ON Friday, February 28, when U.S. President Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office of the White House with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump mused: ‘I hope I will be remembered as a peacemaker’.
As Trump talked about the necessity to make a deal between Russia and Ukraine, Zelenskyy fidgeted. The two men, representing two different sets of interests, did not see eye-to-eye either on the nature of this war or on the possibility of concluding it. Zelenskyy sees Russia as the out-and-out aggressor, and he feels that Russian President Vladimir Putin will never agree to a stable peace. In other words, Zelenskyy, who governs a country that borders Russia, does not believe that there can ever be peace with Russia if Putin is in power or as long as Russia does not cower in fear from the possibility of a NATO attack on Russia. Trump, on the other hand, believes that Russia was pushed into the war by a destabilising force that includes NATO, and that could have given Putin the security guarantees that he wanted long before it came time for the Russian tanks to invade Ukraine. In Trump’s understanding of the situation, Putin can be given some security guarantees as a concession to pull Russian troops out of all of Ukraine except Crimea and the Donbass region, where there seems to be already majorities of Russian-speaking people who would prefer to live in Russia than in an anti-Russian Ukraine. The gap between the two men interrupted their conversation before the cameras, as Zelenskyy tried to interrupt Trump on several occasions to challenge the U.S. President’s view of the situation.
It was after about forty minutes of jostling that U.S. Vice President JD Vance entered the conversation and dismissed Zelenskyy for campaigning with the Democrats in the 2024 election, for not being grateful to Trump, and for being disrespectful to the U.S. population for what it has given Ukraine over these past three years. That effectively ended the conversation. There was no deal. Trump repeated in an agitated voice that Zelenskyy was ‘gambling with World War Three’.
The noise after this conversation was about the future of the war in Ukraine and whether Ukraine’s European allies will be able to provide the support that the United States is likely to withdraw (this will include the Starlink satellites for the telecommunications that had been provided by Elon Musk in the first month of the war).
But the real sound that resonated in the room, and which Trump has repeated on several occasions, is that he is a peacemaker. This claim should not be dismissed abruptly. It needs to be dismissed properly. A misreading of Trump’s manoeuvres in Ukraine and his planned cuts to the U.S. military could be interpreted—and has been interpreted—as the surface elements of peace-making. But this is a superficial reading. U.S. imperialism is alive and well. That is unchanged. What is changed is the strategy that it will follow in the period ahead. To understand this, let us look at two aspects—Ukraine and military cuts—sequentially.
THE BATTLE FOR EURASIA
Trump’s interest in Ukraine is not to bring peace to that country, which has been dismembered, but to resolve the tensions between the U.S. and Russia. Trump sees Russia as a natural ally of the West. This has to do with his being embedded in a White Christian Conservative worldview that considers liberalism, wokeism, and communism as the threats to Western Civilisation. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in late January 2025, the close ally of Trump and friend of Elon Musk, Argentina’s president Javier Milei described the ‘mental virus of woke ideology’ as ‘an epidemic which is destroying the foundations of Western civilisation’. Then he rattled off ‘all heads of the same monster’: ‘feminism, equality, gender ideology, climate change, abortion, and immigration’. The ‘West is in danger’, Milei said, and the ‘cancer of woke ideology’ must be destroyed. This outlook—validated by Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon—has a hold in Russia, where there is an ‘anti-woke’ crusade pushed by the right-wing to suggest that Russian values are better than the ‘satanic’ values of the West (a word used by Putin in September 2022 in a speech from the Kremlin). A section of the Russian bourgeoisie would like to see Putin make peace with the United States to lessen the sanctions on them, and they would not be averse to a reversal of the close ties between Russia and China (the trade imbalance between the two favours China, which has created grumbles amongst the Russian financiers).
