Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists M. Gessen and Bret Stephens about Donald Trump’s first month in office and his use of power on the world stage.
Patrick Healy: Bret, Masha, you’ve both written powerfully for years about Russia and the West, totalitarian states, Vladimir Putin, the Ukraine war and Donald Trump’s use of power. We are one month into Trump’s presidency, and the West seems at the beginning of a potentially significant realignment: Trump is starting to align with Putin over Europe; Trump is repeating Putin’s lies about Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky being a “dictator” who caused the war; and foreign allies and Republican leaders seem weak or pliant in the face of Trump. What is all of this adding up to? Are we seeing a realignment among the United States, Russia and Europe?
Bret Stephens: It might be premature to draw firm conclusions. But, for now, I’d say the word “realignment” feels much too weak. “Reversal” comes closer to the mark. A reversal in our vision of who counts as a democrat or a dictator. A reversal in who counts as a friend or an adversary. A reversal in our approach to the domestic politics of allied states. A reversal in the overall direction of our post-World War foreign policy, which was about supporting embattled or enfeebled allies, promoting economic liberalization, embracing democracy (or at least non-totalitarian states), favoring open societies over closed ones. It’s a world turned upside down.
Another thing: It feels that Trump is seeking to turn America into a predatory state. The casual demand that Denmark relinquish Greenland. The not-so-casual demand that Ukraine hand over much of its mineral wealth. The surly threats to Panama, whose president is as pro-American as they come. The deal to return desperate Venezuelan refugees to the socialist dictatorship from which they fled in hunger and desperation. The joking (or not) about turning Canada into a 51st state; the unilateral and unprovoked trampling of trade agreements, like the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement he negotiated in his first term as a replacement for NAFTA.
There are, in fact, spots where I find myself agreeing with the administration, particularly its tough stance on Hamas and Iran. I don’t want to lose sight of that. But, on the whole, I find myself returning to the same word: nauseating. In fact, it’s actually worse: emetic.
Healy: What you’re describing, Bret, I’ve come to think of as a new Trump doctrine: Coercive Conquest. And what’s extraordinary is that we now have a president of the United States who subscribes to the same worldview of coercive conquest as the president of Russia. Are you surprised that Trump is going in this predatory direction?
Stephens: Surprised? The reason I voted for Kamala Harris, despite my millions of reservations about her competence and ideas, is that I feared something like this. Still, it is breathtaking to experience these policy shifts in real time. Also astonishing, in that some of these positions will be politically ruinous for Trump if he really follows through with them. If, for instance, Zelensky is deposed and a Russian puppet government in the mold of Belarus is somehow installed in Kyiv, it will be as politically disastrous for Trump as the swift fall of Kabul was for Joe Biden. To use Trump’s preferred epithet, it will look very weak.
M. Gessen: Putin has been saying for years, in many different ways, that what he really wants — and feels he deserves — is to return to 1945, when the leaders of the U.S.S.R., the U.S. and Britain sat down in Yalta and carved up Europe. This idea is fundamental to Putin’s understanding of the world as it should be. He feels that Russia was cheated out of what it had won, fair and square, both in terms of land and in terms of influence. The war he unleashed in Ukraine was — and he made this explicit — had as its goal the recapture of power and land in accordance with this vision.
So it’s not about Ukraine, has never been about Ukraine. And what he is proposing to Trump as they start talking — we are seeing this in the readouts of their first, 1.5-hour phone conversation, and in the hypercharged tweets of Aleksandr Dugin, Putin’s favorite so-called intellectual — is to sit down and carve up the world.
Healy: That’s how Trump thinks, too. The world is there for the carving.
Gessen: I think that Trump is likely to find this irresistible. From Trump’s own newly expansionist rhetoric — his demands for Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, Ukraine’s natural resources — we can see that he is groping for this same sort of thing. So, yes, for these reasons and others, even though it’s only been a month, I think we are clearly looking at a realignment of the postwar order. I am saying this based on what Trump and Putin (and Pete Hegseth, and Putin’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and Dugin) have been saying. We need to listen to them.
