Trump’s Pivot Toward Putin’s Russia Upends Generations of U.S. Policy

For more than a decade, the West has faced off against the East again in what was widely called a new cold war. But with President Trump back in office, America is giving the impression that it could be switching sides.

Even as American and Russian negotiators sat down together on Tuesday for the first time since Moscow’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago, Mr. Trump has signaled that he is willing to abandon America’s allies to make common cause with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

As far as Mr. Trump is concerned, Russia is not responsible for the war that has devastated its neighbor. Instead, he suggests that Ukraine is to blame for Russia’s invasion of it. To listen to Mr. Trump talk with reporters on Tuesday about the conflict was to hear a version of reality that would be unrecognizable on the ground in Ukraine and certainly would never have been heard from any other American president of either party.

In Mr. Trump’s telling, Ukrainian leaders were at fault for the war for not agreeing to surrender territory and therefore, he suggested, they do not deserve a seat at the table for the peace talks that he has just initiated with Mr. Putin. “You should have never started it,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Ukrainian leaders who, in fact, did not start it. “You could have made a deal.”

Speaking at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, he went on: “You have a leadership now that’s allowed a war to go on that should have never even happened.” By contrast, Mr. Trump uttered not one word of reproach for Mr. Putin or for Russia, which first invaded Ukraine in 2014, waged a low-intensity war against it through all four years of Mr. Trump’s first term and then invaded it in 2022 aiming to take over the whole country.

Mr. Trump is in the middle of executing one of the most jaw-dropping pivots in American foreign policy in generations, a 180-degree turn that will force friends and foes to recalibrate in fundamental ways. Ever since the end of World War II, a long parade of American presidents saw first the Soviet Union and then, after a brief and illusory interregnum, its successor Russia as a force to be wary of, at the very least. Mr. Trump gives every appearance of viewing it as a collaborator in future joint ventures.

He makes clear that the United States is done isolating Mr. Putin for his unprovoked aggression against a weaker neighbor and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people. Instead, Mr. Trump, who has always had a perplexing fondness for Mr. Putin, wants to readmit Russia to the international club and make it one of America’s top friends.

“It’s a disgraceful reversal of 80 years of American foreign policy,” said Kori Schake, who is the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and was a national security aide to President George W. Bush.

“Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. refused to legitimate Soviet conquest of the Baltic States, and it gave heart to people fighting for their freedom,” she continued. “Now we’re legitimating aggression to create spheres of influence. Every American president of the last 80 years would oppose President Trump’s statement.”

In Mr. Trump’s circle, the pivot is a necessary corrective to years of misguided policy. He and his allies see the cost of defending Europe as too high, given other needs. Coming to some kind of accommodation with Moscow, in this view, would allow the United States to bring home more troops or shift national security resources toward China, which they see as “the biggest threat,” as Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it last month.

The U.S. reversal has certainly been pronounced over the past week. Just days after Vice President JD Vance excoriated European allies, saying “the threat from within” was more worrisome than Russia, Mr. Rubio met with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and talked up “the incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians” if they could simply dispose of the Ukraine war.

No Ukrainian leaders were in the room for the meeting, held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, much less other Europeans, although Mr. Rubio called several foreign ministers afterward to brief them. Instead, by all appearances, this was a meeting of two big powers dividing up areas of dominance, a modern-day Congress of Vienna or Yalta Conference.

Mr. Trump has long seen Mr. Putin as a compatriot, a strong and “very savvy” player whose effort to bully Ukraine into making territorial concessions was nothing short of “genius.” Mr. Putin, in his eyes, is someone worthy of admiration and respect, unlike the leaders of traditional U.S. allies like Germany, Canada or France, for whom he exhibits scorn.

Indeed, Mr. Trump has spent the first month of his second term stiffing the allies, not only leaving them out of the emerging Ukraine talks but threatening tariffs against them, demanding they increase their military spending and asserting claims over some of their territory. His billionaire patron Elon Musk has publicly backed the far-right Alternative for Germany party.

“For now, the Europeans see this as Trump normalizing Russia relations while treating his allies, the Europeans, as untrusted,” said Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, an international consulting firm. “Supporting the AfD, who the German leaders consider a neo-Nazi party, makes Trump look like an adversary to Europe’s largest economy. It’s an extraordinary change.”

