President Donald Trump meets with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office at the White House, Monday, Aug. 18, 2025. [AP Photo\/Julia Demaree Nikhinson]<\/p>\n
Until a few years ago, the US and European powers worked closely together to encircle Russia and bring Eastern Europe and large parts of the former Soviet Union under their control.<\/p>\n
Between 1999 and 2004, NATO swallowed up all former members of the Warsaw Pact, as well as the former Baltic Soviet republics. This was followed by the successor states of Yugoslavia and \u201cpartnerships\u201d with the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. In 2014, the US and Europe jointly organised a coup in Kiev to bring Ukraine under their influence, thereby provoking the current war.<\/p>\n
But now the axis of conflict is shifting. The rivalry between the US and Europe is increasingly coming to the fore. The robbers are fighting over the spoils. Trump\u2019s effort to strike a deal with Putin over the heads of the Europeans and Ukraine is meeting with bitter hostility in European capitals.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Europeans now are paying the price for not having invested in military capabilities over the last years,\u201d explains Claudia Major of the German Marshall Fund, an authoritative voice on European foreign policy. \u201cThe Europeans are not at the table, because, to quote Trump, they don\u2019t have the cards.\u201d<\/p>\n
The European powers are doing everything they can to sabotage Trump\u2019s plans for Ukraine. So far, with some success. The five-hour meeting between Trump\u2019s emissary Steve Witkoff and Putin, which took place in Moscow on Tuesday, produced no results. The European powers changed Witkoff\u2019s original 28-point plan in tough negotiations to such an extent that it is unacceptable to Moscow.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But, in Major\u2019s words, they lack \u201cthe cards\u201d to continue the war without US support. The US is scaling back its funding for Ukraine and making Europe pay for weapons deliveries. The Zelensky regime, on which the Europeans rely, is sinking into a swamp of corruption scandals and, due to growing opposition to the war, is increasingly unable to recruit the necessary cannon fodder. \u00a0<\/p>\n
General Freuding, the new head of the German army, who was previously responsible for coordinating aid to Ukraine, complained in The Atlantic that communication with the American military had completely broken down. He said he used to be able to contact them \u201cday and night.\u201d \u201cYou have an enemy knocking at your door and at the same time you are losing a good friend,\u201d he said. By enemy, he meant Russia, and by friend, he meant the US.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The unexplained absence of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio from yesterday\u2019s long-planned NATO meeting in Brussels is also an expression of the growing tensions between Europe and the US. In an effort to strengthen Ukraine militarily and appease the US, the foreign ministers there decided to increase military aid to Ukraine and to purchase at least $1 billion worth of US-made military equipment for Ukraine each month.<\/p>\n
The transatlantic conflict has intensified, particularly during Donald Trump\u2019s second term as president. Trump and many Republicans have long considered the confrontation with Russia to be the wrong war and want to focus American military power even more strongly than before on China.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the tensions within NATO have even more fundamental causes. The alliance between the US and Europe, the two largest imperialist power blocs, has always been a historical anomaly. First, it was forged by the Cold War against the Soviet Union, and after the latter\u2019s dissolution, it was based on joint expansion into Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n
Now, the global crisis of capitalism and the accompanying bitter struggle for raw materials, markets and profits are tearing apart the alliance between the two largest imperialist power blocs, which together account for 45 percent of global economic output. Trump\u2019s punitive tariffs against the EU are another expression of this development.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Thirty years ago, American geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski explained in his bestseller The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives that maintaining American world domination depended on preventing the emergence of an economically equal power in Europe and Asia. This referred not only to China and Japan but also to Germany and the European Union.<\/p>\n
With his Ukraine plan, Trump has destroyed the myth that this war was ever about freedom, democracy, international law or other noble values. He links an end to the war so openly with economic blackmail and the business interests of his own family clan that even in the corruption-rich history of capitalism, it is difficult to find a comparable precedent.<\/p>\n
Trump is not interested in peace. Even if the war in Ukraine were to end, it would only be the prelude to a new round in the violent struggle for the imperialist redivision of the world. Venezuela is already in the crosshairs of the US military, and China is being systematically encircled.<\/p>\n
The Wall Street Journal, which criticises Trump\u2019s Ukraine policy from a right-wing perspective, has published a detailed article entitled \u201cMake Money Not War: Trump\u2019s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine\u201d about the profitable plans that Trump\u2019s business friend and chief negotiator Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterpart Kirill Dmitriev have been discussing for months. Trump\u2019s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has already raked in billions for his companies as a \u201cpeace negotiator\u201d in the Middle East, is also involved.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The plans range from joint extraction of gas, oil and rare earths in the Arctic to the use of $300 billion in frozen Russian central bank funds for US-Russian investment projects, the return of ExxonMobil and other US corporations to Russia, and the recommissioning of the damaged Nord Stream Baltic Sea pipeline and its sale to Stephen P. Lynch, an investor close to Trump.\u00a0<\/p>\n