Healy: You both are getting at Trump’s core. He is a transaction-oriented empire-builder who wants to keep other people over a barrel. He sees America’s allies largely as moochers or rip-off artists that he needs to squeeze and get better deals from — all those mineral rights Bret referred to. Trump doesn’t operate based on shared values or historic relationships; he has a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, and thinks Americans elected him to get a better deal from other countries, not to get “shared values.” In this vein, I think Trump and Putin see Europe as something to plunder — Ukraine, Greenland, squeezing NATO for more money, pressing them to give up things in return for superpower benevolence.
Gessen: Patrick, I think you are right. And I also think that Trump’s views, or his sense of himself, have evolved over the last eight years. During his first term, you could really tell that he felt like an accidental president. This time, he seems to feel genuinely chosen. There is a new messianic quality to his behavior. He is not just making deals so he can accumulate wealth while he is president, as he did during his first term. It seems to me that he is now planning to rule for a long time (forever, in his imagination?), and he wants to wield genuine power in the world.
Stephens: I agree with Masha. The creepiest line in his inaugural speech was, “I was saved by God to make America great again.” There’s a degree of messianism there that befits an Iranian ayatollah or a medieval crusader, not an American president.
I’m also not sure the word “transactional” quite fits the president. The art of a great deal, to adapt a phrase, is that both sides are supposed to come out as winners. But Trump’s “deals” are all of the “I win, you lose” variety. His goal is less to score strategic or tactical victories and more to humiliate others, particularly those he feels have slighted him or paid insufficient obeisance. And the attitude pervades the administration. The ill grace JD Vance showed in refusing even to meet with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, was flabbergasting but very much on-brand. It’s the attitude of a dismissive viceroy, not a gracious ally.
Healy: Bret, I think Trump takes a very expansive view of the word “deal” — he wants a deal for himself and concessions from everyone else. I’d also add that Trump’s favorite verb these days is “take” — he’s going to “take” Gaza, and I don’t doubt that in his God-delivered, divine-right-of-kings mentality, he imagines he will take Greenland and the Panama Canal. Less sure about Canada.
Stephens: Maybe someone alerted him to the inconvenient fact that if we swallowed Canada, no Republican would be elected president for the next 100 or so years.
Healy: Germany is holding elections this weekend, and France in the next couple of years. Is Europe sliding inexorably toward the Alternative for Germany party wielding more power in Germany, Marine Le Pen taking power in France, Putin projecting power across Europe, and Trump destabilizing power in NATO?
Gessen: I don’t think we can predict the behavior of European voters; this moment is so volatile that, really, anything could happen. But we can say what we know.
Trump’s America has told Europe that it can no longer count on the United States for security. Yes, Hegseth walked those comments back a little, but the message remains: The security guarantees that were there for 80 years have been withdrawn.
Meanwhile, the threat to Europe is not theoretical: For the first time since World War II, European states are facing an aggressive, expansionist power that is actively waging war. For the last three years, Ukraine has served as the buffer between the European Union and Russia. This is a horrible way to think about the Russian-Ukrainian war, but it’s the way the Western alliance has treated it, supplying just enough aid to Ukraine to ensure that the buffer zone remained. The bulk of this aid, provided by the United States, is now under threat, and this means that E.U. states are facing a direct military threat.
The question is, is there enough political will in Europe to unite and mobilize to meet this threat?
Stephens: There’s no question that European politics have taken a very perilous turn, in part because of the threat of Putin, but in even larger part because of the threat of Putinism represented by the parties of the far left and far right: Jean-Luc Melenchon and Marine Le Pen in France, Sahra Wagenknecht and Björn Höcke in Germany. One of the things most of these parties have in common is an abiding strain of anti-Americanism, which makes Vance’s outreach to the AfD not just obscene but self-defeating.
Healy: Bret, you spoke for a lot of readers when you called Vance’s comments a disgrace and raised the specter of the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement with Hitler.
