Trump's Self-Sabotage Weakens Europe's Alliance Against Putin

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Moscow last weekend as emissaries from the American president. They traveled in a Russian government motorcade. They used a Kremlin interpreter. The optics alone—two senior American officials conducting sensitive diplomacy entirely on Russian terms, in Russian vehicles, through Russian-provided translation—registered as a kind of capitulation. But the shock wore off quickly. It had to. There was too much else happening.

Russian drones were still hammering Kyiv. Ukrainian cities were still burning. Meanwhile, from Washington came a steady stream of provocations and reversals: a lopsided investment deal imposed on Ukraine, threats to annex Greenland, the surreal spectacle of an Alaska summit that seemed designed more for theater than substance. Each event arrived with enough force to dominate the news cycle, then vanished into the next one. The cumulative effect was disorientation—a sense that American foreign policy had become untethered from any coherent strategy.

Two recent books attempt to make sense of this chaos. Luke Harding, a journalist at The Guardian, has written a detailed account of Trump's relationship with Putin and the cascade of decisions that have reshaped American posture toward Russia and Europe. His work documents the events with precision but stops short of declaring a final verdict on what it all means. Keir Giles, a British security analyst, goes further. In his assessment, the Trump presidency represents something more deliberate than incompetence or mere preference: it is, in his view, a Kremlin victory achieved from within the American executive branch.

Giles's argument rests on a structural observation. It is not simply that the president defers to Putin personally, though that deference is real and visible. Rather, the administration has adopted the operational logic of the Russian state itself. The blending of personal wealth with political power. The systematic weakening of institutions that might constrain executive action. The deployment of nationalist rhetoric as cover for something closer to kleptocracy. These are not new patterns in American politics, but they have accelerated and deepened under this administration in ways that mirror the trajectory of Russian governance over the past twenty-five years.

The comparison unsettles some observers. It feels hyperbolic, perhaps—a worst-case reading of what might be mere incompetence or ideological drift. Optimists point to the constitutional system itself. If midterm elections proceed as scheduled and are conducted fairly, they argue, the institutional guardrails will hold. The system will correct itself. But Giles and others who share his concern are less confident. They worry that even if this administration loses an election, it may not accept the result. The goal, in this reading, is not merely to govern for four years but to secure power beyond 2028, regardless of what voters decide.

For Europe, the implications are stark. The alliance that has anchored Western security since 1945 is being tested by an American president who appears indifferent to it and actively aligned with the power it was designed to contain. Ukraine continues to absorb Russian firepower with American support that is now uncertain and conditional. NATO members in Eastern Europe are watching Washington with a mixture of hope and dread. The hope is that American institutions will reassert themselves, that this period will be brief and recoverable. The dread is that it will not—that the damage to trust, to credibility, to the basic assumption that America will stand by its commitments, may be permanent. European leaders are beginning to plan accordingly, building defense capabilities and diplomatic relationships as if they cannot rely on American resolve. That shift, from assumption to contingency, marks a genuine rupture in the postwar order.