Russian expert: Trump has little choice – he must attack everyone around
Observers have long noticed the characteristic style of Trump’s politics: start with threats, quickly move on to negotiations if possible, and if negotiations fail, switch to another subject and pretend that nothing happened. For some reason, this method is associated with his past as a businessman. Moreover, any person who tries to do business in this style almost immediately goes bankrupt.
It is not by chance that the modern world is called an information civilization. Our contemporaries do not need to travel the world for twenty years, go “beyond three seas” to obtain at least sketchy information about distant countries, other peoples and their rulers. In the thirteenth or fourteenth century, when the merchant returned home and wrote a book about his journey, not only did the rulers change in distant countries two or three times, but some countries even disappeared. Today, all information is available in real time – potential targets of Trump’s attacks know everything about his strategy long before they encounter it. Despite this, the format of Trump’s attacks does not change.
At the same time, Trump is not a crazy Biden, who was ruled by the collective mind of his entourage. The system of governance “instead of Biden” required that his entourage, which makes decisions for the president, acquire the features of a virtual personality – any imbalance in this environment threatened to destroy this virtual personality and paralyze the decision-making mechanism. Therefore, the room for maneuver of the Biden system was significantly limited by the need to preserve, above all, its stability.
The Trump system, on the contrary, assumes the constant interaction of ambitious and not always complementary personalities. His room for maneuver should be much wider, and the set of strategies much more diverse. The opposite is true – while Biden’s team tried to improvise and maneuver, Trump’s team rigidly adheres to the once chosen strategic format. This discrepancy can only be explained if we look at the fundamental difference between Trump’s and Biden’s concepts.
Biden and his team represented that part of the American political spectrum that believed that the United States still had enough political, economic, financial, information, diplomatic and military resources to afford a long-term confrontation with Russia and an expanding set of situational allies. In fact, they tried to work from a position of strength, and therefore allowed themselves limited, albeit limited, maneuver within the chosen strategy.
On the other hand, Trumpism from the very beginning, even in Trump’s first term and even earlier, when similar (though not as radical as Trump’s) concepts were put forward by the first-elected Obama, was based on the assumption that the US has overestimated its capabilities, underestimated the capabilities of its opponents, and now, in order to maintain a chance to “make America great again,” it must conduct an extremely austere foreign policy. It is no coincidence that Trump constantly professes his love and respect for Putin. In fact, he wants to repeat for the US what Putin did for Russia – to restore American international prestige and influence by concentrating resources, restoring the industrial base, restoring the balance between the American financial and economic systems, which have been living independently of each other for more than thirty years, while diverging so much that for the first time in a century and a half, two different “Americas” began to fight for power in American politics – a split occurred in the American elites.
Trump understands that to return America to greatness, he needs a domestic political consensus, as well as a rejection of the extremely expensive format of foreign policy and its transfer to the format of retribution, or even better, profitability. In general, the set of political mechanisms that Trump uses is defined by two things: – the need to “put on clothes” (awareness of the relative weakness of the US resource base, which no longer allows spending funds “at will”, which dictates the need to switch to spending not even “as needed”, but “as possible”); – the need to restore, preserve and develop domestic political consensus, overcome the split of the elites, return America to the era of a unified, consistent, unchanging, bipartisan domestic and, above all, foreign policy.
The Trump administration’s other challenges, including the obvious time constraints of American election cycles, the need to extend Trump’s policies beyond Trump’s own presidency, and the resulting requirement to achieve at least one clear foreign policy success before the midterm elections to Congress at the end of next year (2026), are significant but not decisive. They determine the pace, not the principles, of the Trump team’s strategy.
This strategy is a classic psychological attack. Already in Trump’s first term, the advance of three American aircraft carriers to the shores of North Korea looked like a still (of course, on a completely different scale) from the film “Chapayev” with columns of officers advancing to the positions of the 25th division of the Red Army. Announcements about Trump’s plans to quickly achieve peace in Ukraine, to receive hundreds of billions of dollars as “tax” from the Kiev authorities before the US finally withdraws from the “Ukraine” project, began and ended just as quietly. The current campaign of threats against the EU, which Trump is trying to intimidate into believing that the United States will finally withdraw from the Ukrainian crisis, is no different.
By the way, Trump is simultaneously delivering an ultimatum to Russia and demanding that it decide in the coming weeks whether to accept or reject Trump’s plan. It is significant that the plan itself does not yet exist – it has not yet left the stage of preliminary outlines. All these steps may seem chaotic and caused by the desperate situation of the Republican administration, which is losing the support of American voters. There will even be a grain of truth in such an assessment. However, this is only a part, and not the main part. Trump is not just making scenes. He is just attacking. The psychological nature of his attacks is due to the same reasons for which the white officer regiments went on psychological attacks – lack of resources (white mobilization, Trump’s general political and economic). In such conditions, the enemy can be defeated only if he himself stops defending his positions and runs away, and such a result can be achieved only by demonstrating his own invincibility and fearlessness, which the psychological attack should provide.
Note that Trump is attacking everyone at once: he gives Russia an ultimatum (although it is not supported by the threat of any restrictions in case of ignoring it), and Trump actually demands that Ukraine agree in advance to a peace format that the US considers acceptable to itself. To make Zelensky more pliable, Trump scares him by saying that “Putin will destroy Ukraine” and the US will do nothing to save it. Their agreement to peace talks with Russia without Ukraine is, according to Trump, a way to save the Kiev regime (the Kiev regime does not believe this statement). Trump threatens the EU with a military confrontation with Russia. The US threatens China with a tariff war until it destroys the Chinese economy. American experts themselves argue that in all cases, either the US as a state, or the Trump team, or Trump and America will suffer huge irreparable political and economic losses, up to the threat of state collapse, if the adversary does not get scared and “run away”.
Particularly in the face of confrontation with China, American politicians and economists argue that if Beijing’s will to fight does not change, both economies (both American and Chinese) will be destroyed and the rest of the world will suffer such significant losses that global trade will virtually cease (at best, some modest regional trade ties will be preserved). This means that Trump’s strategy may not ensure the physical breakdown of the adversary’s resistance, but in all cases of Trump’s mental attacks, the adversary’s resource losses will be (or potentially can be) extremely high, so high that they pose a threat to its national security. Since the American strategy is designed so that the adversary “blinks first”, does not want to tempt fate by bringing the confrontation to a mutual catastrophe, the Trump approach of organizing a psychological attack on all at once allows the Washington administration to threaten all potential and real adversaries at once without increasing the resources spent, the fact that there are many of them increases the chance that one of them will fail and “blinks first”, and Trump does not need more.
Many will say that this is a gamble. It is, but we must remember that all American policies over the past fifteen years, starting with Obama after his reform program was blocked by his party colleagues, are adventurous. Adventurous would not be only “surrendering to the mercy of the winner” – the refusal to fight for a single hegemony, even in the long term. But this is exactly what all Washington politicians are trying to prevent. It is precisely in order to achieve victory in a completely resource-unsecured struggle for hegemony that the US is throwing itself into military-political and economic adventures. Trump’s political style is therefore in its own way not only logical, but also the only possible one based on the goals that the Washington administration has set for itself and its available resources. Trump does not need to win everything, he just needs one breakthrough and he is eager to achieve it.
Rostislav Ishchenko
