The emphasis President Trump is placing on North Atlantic Treaty members pulling their own weight in the alliance and in bringing the Ukraine war to an early end with a reasonable compromise that does not completely humiliate Russia, but does establish Ukraine firmly as a legitimate sovereign state with adequate security guarantees in slightly diminished borders is all part of a larger plan. 

Russia is no longer a threat to America or to the West. The only threat it poses would be if it made itself a resources supplier to Communist China and abdicated Russia’s 800 years standing as an independent state dominant in its part of Eurasia and took on a new role of allowing surplus Chinese population to extract resources from Siberia for a royalty paid to the Kremlin. 

This would be a demotion of Russia that would be insufferable to the imperishable spirit of unconquerable Holy Mother Russia, but it would be a quick fix for the rather unsuccessful Putin regime. More dangerously, it would be very empowering to China, which has never had an abundance of its own resources, though it has intermittently been a great regional power for 3,000 years.

Russia has always held out for itself a more exalted and exceptional destination than this, and there is little doubt that the United States could lead a successful enticement of Russia to continue as one of the world’s major powers, but any such endeavor must begin by ending the Ukraine War in a way that does not forfeit the largest single ingredient of the West’s Cold War victory by giving that strategically vital jurisdiction back to Moscow and inciting the inference that the Western Alliance since the end of the Cold War has become a paper tiger. 

The statements of indifference of many American commentators about what happens in Ukraine are irresponsible, and the failure to recognize the damage that is being done to Russia’s credibility as a Great Power at accost to America of no lives and only six percent of the defense budget is mistaken and immature strategic analysis.

From the American strategic perspective, there is no longer any serious threat to Western Europe, but there is a threat in the Far East from the People’s Republic of China. When the great strategic threat to the United States and the West came from Nazi Germany, the United States constructed close alliances with the British Empire and the Soviet Union, which were already at war with Germany before the United States was.

When a dangerous strategic threat to the West quickly arose after World War II from the Soviet Union, the United States launched the Marshall plan to accelerate the return of prosperity in Western Europe and defeat the communists politically in those countries and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to assure collective defense for the West and a strategy of containment against the Soviet Union. 

The USSR disintegrated, (without a shot being exchanged between the Soviet Union and NATO),  because the USSR was unable to match the military investment of the United States and was in danger of losing its deterrent capacity to President Reagan’s anti-missile defense system. After a brief hiatus, a new and self-assertively over-confident threat arose from China. In these changed circumstances, Europe is not a useful ally since it has few interests in the Far East and little ability to project such influence as it possesses to so distant a theater.

 President Franklin D. Roosevelt ended American isolationism because he recognized that if there were not an American presence in Western Europe and in the Far East, the entire Eurasian land mass could settle into the hands of enemies of democracy and the future of democracy and the safety of the Americas would be at risk every generation. 

There is no such threat in Europe now, and the proven strategy for dealing with powers that do challenge America, without recourse to war, is the imposition of a containment strategy. The original, applied to the Soviet Union, was devised by the military and strategic team bequeathed by Roosevelt to President Truman: George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, and a few others.

A Chinese version of this is already well on the way to assembly, and associated in this effort are Japan, India, South Korea, Australia, Philippines, Indonesia, and perhaps Vietnam, and depending on Beijing’s conduct, the Republic of China on Taiwan. The final large piece of this puzzle to be inserted is Russia. There is absolutely no historical conviviality between Russia and China and they are natural rivals in the great Eurasian landmass. 

This is why the recent fretful comments in Germany and elsewhere about America’s desertion of its NATO allies are unfounded. Western Europe is not facing any serious threat and is entirely capable of responding to it with a suitable increase in its own defense commitments. And it retains its alliance with America and Canada (which has pledged to raise its game militarily).               

Russia could, with suitable encouragement, but without sacrificing Western principles or interests, become associated with the containment of China. Europe is not a threat to Russia, but China could be. If Russia stopped treacherously trying to retrieve lost elements of its former conquests in Europe and focused on Asia, it would rejoin the ranks of respectable Great Powers for the first time since 1917, apart from when it was in a death struggle with its former Nazi ally in World War II. 

Moscow would find more fertile ground for its ambitions in its former Asian Republics and adjoining territory. Russia would also find association with the West immeasurably more enriching than being a semi-vassal of Beijing. Mr. Trump is on the right track and all this nonsense about him deserting democracy for despotism is already subsiding.