Stephens: That said, it’s worth adding that Vance wasn’t entirely wrong in his Munich speech. Europe does face a threat from within, though it’s not really the one he pointed to.
Center-right and center-left parties have allowed their economies to stagnate and decline. In Germany, Angela Merkel’s immigration policies, especially during the 2015 migration crisis, will be remembered as a historic mistake that did too little to assimilate migrants (one of whom went on a terrorist rampage during the Munich Security Conference) and too much to energize the extreme right.
Overregulation by the European Union stifles innovation and explains why there is no European peer to Apple, Microsoft, Meta or Oracle. Radical Islamism of the sort that generated the 2015 Bataclan massacre in Paris remains a major menace that too many centrist European leaders are too timid to address head on. Western Europe’s declining fertility rates mean declining economic dynamism, unsustainable public pension systems, and ever more bitter political fights over an ever-diminishing fiscal pie. And consistent European underspending on defense, even in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, is something American taxpayers shouldn’t tolerate.
That would have been a good, bracing, impactful speech. Instead, Vance held hands with fascists and peed on the carpet.
Healy: You’re identifying something key to how Trump and Vance see Europe. They see a collection of weak, failed or sclerotic economies; they see failed open borders; they again see weakness (another favorite word of Trump’s) stemming from the lack of nationalism and national identity that they are trying to foster in America and that the nature of the E.U. — one currency, etc. — saps; they see countries not spending enough on their own defense and instead behaving like welfare-state clients of the U.S. All of which sets the stage for Europe being a weak target that Trump sees for the taking. Am I overstating things?
Stephens: Europe may be the world’s greatest geopolitical risk: Its weakness is provocative. Like Lebanon in the 1960s, it has become a garden without walls, with orchards to plunder. The tragedy is that the Trumpian diagnosis of what ails Europe isn’t wholly wrong. It’s the prescription that’s frightening.
Gessen: I don’t think you are overstating things, Patrick. I would also add that Trump and Vance see a crisis in Europe that challenges the European Union’s foundational values — the two of them have undisguised contempt for the concepts of cooperation, openness, human rights, supranational legal mechanisms. The collapse of Europe would be a sort of proof of concept for Trumpism.
Healy: After Russia invaded Ukraine, Senator John Thune said Ukrainians could not survive the war without military aid from the U.S. and Europe. Now Trump is calling Zelensky a dictator and treating Ukraine like the problem. Thune today is the Senate majority leader, and his pushback amounted to, “The president speaks for himself.” Will Republicans capitulate to Trump on Ukraine? And if they do, what won’t Republicans capitulate on?
Gessen: I fear that there is no limit to what Republicans will let Trump do. But I am not sure it’s right to frame the issue as Trump’s withdrawal of the commitment to helping Ukraine.
For one thing, the consensus on Ukrainian aid had been teetering for the last year of the Biden presidency. For another — and this, to me, is a much more important point — that commitment has always been weaker than it needed to be. The United States and NATO have always had the military and financial power not just to help Ukraine defend itself, to slow Russia’s advance, but to end this war. And they have consistently chosen not to do this. The Biden administration advanced a myth of unprecedented military aid to Ukraine, but the aid to Ukraine has been minuscule compared to American spending on conflicts this country has actually been involved in. It has always been insufficient to stop the carnage, the destruction of Ukrainian cities and the murder and torture of Ukrainian people. And now even this insufficient aid is likely to vanish.
Stephens: Masha is entirely correct here, and history will not look kindly on the way Biden consistently dragged his feet on the delivery of key weapons systems, nor on his overall concept of giving Kyiv enough assistance so that it wouldn’t lose but not enough so that it could possibly win. Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken and the rest of the Biden foreign policy team have a lot to atone for.
But that criticism ought to lead Republicans to conclude that the right way to help Ukraine — and speed the war to the most advantageous conclusion — is to double down on our military support for Ukraine (and our financial punishment of Russia) as a means of gaining leverage over Moscow in negotiations to end the war. Instead, they seem to be following Trump down the road of pre-emptive capitulation and dishonorable surrender.
