From The iPaper today:
"The international roadshow is a wild ride these days. When I left the Munich Security Conference on Monday, there were three US Air Force jets on the tarmac, ready to spirit the new top ranks of US defence and security players in the Trump administration back to DC or onwards to preparations for the bilateral talks with Russia ending the war in Ukraine.
This is how Donald Trump wants to shape his second term – the trappings of US power on full display, messages broadcast at full volume, objections dismissed as those of whingeing Europeans: “If you don’t like it, shut up or pay more,” as one vociferous congressman close to Trump put it to me.
Saudi Arabia was the venue for the first instalment of the US-Russia rapprochement. Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov started in the traditional Moscow negotiating position as “Mr Nyet”, branding proposals to deploy troops from Nato countries to Ukraine as part of any peace deal “unacceptable”. The US asked that Russia stop targeting Ukraine’s energy and nuclear facilities, to which the Russian response was to lie outright that it does no such thing.
For those of us who covered Soviet era negotiations this felt like the resumption of the old way of doing business: start with the threats and lies and somehow get to a handshake.
This all looks more like a starting gambit than a road to a certain outcome. No presidential encounter is likely to transpire for around a month at least. Talk of a deal is still premature; for a start there is no clear landing zone that Vladimir Putin could declare as victory. But the bigger significance of this meeting was that it marks a revival by Trump of a deal-making relationship with the Putin regime in Moscow and the end of the US freeze on relations.
Steve Witkoff, one of the White House’s powerful emerging “envoys”, a property developer and business ally of Trump, flew to Moscow to meet Putin before joining the delegation in Saudi Arabia.
Putting aside the fact that all of this happens outside the old structures of accountability (a State Department senior source tells me the embassies are only cursorily informed of these meetings, and US intelligence networks are similarly left out),they define a new style and substance in relations between the former Cold War rivals which will have deep consequences for Britain and Europe.
Putin the pariah is now top of Trump’s list of favourite leaders to deal with. A near-dictatorship which had been frozen by outside organisations like the G7 economic bloc, and whose leader faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court over a long list of war-crimes accusations, finds itself courted at the expense of America’s traditional allies.
They, in turn, get scolded for not paying enough for the continent’s defence. A new era of transactionalism will attempt to leverage a detente with Moscow, in order to loosen Russia-China ties.
For Putin, this is a moment of breakthrough and opportunities. It potentially weakens Nato, which is his longstanding aim, as it was of the Soviet Union – except now he has help from the US President. But he has been domestically damaged by the sanctions regime and by the attrition of the war. For all the bravura talk, Russia’s economy is in deep trouble; up to 30 per cent of GDP is being spent on pulverising Ukraine.
Opening the door again to American companies, many of whom have simply “frozen” their operations in Russia in a long waiting game to re-access that market while not falling foul of sanctions requirements, is likely to be a part of Trump’s deal-making. Even dating apps like Tinder and Hinge quit the Russian market in May 2023.
Well, it’s definitely US-Russia date night now. In Trump, Putin has a counterpart who is just as mercantile and power-centred in his view of the world as a system of spheres of influence, with less concern for those on the edge of these, or blocs like Europe which are secondary to the primary relationship.
Ploughing ahead with bilateral talks, despite objections from Ukraine, is intended to send a “might is right” message that Russia and the US are the deciders in ending the conflict and everyone else – from Kyiv to London and Paris, Berlin and Warsaw – are merely bystanders.
The rare-earth mineral demand from the US – that Ukraine should pay by forfeiting a huge chunk of revenue from its precious natural resources for what it has received in weapons supplies from the US – was a “you what?” jaw-dropper moment. But it was one intended to underline that security and mercenary dealings will be intertwined. The Russians, not coincidentally, sent their head of the sovereign wealth fund to Saudi Arabia.
This does not have to be accepted at face value. The challenge now for Europe is to find ways to support Ukraine and figure out a fast fix for lagging defence spending and do its own “art of the deal”. That is likely to end up with Ukraine buying more expensive modern arms and technology from the US to protect itself against a threat of Russia, while the US administration revives big-ticket business deals with Moscow and its proxies, including Hungary and Serbia. Paradoxes will not be in short supply.
There is, however, a degree of realpolitik in all of this which will need to be accepted. I have covered many of the Russia-US summits towards the end of the Cold War, from the disarmament talks which denuded Ukraine of its nuclear weapons capability, to the Yeltsin-Clinton summit in Vancouver, where the US scrambled to shore up a plainly incapacitated Boris Yeltsin in order to salvage economic reforms. That failed, creating an unaccountable oligarch class and eventually helped bring Putin on the path to power. Now a long arc of estrangement is bending back towards a bilateral relationship, which means that the US is likely to put its dealings with Moscow ahead of affinity for its democratic allies.
There are similarities underlying the vastness of the countries and their oil and mineral wealth, as well as the federal structure of their states. The USSR remains Putin’s model of the way that Russia should dominate its neighbours and is the foundation of his lack of respect for the independence aspirations of Ukraine.
Fundamentally, the Kremlin leader regards the Baltic states’ autonomy as an accidental loss at the end of the Cold War too. This does not end with Ukraine, because it is at heart about a grand reset between Washington and Moscow, a gamble which will define Trump’s second term in power.
It may not go to plan or go well at all. But the wake-up call for Europe and the UK is that this week, the reset began.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor of POLITICO and host of the Power Play interview podcast.
www.cfr.org 