But even on this point of shared values, there are great divisions in Putin’s ruling bloc, many of whose most important voices (such as that of Sergei Lavrov) counsel against a full rapprochement with the West if this means a devaluation of the ‘no limits’ partnership signed with China in 2022. For Lavrov and other realists, the ideological connections of anti-woke are weak and, as Putin knows very well from being the understudy of Boris Yeltsin and watching now how the U.S. is disposing of Zelenskyy, no alliance with the imperialist bloc is either permanent or mutually beneficial (the Trump agenda is entirely about getting the best deal for the United States, which means that even rhetorically there is no question of what the Chinese call a ‘win-win’ deal). Furthermore, even Trump does not seem totally committed to a pivot to Russia given his frequent statements that it is not the U.S. that should be paying for the war in Ukraine but the Europeans. If the Europeans can get some money together, which is unlikely, and if they can cobble together a proper army, which is even more unlikely, then Trump would sit back and watch them get their own conscripts caught in a futile war somewhere in small towns in eastern and northern Ukraine. It is not ending the war itself that drives Trump’s realist agenda but ending U.S. support for the war.
Trump wants to end that U.S. support for Ukraine not to bring peace in the world but to consolidate U.S. assets to both rebuild the industrial base in the United States and redeploy U.S. military assets to harass and intimidate China.
REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
Trump’s military team, led by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, has said that they will cut spending for the military by 8 per cent. However, this is not a cut for all of the military activities of the U.S. They want to cut this from the Pentagon’s bureaucracy and move it to the ‘Iron Dome’ defence project as part of the U.S. government’s lethal counterforce nuclear strategy (in other words, no commitment to a ‘no first strike’ policy). Rather than a defence cut, the overall defence budget of the U.S. will rise by the end of this second Trump presidency. This is not a peacemaker’s military, but an attempt to create a more dangerous U.S. military as far as the world is concerned.
When Donald Rumsfeld sat before the U.S. Senate for his confirmation to be George W. Bush’s Defence Secretary in early 2001, he spoke at length about the need for a ‘revolution in military affairs’. What Rumsfeld meant was that the military is no longer going to fight the kind of wars seen in Vietnam or in Korea but will have to become more agile and use advanced technology to be more lethal and therefore efficient in the use of force. The Rumsfeld Doctrine, as this revolution came to be known, was to have three elements: heavy reliance on air attacks, including missiles, which would destroy the enemies’ armed forces and allow small special forces units to operate without fear of detection and with the use of advanced technology in communications and in ISTAR (intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance). Rumsfeld’s doctrine did not work in Iraq, where the airstrikes failed to destroy the Iraqi leadership and to break the will of the military (which regrouped and reappeared as a guerrilla force) and where the small bands of special forces worked in conditions of confusion and danger from IEDs (improvised explosive devices).
But Rumsfeld was ahead of his time. Since 2000, the technology of the battlefield has improved dramatically, with drones providing both the ability to give air cover and ISTAR. The importance of drones is why Zelenskyy interrupted Trump early into the press conference to say that Ukraine has developed an indigenous drone that his country would license for the U.S. military. Trump’s Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that his approach to reform of the military is not to merely cut the budget but to improve ‘lethality, warfighting, and readiness’. The military will lose money only on those areas that are wasteful and do not conform to the revolution in military affairs. But otherwise, the U.S. military is going to be strengthened. In the Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s government, the section on the military was written by former Trump military official Christopher Miller. Miller writes that the Army can be increased by 50,000 troops, that the Navy retain its amphibious warships, and that the Airforce increase its F-35A procurement. The cuts are not exaggerated but remain at the level of better use of the personnel and ending all the diversity mandates on the armed forces. Otherwise, there is nothing in Project 2025 that contradicts the idea of a revolution in military affairs that would make the U.S. military, if the reforms succeed, more lethal—to use Hegseth’s word—rather than more peaceful (the army of a peacemaker).
Trump is hard to read. If you take him at his word, you will be befuddled. Outrage at this or that statement by Trump or his MAGA team is a distraction. More fundamental analysis of the dynamic set in motion by the Trump 2 presidency is necessary. Trump is not a peacemaker. Palestinians know that he is an annexationist and warmonger. Trump is seeking new options to strengthen the United States in its bid to remain the most powerful country in the world.