Healy: What can the Democrats do constructively here? They are looking like the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t party these days, seeing little upside on defending any sort of status quo but not empowered or visionary (or trusted enough by voters) to persuasively articulate an alternative path forward.
Gessen: It’s very hard for me to imagine the Democrats doing anything at this point. But we do know what having the courage of your convictions looks like: It looks like Volodymyr Zelensky standing up to Donald Trump. His country is facing an existential threat. He personally is Putin’s No. 1 target. And yet he is able to say no to Trump and to propose a way forward for Europe.
Stephens: I’ve been saying for a while that, if ever there was a time for Democrats to reclaim the legacy of Harry Truman or John F. Kennedy, this is the moment. At the very least, begin to articulate the critique so that the American people clearly understand the stakes: A Russia that emerges from the war in Ukraine looking like a winner will not allow the U.S. to concentrate our energies on East Asia; it will merely embolden China to seize Taiwan at the first opportunity.
It will also be good news for Moscow’s friends in Tehran, who will feel vindicated in their conviction that if the United States can bring itself to betray its allies in Saigon, Kabul and Kyiv, it will eventually betray its partners in Jerusalem.
Healy: Bret, reading your Conversation with Gail Collins on Monday and your column on Tuesday, I came away thinking that we have a morally corrosive presidency that is treating American values and our post-World War II understanding of evil as, now, purely transactional and morally relative matters. Are we already living in an America that’s different from the America we knew, and we haven’t woken up to that fact yet?
Stephens: Again, I’m a little reluctant to draw hard-and-fast conclusions after a month of misgovernance. And I have an abiding faith in America’s ability to recover its good sense and innate decencies — eventually.
But we’ve never seen anything like this: an American president who sees more to like in a Russian dictator who poisons his opponents and sends missiles into civilian apartment buildings than he does in the people being poisoned and bombarded. We are transmogrifying from a Great Power — with “great” implying core moral values and nobility of purpose — into a Big Power, relying on nothing but size to impose our will. In the long term, it will greatly damage our actual power in world affairs, which historically has had as much to do with our ability to inspire and attract as it does with our ability to compel.
Gessen: We know we are in uncharted waters when Bret and I seem to agree on every point. And I agree with Bret here, too. I would add only that it’s not over until it’s over. This country is not well equipped to resist Trump’s attack: We are atomized and polarized, we no longer have local news media and, as a result, we have little local political life. At the same time, we do have a free press. We have probably the wealthiest civil society in the world. We have, still, a largely independent judiciary, and a robust legal culture. We don’t have to give in to autocracy.
Healy: Masha, I’ve been thinking a lot about your two recent columns — about the idea of “anticipatory obedience” toward Trump and other fear-based leaders and why people give way or capitulate, and about the idea of “preposterous” ideas used by totalitarian regimes to overwhelm societies. How is Trump already changing the nature of our country?
Gessen: It is a classic autocratic bargain: quality of life in exchange for the sense of belonging to something great. Trump’s tariffs, his gutting of federal agencies, the destruction of what social safety net we have had in this country — all of these moves will have dire consequences for many Americans, including many of those who voted for Trump precisely because they are struggling. Their reward for sacrificing ever more of their sense of material security? Being part of Trump’s new empire.
It is a crazy bargain, but historically many societies have accepted it. A new poll out of Russia shows that, for the first time, a majority of people say that they would rather live in a “great” Russia that is powerful on the world stage than enjoy a higher standard of living.
Stephens: Like Masha, I’m mindful that one of the ways in which Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela were able to consolidate their autocracies was by presiding (early in their tenures) over a stretch of strong economic growth, usually fueled by high commodity prices, which later allowed them to gut democratic institutions and rule by force even when their economies crumbled. I don’t think that’s going to be the fate of American democracy, just because our institutions are much more deeply anchored in history and habit. We are not the Weimar Republic or post-Soviet Russia — a fragile flower on rocky soil. But we need to take care.
