Epstein files, and received a hero’s welcome at the NATO summit in The Hague, where a servile Secretary General Mark Rutte called him ‘daddy’.

One of the most pronounced shifts came earlier this week at an Oval Office press conference with Rutte, when Trump declared that he was ‘very disappointed’ with Vladimir Putin and issued him an ultimatum: agree to a ceasefire deal with Ukraine in fifty days or else face punishing 100% secondary tariffs, designed to make it harder for Russian trading partners like Brazil, India and China to finance the war. Trump also pleased the Atlanticist faithful with the surprise announcement that he would send top of the line weapons to Ukraine, albeit indirectly. According to the new plan, the US will sell ammunition, missiles and Patriots – both interceptors and launchers – to European allies and NATO will facilitate their delivery to Ukraine. The decision prompted more unseemly gushing from Rutte. ‘Mr. President, dear Donald, this is really big. This is really big.’ 

All this was a far cry from the events of February, when Trump and Zelenskyy engaged in a televised row that made headlines around the world. As recently as two weeks ago, President Trump halted some weapons shipments to Ukraine, citing Pentagon concerns about diminished stockpiles. What explains this abrupt change of course? Has Trump revealed his willingness to defer to the conventional neocon-Atlanticist outlook, or is this merely an ephemeral convergence? 

Since Trump’s return to the presidency earlier this year, Putin has tried to balance two contradictory priorities. On the one hand, he has sought to continue waging war, since he currently has the upper hand and thus has little incentive to end the conflict on terms acceptable to Ukraine. On the other, he is aware that Trump has placed an enormous premium on ending the fighting, so he has tried to convince Washington that Russia is amenable to a diplomatic solution and a negotiated peace. This dynamic led to two rounds of largely theatrical talks in Istanbul in May and June, which secured a prisoner swap of thousands along with an exchange of war dead, yet made little progress towards a ceasefire. Russia sent a delegation of mid-level officials – a move which indicated that it was less interested in bringing the war to an end than in sending a symbolic message to Trump: that Russia is the rational, constructive actor committed to diplomatic engagement, while Ukraine is the party with impossible, maximalist demands. 

But Russia could only sustain this double act for so long. The past three weeks have seen a rapid deterioration in Putin and Trump’s hitherto friendly relations, as it has become clear that the peace talks were little more than a pantomime, and that the war is likely to drag on. On 3 June, the two men had a phone call that Trump described succinctly as ‘bad’. Just hours later, Russia initiated its largest aerial attack of the entire conflict, launching 539 drones and 11 ballistic and cruise missiles at Ukraine. The next day, Trump had a call with Zelenskyy in which he reportedly asked if Ukraine could hit Moscow or St. Petersburg. ‘Absolutely’, Zelenskyy is reported to have told Trump. ‘We can if you give us the weapons’. One commentator speculated that the conversation was briefed to the press as a means of putting pressure on Putin. But this appears to have failed, as Russia launched yet more attacks on Ukraine over the following days. Nor did this week’s ultimatum seem to faze those in the Kremlin; in fact, the Moscow stock market rose by 2.7% shortly afterward. 

While Trump’s pivot has been hailed as a game-changer, it remains to be seen whether this renewed goodwill between Washington and Europe will last. At the NATO Summit in June, Ukraine took a backseat to Trump’s preferred topic: European defence spending. Convinced that many NATO states have not been paying their fair share, Trump managed to push through his demand that members increase defence spending to 5% of GDP: an edict accepted by every country apart from Spain. The agreement prompted Trump to abandon his anti-NATO rhetoric and start praising the alliance, in what was widely reported as a victory for European diplomacy and particularly for Rutte, whose kowtowing had found apparent justification.

Yet, even at the summit, there was a sense that the magical 5% figure was all for show. One senior official from a European defence ministry confided to me that the spending announcements were less of a ‘binding commitment’ than a means to ‘project unity to Russia and Trump’. Just days after the event, it was reported that in order to reach the target, the Italian government was planning to classify a €13.5 billion bridge to Sicily as a defence expenditure. Such creative accounting may placate Washington for now, but it may not do so further down the line. 

It is also worth noting that Trump’s policy shift is somewhat less dramatic than the media billing would suggest. The President has framed it not as aid or charity but rather as an ‘America First’ deal that will benefit US arms manufacturers – a continuation of his transactional approach to foreign policy, rather than a break with it. Nor is it a deviation from his long-term plan to reprioritize America’s overseas commitments and resources, gradually shifting away from Europe to Asia. For Trump believes that he can dominate and coerce other states from a distance, through a series of piecemeal agreements like this one, rather than committing to the traditional set of external alliances that remained sacrosanct under Biden. It is this fundamental lack of investment in such geopolitical relationships that distinguishes Trump from his predecessors. His change of tack on Ukraine does not affect this wider approach.

‘Trump’, as Patrick Porter recently quipped, ‘is discovering that wars don’t end by presidential fiat’. The break-up of Yugoslavia, the last series of wars on European soil, took almost a decade and included the longest siege in modern military history. We may well see a similarly protracted situation in Ukraine, with neither side able to win outright nor willing to bring an end to the bloodshed. An alternative scenario would be a Korea-style partition with a heavy demilitarized zone that would look more like a frozen conflict than peace. Either way, Western powers who are longing for a simple solution – either a stable settlement or a decisive victory – are likely to be disappointed.

Read on: Lily Lynch, ‘Imperfect Unity’, Sidecar.