Mr. Trump vowed during the campaign that he could end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, which he has failed to do, and in fact said he would bring peace to Ukraine even before his inauguration, which he also failed to do. After a nearly 90-minute phone call with Mr. Putin last week, Mr. Trump assigned Mr. Rubio and two other advisers, Michael Waltz and Steve Witkoff, to pursue negotiations.

The concessions that Mr. Trump and his team have floated sound like a Kremlin wish list: Russia gets to keep all of the Ukrainian territory it illegally seized by force. The United States will not provide Ukraine with security guarantees, much less allow it into NATO. Sanctions will be lifted. The president has even suggested that Russia be readmitted to the Group of 7 major powers after it was expelled for its original 2014 incursion into Ukraine.

What would Mr. Putin have to give up for a deal? He would have to stop killing Ukrainians while he pockets his victory. Mr. Trump has not highlighted other concessions he would insist on. Nor has he said how Mr. Putin could be trusted to keep an agreement given that he violated a 1994 pact guaranteeing Ukrainian sovereignty and two cease-fire deals negotiated in Minsk, Belarus, in 2014 and 2015.

Mr. Trump’s evident faith in his ability to seal a deal with Mr. Putin mystifies veteran national security officials who have dealt with Russia over the years.

“We should be talking to them in the same way that we talked to Soviet leaders throughout the Cold War,” said Celeste A. Wallander, who dealt with Russia and Ukraine issues as assistant secretary of defense under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “Which is you don’t trust them.”

“When you do negotiations,” she continued, “you do them with the presumption that they will violate them. You try to find overlapping interests, but recognize that our interests are fundamentally in conflict and we’re trying to manage a dangerous adversary, not become best friends.”

Speaking with reporters on Tuesday, Mr. Trump made it sound as if he did consider Russia to be a friend — but not Ukraine. “Russia wants to do something,” he said. “They want to stop the savage barbarianism.”

Mr. Trump expressed dismay about the killing and destruction wrought by what he called a “senseless war,” comparing scenes from the front to the Battle of Gettysburg with “body parts all over the field.” Ukraine, he said, was “being wiped out” and the war had to end. But he did not say who was wiping out Ukraine, leaving it clear he faulted its own leaders and dismissing their insistence to be part of any negotiations.

“I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Mr. Trump said. “Well, they’ve had a seat for three years. And a long time before that. This could have been settled very easily. Just a half-baked negotiator could have settled this years ago without, I think, without the loss of much land, very little land. Without the loss of any lives. And without the loss of cities that are just laying on their sides.”

He repeated his claim that the invasion would not have happened had he been president, ignoring the fact that Russian-sponsored forces had waged war inside Ukraine all four years of his first term. “I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land,” he said without explaining why he did not try to negotiate peace when he was in office.

As he often does, Mr. Trump flavored his comments with multiple false claims. Among them, he said that the United States has contributed three times as much aid to Ukraine since the war started as Europe has. In fact, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Europe has allocated $138 billion compared with $119 billion from the United States.

He also denigrated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, saying more than once that “he’s down at 4 percent in approval rating.” In fact, Mr. Zelensky’s approval rating has fallen from its once-stratospheric heights, but only to around 50 percent — not that different from Mr. Trump’s own.

Mr. Trump also agreed with a Russian talking point that Ukraine should have new elections to play a part in negotiations. “Yeah, I would say that when they want a seat at the table, you could say the people have to — wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have to say, like, you know, it’s been a long time since we had an election?” he said. “That’s not a Russia thing. That’s something coming from me and coming from many other countries also.”

What other countries he did not say. Nor did he say anything about the need for elections in Russia, where any voting is controlled by the Kremlin and its allies.

Mr. Trump’s remarks were not scripted and came in response to questions by reporters. But they reflected how he sees the situation and foreshadowed the next few months. They also sent fresh shock waves through Europe, which is coming to grips with the fact that its chief ally in the new cold war no longer sees itself that way.

“Some of the most shameful comments uttered by a president in my lifetime,” Ian Bond, deputy director of the Center for European Reform in London, wrote online. “Trump is siding with the aggressor, blaming the victim. In the Kremlin they must be jumping for joy.”