The Ukraine war is like a Russian doll. A series of five increasingly complex geopolitical questions encases a solid core of historical conflict. That core issue is whether Ukraine should be independent of Russia or whether, as often in its history, it falls so far within Russia’s sphere of interest that it becomes a second Belarus, a province of President Vladimir Putin’s revived empire. The thwarting of Russia’s 2022 invasion has resolved this question in Ukraine’s favor.
The second layer of the doll is whether Ukraine’s postwar territory includes Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, and the eastern and southern regions that have been annexed by Russia since 2022. The third layer is the nature of Ukraine’s sovereignty: whether postwar Ukraine is free to pursue its own policies, especially on joining the European Union and NATO, or whether these must be decided over Ukraine’s head.
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That decision brings us to the fourth, pan-European layer, relations between Russia and the European states. The Europeans cannot defend themselves without American support, so this negotiation is encased in a fifth shell: relations between the United States and Russia.
Finally, we reach the sixth outer casing: the global map. The war in Ukraine is not just a proxy war in which the U.S. uses Ukraine to weaken Russia. It is a proxy war in which China uses Russia to weaken Europe and the U.S. To put a bow on it, the same dynamic recurs in the war between Israel and the Iranian-led axis.
How you understand American interests in Ukraine depends on whether you start from inside or outside the doll. The Biden administration started somewhere between the fourth layer (making sure Ukraine aligned westward in an American-run security system) and the fifth layer (in which breaking Russia was seen as an American interest). The Obama-Biden approach, updating and expanding post-Cold War policies and viewing European-Russian relations as a discrete theater, will fail because it no longer reflects global reality.
The Trump administration, however, starts from the sixth, outside layer. It sees the Ukraine war as a minor front in a radically altered global map. This reconceives the American interest. It might work, but it is not without risks.
It was in the American interest to support Ukraine after the February 2022 invasion. Since the stalemate that developed in the summer of 2022, however, the Biden administration’s strategy has damaged American interests. Adding Finland to NATO roughly doubled the length of NATO’s eastern frontier with Russia. Resupplying Ukraine drained money and weapons from budgets and arsenals. Excluding Russia from the SWIFT system and dollar-denominated exchanges pushed Russia into an open alliance with China and warned the world that the U.S. dollar is no longer a safe harbor.
The Trump administration is following the Kissinger playbook and trying to split Russia from China. The European economies, Germany especially, need cheap energy. They have never stopped importing Russian gas, and they will restore imports to pre-2022 levels as soon as they can. It is in the American interest that Russian energy is exported westward to Europe rather than eastward to China.
The Trump administration is correct in identifying China as the prime challenge. Therefore, shifting budgets and arsenals to Asia is an American interest. So is stabilizing relations with Russia rather than punishing it or even seeking its breakup, which would have uncontrollable security ramifications for Europe and Central Asia. So is integrating a shrinking Europe into a new, joined-up strategy for Western Asia.
This amounts to a major shift, effectively a new era in American foreign policy. The key recognitions driving it are little more than obvious. They will soon be received wisdom among Democrats, too. China is the priority. Europe matters much less now than it did in 1990. The U.S. cannot manage multi-theater conflict in a multipolar system. The Europeans must defend their own borders.
The risk is that as the Trump administration walks back its European priorities, Europe is exposed. The Europeans promise to rearm, but this will take years — assuming, that is, that they deliver at all. In the meantime, American withdrawal risks leaving Eastern Europe exposed to further Russian aggression. So, rebalancing NATO makes sense for the same reason that killing off NATO entirely would be a big mistake.
In the event of Russian aggression, the U.S. would have to decide whether, yet again, it saves Europe from the consequences of its own folly. This would be a choice between two kinds of disaster. Again, keeping NATO going is the only available stopgap.
Meanwhile, there remains only one way for the U.S. to avoid that choice between disasters and buy time for Europe to rearm: to reach an understanding with Russia. Putin understands that. He will raise his price accordingly. He may even demand an impossible price, to keep his options open.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.