New turn in US-Russia relations

The meeting between the representatives of the United States and Russia in Saudi capital Riyadh on Tuesday was ostensibly about ending the war in Ukraine. It has however turned to be the restoration of dialogue between Washington and Moscow.

It is a fact that it is the war in Ukraine that led to the negative turn in US-Russia relations. At the outbreak of the war, the US had unhesitatingly supported Ukraine, condemned Russia’s invasion of the country, and followed it up with military aid to Ukraine. American President Donald Trump believes he can end the war in Ukraine, and to do so he needs America to be back on talking terms with the Russians. What the Riyadh meeting has done is that it has enabled the two sides to sit across the table and talk to each other.

This does not however mean that it would automatically lead to the end of the war in Ukraine. It is going to be a long process of negotiations, and there is no question of excluding Ukraine as feared by many including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinsky. Russian President Vladimir Putin has acknowledged this when he said that Ukraine cannot be excluded from the negotiations. The fact is that the Americans and Russians have not reached the point of discussing Ukraine. They have just managed to reconnect with each other after three years.

An implication of the reconnect between the US and Russia is that the Americans will not support Ukraine’s war effort. President Trump and his advisers seem to believe that once American aid ends, Ukraine will capitulate. It may not. It can continue to fight with the help of the European Union (EU) members. It is also unlikely that the United Kingdom, which is not part of EU, is likely to stand with Ukraine rather than shake hands with the Russians.

President Trump is keen to do business with President Putin and Russia for reasons of his own. For President Trump international relations is all about business, and he see US-Russia relations exclusively through the business lens. The EU, which includes all the European members of NATO, sees the Russian presence in terms of territory and ideology. The European leaders read Putin’s moves as a means of recovering the Russian sphere of influence in eastern Europe as it had existed before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the old Cold War.

Many in the American establishment see Russia as an ideological adversary though they feel that China is a greater rival both on ideological and economic grounds. And the Americans would have only been too willing to fight on the European and Asian fronts. Trump it seems feels that the Ukraine war is a drain on the American treasury. He sees rightly that the war in Ukraine has reached an impasse and that there is no decisive end to it where the winner could be declared.

He also sees that friendship with Russia would also decrease the importance of NATO, and by implication the US financial support for NATO. Trump is keen to cut all expenditure that he thinks as wasteful, and he has no appetite for ideological rivalries. His weapon of war is tariffs and not missiles. European countries like France and Germany too want peace with Russia and an end to the war in Ukraine. But they rely on the older diplomatic rules of territory and sovereignty. The European and Ukrainian demands would be unacceptable to Russia.

Trump’s unorthodox business model of diplomacy may be more effective for making peace between Ukraine and Russia. But in his zeal to get Russia on board, Trump is likely to push around Ukraine that could end in failure.