He parades as a strongman, but in fact he’s weak, weak, weak. In the face of America’s adversaries Donald Trump is, as he might put it, a patsy, a sucker, a pushover. He folds like a pack of cards. He’s a human doormat. A loser.
Just consider the gifts he has handed Vladimir Putin this week. He has brought Russia in from the diplomatic cold after three years of ostracism following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, whose anniversary is nearly upon us. Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s foreign minister, was meant to be persona non grata; he remains under international sanctions. Nevertheless, this week in Riyadh he met Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, in so-called peace talks.
The mere fact of that meeting gave Putin something he has long desired: parity with the US. It signalled that Washington regards Moscow as its equal: not a pariah state that has committed an unconscionable act of aggression, but a fellow great power, even superpower, to be treated with respect. Whatever was agreed in Saudi Arabia, Putin will chalk that up as a win.
But Trump’s generosity did not end there. For who was not in the room in Riyadh? Answer: the Ukrainians. Remember, these were talks to discuss the future of Ukraine. To end a war in Ukraine. After the invasion of Ukraine. The exclusion of Ukrainians from discussions to determine their own future is obviously an enormous concession to Putin: it ensures he ends the war on his terms. But it’s a gift of a deeper kind too. It implicitly endorses Putin’s claim that Ukraine is not a real country, that it was only ever a province of the great Russian motherland with no sovereignty of its own.
There were others shut out in Saudi Arabia, and their exclusion was another kindness to the Russian dictator. The nations of Europe were not represented, even though they have a direct stake in what happens on their eastern frontier. They have been allies of Kyiv, aiding in the defence of Ukraine, and therefore their presence was deemed too uncongenial to the Russians. So they were not invited.
Again, though, this concession contained another, larger one. For what is one of the great strategic goals of Putin, which explains so much of his activity over recent years, including his meddling in foreign elections? It is the fragmenting of the western alliance. He loved Brexit, cheers on the far right in Europe and backed Trump because he wants to see the crumbling of the western bloc that has stood firm against him. For a US president to follow that script, icing out America’s most longstanding allies, is a huge win for the Kremlin.
Not least because it came straight after the US vice-president, JD Vance, had travelled to Munich – a city whose name will for ever be associated with the appeasement of dictators – to berate the democracies of Europe, lecturing them on free speech and culture wars, while making no mention of Russia’s suppression of all dissent, manifested in the unfortunate tendency of Putin’s internal critics to end up dead.
All of this would have represented a spectacular set of concessions to Moscow. But there was more. For one thing, Trump’s comically unqualified defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, had earlier warned Ukraine that it would never recover the lands stolen from it by Russia and that it should abandon all dreams of joining Nato. Again, two more items on Putin’s wishlist ticked off.
But then, Trump posted a social media rant that echoed a raft of Putin’s favourite talking points. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is “A Dictator without Elections,” Trump wrote, massively unpopular with his own people, ripping off the west as Ukraine corruptly swallows up billions of dollars. To cap it all, he endorsed the Orwellian, black-is-white inversion of truth advanced by the Kremlin when he said: “You should have never started it.” As if it were Ukraine that invaded Russia three years ago, rather than the other way around.
That, then, is everything Trump handed to Putin in the last week or so. And what has he got in return? Nothing, save flattery and the dangled promise of lucrative energy deals with Moscow. Indeed, he did not so much as ask for anything in return. The supposed strongman fell to his knees and kissed the Russian dictator’s feet before they had even entered the negotiating chamber. Small wonder that Kurt Volker, who resigned as Trump’s point man on Ukraine in 2019, told me for the latest Politics Weekly America podcast that the president has a “blind spot on Putin,” one Volker admits he does not understand.
All of which makes it laughable for Trump to claim he is “successfully negotiating an end to the war”, something only he could do, or for his cheerleaders to hail “the art of the peace deal”, or indeed for the meeting in Riyadh to be described as “peace talks” at all. They are nothing of the kind. If you give one side everything they want, which they naturally accept, while denying the other side everything they need, which they naturally reject, that is not a peace agreement: it is nothing more than a coerced surrender. Anybody could do that. It is no achievement at all.
And Trump has form in this area, the supposed master of the deal repeatedly giving away everything and getting nothing in return. Recall his photo-op meeting with Kim Jong-un in 2018. The North Korean tyrant and ruler of a slave state was rewarded with the legitimacy of a summit with – and the effusive praise of – a US president. Kim also won a suspension of US military exercises in the Korean peninsula. These were concrete, high-value gains. In return, Kim conceded nothing but some vague aspirations for a world without nuclear weapons. He played Trump like a slot machine.
To be clear, presidential weakness is not the gravest sin here. More serious is the capitulation to a dictator, the acquiescence in an invasion and the lasting precedent it sets, the abandonment of an ally fighting for its life and an apparent decision to break apart an alliance that has delivered relative peace and prosperity to the west, including the US, for eight decades.
Trump’s explainers say he’s doing this for a hard-headed reason: to end the distraction of a war that does not affect the US directly, so that it can focus its resources on the real threat, China. But even judged on its own terms, this move is a failure. Because a broken west makes a future dominated by China more, not less, likely.
The rest of the west, including Britain, needs to decide very quickly how to navigate the new world that emerged with vivid clarity this week. The postwar era is over. The global architecture built in 1945 is being burned to the ground by Trump. Europeans need to plan for, and invest in, a future where they have to defend themselves without the US. That future does not loom in the distance. It is already here.
For now, there is a political job that can be done. It is the puncturing of the image Trump has done so much to cultivate, and which he relies on to intimidate others, at home and abroad. The Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal made a good start this week, when he said: “The president’s surrender is pathetic and weak.” This is the right language to use. Trump may be the greatest showman, but he is the weakest strongman the world has ever seen.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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