What worries me especially is the absorption of Republican politicians and whatever remains of conservative intelligentsia into the cult of Trump. There have been some honorable and notable exceptions, notably The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, but the prevailing attitude in conservative circles is that everything Trump does is right for the mere fact that he does it. And I don’t think democracy can endure in the long term if it doesn’t have a healthy conservative movement that cares more about principles than personalities.
Healy: I hear from a lot of our readers asking what can they do if they oppose or detest the direction Trump is taking America. Masha, you may have asked yourself a similar question when you lived in Russia under Putin. And Bret, I’m mindful that you’ve cautioned against seeing everything Trump does as stupid, evil or wrong. But I wonder what each of you would say to readers who are looking at the actions and remarks by Trump and Vance about Ukraine, Putin and Europe and asking, am I powerless to do anything about this?
Stephens: Well, imperialist-neocon-Zionist monster that I am, I’m a great fan of Rudyard Kipling, especially his poem “If”: “If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs ….”
My advice is: Keep your head!
To my fellow conservatives, don’t just close your eyes or try to rationalize everything Trump does as part of some brilliant scheme, or some cunning troll, or something you’d rather not think too much about because you’d rather avoid drawing the obvious conclusions. He traduces traditional conservative moral values with his very being. And he traduces many of our political values with some of his harebrained or malevolent policies.
To my liberal friends, don’t give way to obsessive loathing or an inability to understand that Trump’s power (like that of all demagogues) comes not from the lies he tells, but rather from the half-truths: his ability to alight on genuine issues even when he has bad solutions. In the case of domestic politics, that applies especially to the excessive growth of government in recent years, the inability of the Biden administration to police the border, the obnoxiousness of parts of the cultural left, and the left-behindedness of too many Americans living on the margins of the knowledge economy. In foreign policy, it means the timid predictability of the last administration, which invited derision and aggressiveness by our adversaries. These are some of the problems Democrats failed to address, which explains the political hole they are in now.
Gessen: Keeping your head is a great start. And no easy task. You are right, Patrick, that all of this feels familiar to me from living in Russia — though Putin didn’t move at nearly the same speed as Trump is moving. We are so overwhelmed by the barrage of news, by the unimaginable becoming real, by new uncertainties in so many areas of life that we can barely think. And then there is the problem I’ve written about, which is that often giving in to the budding autocrat’s demands appears to be the rational, reasonable thing to do: to protect your business, to save your employees’ or your colleagues’ jobs, to continue providing a service, etc. That kind of obedience is exactly what gives the autocrat his power.
So for readers looking for advice, I would say, first, check this reasoning. Don’t obey in advance. And then, also, do something. Take a risk. Offer help to people who are under attack — at the moment it’s immigrants and trans people. Speak up. When the Trump regime asks for your cooperation in doing distasteful or illegal things, withhold it, even if you know that someone else will provide it.
We have seen examples of this kind of behavior: the seven federal prosecutors who resigned last week rather than carry out Trump’s bidding are one example; college presidents who have spoken up, like Wesleyan’s Michael Roth, are another.
Healy: Final question. You both lived and worked as journalists overseas, reporting and writing about other countries. If you were covering Washington as a foreign correspondent right now, what would you make of it?
Gessen: What an assignment this would be! The beauty of being a foreign correspondent is that, rather than cover news as it comes, often at the expense of the big picture, your job is to try to tell readers what is happening historically. So, if I were a foreign correspondent in Washington today, I would be writing about the destruction both of the American system of government and of the American myth. I would be writing about an unfolding disaster that illustrates the theory that democracy contains the tools of self-destruction, that democracy ends in dictatorship.
Stephens: Here I would differ from Masha. If I were a foreign correspondent, I’d get out of Washington as much as possible. I’d work harder to understand — without condescension or derision — the motivations of regular Trump voters. I’d cultivate sources on both sides of the political aisle. I’d look for countervailing points of data that run against the grain of some of the consensus reporting, especially when it comes to popular objects of liberal derision like Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. I’d cover a country, not just a capital.
Above all, I’d keep in mind the aphorism that “this, too, shall pass.” Because, eventually, it will.
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