denko maleski
Professor Denko Maleski, Photo: Free Press / Archive

Trump: NATO is the reason, I understand Putin

The taboo that the newly elected American president broke was expressed in two of his statements about the war in Ukraine: that everything is because of NATO and that he understands Putin's position.

There is a well-known metaphor for America's foreign policy, in which it is compared to a huge tanker that needs time to stop and change course. As for the direction, as President Biden's recent decisions show, much depends on the captain of the ship. Although the newly elected president has announced peace talks with Russian President Putin, Biden continues to deliver new contingents of weapons along with permission to strike targets deep inside Russian territory. And so with a series of executive orders that Trump is known to be repealing, some of them, on the very first day he takes office, on January 20.

But not everything depends on the will of the American president. A grand strategy, like the one that previous presidents, Democrats or Republicans, have adhered to, is difficult to change.

What interests world public opinion today is whether America's strategy of interventions in favor of a world of democracies, but also of American dominance, which dragged the great power into "eternal wars", will be abandoned by Trump in favor of a "transactional" foreign policy. The rare critics, American intellectuals, doubt the success of the newly elected American president's intention to change the grand strategy: for America to dominate the entire world, by force if necessary. In support of their theses, they invoke the power of the "deep state", meaning the security services, the CIA above all, and the military-industrial complex that have the decisive say on such topics.

But the newly elected American president has already done the unthinkable. There is one taboo that Donald Trump has broken, a taboo that has ruled American politics, but also the politics of its allies, one of which is the Republic of North Macedonia as a NATO member: to express understanding for the other side. No one in the West, since the beginning of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, has dared to say such a heresy. By blindly following American politics, the European allies have lost their "I". The new EU Commissioner for Foreign Policy, Kaia Kallas, even stated that even if America withdraws, we (the EU) will continue to help Ukraine with weapons.

Until the last Ukrainian, critics of the war would add. Like her predecessor Borrell, she entered the competition to be “a greater pope than the pope.” After February 22, 2022, when Russian troops invaded a sovereign state, we all united in thunderous condemnation of an act for which no one could find justification. But something happened that should not have happened: all debate about the reasons for this war, seen also through Moscow’s eyes, stopped.

Gone is the talk of the great powers fighting for security and the desire to weaken if not destroy the other, of the broken treaties with Russia and the missed diplomatic solutions that would have led to peace. It has become unpopular to think of diplomacy as a tool for stopping a war that has continued to escalate to the current ninety seconds to Armageddon. Even the revelation that Britain and the United States sabotaged the peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul at the very beginning of the war has not diminished the West’s commitment to the war.

Propaganda, not enlightened debate, took over America and Europe, and no one was allowed to say otherwise. Even the pages of the New York Times were closed to dissenting opinions.

And suddenly Trump ante portas. The taboo that the newly elected American president broke was stated in two of his statements about the war in Ukraine: that it was all because of NATO and that he understood Putin's position. And now, what do we do? Will Trump produce peace or will he be defeated by the "deep state"? We'll see. Putin himself is a skeptic and does not trust the Americans. He tells the story of when he proposed to them that Russia become a member of NATO. President Clinton found the idea interesting but asked to speak to his advisors. The next day he told the Russian president that the idea was not acceptable.

Putin's comment follows. Presidents who take office have ideas, he says. But then people in dark suits and blue ties come and tell them what the reality is.

Putin should know best: in the USSR he was one of those in dark suits and blue ties.

(The author is a professor and the first minister of foreign affairs)

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