Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good
Is the US Switching Sides?
Fareed Zakaria
February 19, 2025
“European officials are awakening to a reality that Donald Trump has long underscored,” John Paul Rathbone and Henry Foy write for the Financial Times: “the US no longer wants to be the primary guarantor of security for either Ukraine or the continent as a whole.”
To some observers, the reality is much more extreme: The US president is ending America’s longstanding alliance with Europe and siding instead with Russia.
In recent days, Trump has excluded Europe and Ukraine from talks with Russia on Ukraine’s future, and he has mused that Ukraine might become part of Russia. Trump also has adopted Kremlin talking points, calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator,” falsely asserting that Ukraine started Russia’s war of aggression, and publicly pressing Zelensky to make a deal or lose his country. (Zelensky, for his part, says Trump is trapped in a bubble of disinformation.) Trump also has called for Russia to
be readmitted to the G7, from which it was expelled for annexing Crimea in 2014.
This is all about reshaping US–Russia relations broadly, London School of Economics international-relations professor Peter Trubowitz argues in an interview with Nicole Frölich of the German public media outlet Deutsche Welle. “I think for Trump, this kind of stunning turnaround bringing … Russia in from the cold has all the trappings of grand theater,” Trubowitz says. “It’s bold, it’s dramatic, it’s a surprise. And that’s, I think, really what he’s focused on. He is focused on the geopolitical … advantages that realigning the relationship with Russia, in his mind, offers. And that includes … putting pressure on Europe and taking advantage of Europe’s dependence on the United States … and, in Trump’s mind, opening up the possibility of gaining leverage over China by realigning relations with Russia. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s got his own game. It’s a different game, but I think both of them see the negotiations over Ukraine as an opportunity to make strategic moves that are much larger than the war itself.”
In a Foreign Policy op-ed, former UK Conservative Party policy adviser Garvan Walshe takes a similar but slightly different view, writing that “Trump’s venture appears to be an echo of the 1945 Yalta Agreement, through which then-U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin agreed to consign Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence.”
Europe’s Dilemma
What could this mean for Europe? First of all, the current moment is “surreal,” as a New York Times column by Farah Stockman notes. “Indeed, Europeans are waking up to the fact that they are entirely dependent on a foreign power that is no longer acting like itself. America, which once championed the liberal democratic world order, is now turning against it in ways that are shocking to its allies.”
Europe could build up its own military power so that it can either stand alone without the US, or return to the previous status quo if the US “comes back” as an unconditional NATO security guarantor, argues Liana Fix of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Trump regime is not synonymous with the United States,” Garvan Walshe argues in Foreign Policy, so European officials can continue to engage with some Trump administration officials and US lawmakers who don’t share Trump’s views of world politics.
In another Foreign Policy op-ed, former senior Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani argues Europe should signal it is willing to exit NATO and align with China. “Two thousand years of geopolitics has taught us a simple and obvious lesson,” Mahbubani writes: “All great powers will put their own interests first and, if necessary, sacrifice the interests of their allies. Trump is behaving like a rational geopolitical actor in putting what he perceives to be his country’s interests first. Europe shouldn’t just criticize Trump— instead, it should emulate him. It should carry out the currently unthinkable option: Declare that henceforth it will be a strategically autonomous actor on the world stage that will put its own interests first. Trump may finally show some respect for Europe if it does that.”
US abandonment of Europe could be a real policy goal, or it could be a threat—“a bargaining chip to force allies to spend more on US weapons, or to gain concessions in other areas such as trade and technology standards,” writes Giuseppe Spatafora of the European Union Institute for Strategic Studies. Either way, Spatafora writes, “Trump’s aggressive rhetoric and actions suggest that US abandonment of Europe is now on track to materialise. … [R]eality will likely contain elements of both scenarios. Europeans cannot just rely on one interpretation of abandonment. Some countries will seek to appease Trump by buying more US weapons or signing side deals, but that will not solve the issue if the administration’s goal is to disengage from Europe. To prepare for all contingencies, the EU should develop a more balanced strategy. At its core, this strategy
would entail the creation of a strong European deterrent force that could make up for US retrenchment.”
Gaza and the ‘Dismal History of Population Transfers’
With Trump planning to “take over” the Gaza Strip and displace Palestinians, Arab governments are working on counterproposals, The New York Times’ Patrick Kingsley and Vivian Yee report. “Representatives of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are quietly coordinating to form an alternative vision for Gaza in which Arab countries would help fund and oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, while keeping its residents in place and preserving the possibility of a Palestinian state, according to diplomats and officials briefed on the endeavor.” A plan developed by Egypt “centers on rebuilding Gaza while keeping Palestinians inside the enclave instead of forcing them out to Egypt and Jordan, as Mr. Trump has suggested,” the Times reporters write.
That would be welcome news for Gazans who have trekked back to their destroyed homes, committed to staying on their land. Writing in Compact, Princeton politics PhD candidate Heather Penatzer notes that schemes of forced displacement—also known as ethnic cleansing in cases where force and intimidation are used to render a geographical area ethnically homogenous—generally don’t work anyway. “Population transfers are not unheard of in modern politics,” Penatzer writes. “But among the many examples of forced migration, there is a startling absence of ‘successful’ cases. Indeed, looking to the past reveals that such projects tend to produce more practical problems than they solve.”
Penatzer notes Stalin’s forced deportation of Volga Germans to Central Asia and Siberia, the Nazi plan to clear Slavic peoples from Eastern Europe after an expected Nazi victory in World War II, and the US Indian Removal Act of 1830. Another “type of transfer is a population exchange in which two countries mutually agree to ‘trade’ large groups of people,” Penatzer
writes. “For example, the interwar period involved a number of attempts by the League of Nations to sort post-imperial populations into ethnically homogenous nation states. … In 1923, the League brokered a population exchange between Greece and Turkey in which nearly 2 million civilians (approximately the population of Gaza today) were forced from the homes their families had known for generations … The historical record, however, shows that such projects are themselves often highly destabilizing. In-state demographic manipulation can catalyze internal conflicts, as the local balance of majority and minority social groups is upset.”