The shocking US pivot to Russia has sent the world through the political looking glass and into the upside-down era of Trumpland. Is the US abandoning its historic allies in NATO, Europe, and Canada in favor of … Russia?
The short answer is yes. For now.
Let’s start with exhibit A: the inversion of facts to justify the abandonment of Ukraine.
President Donald Trump has, to steal a Lewis Carroll phrase by the QAnon movement, followed the white rabbit down the disinformation hole. According to him, Ukraine started the war, not Russia. “You should’ve never started it,” Trump said this week about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “You could’ve made a deal.”
Wait, what?
Didn’t the war start when Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea in 2014? Didn’t it escalate when he invaded the country — three years ago this Saturday — in February 2022, bombing cities and trying to assassinate Zelensky?
Those are the facts that NATO nations have long accepted … because they are true. Putin was the dictator who started the war, and Zelensky the defender of democracy.
Not for Trump.
He now calls Zelensky “a Dictator without Elections,” not Putin. Parroting Russian propaganda, Trump claims that Zelensky has only 4% support in his country and so has no standing to be part of the peace negotiations.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” as Alice said, gazing around the new world of Wonderland. This just doesn’t make much sense.
Once you go through the political looking glass, the flow of disinformation threatens to overwhelm reality. Fact-checking is suddenly seen as a radical form of partisanship, but it shouldn’t be. Facts are facts. The truth is, in the last presidential election, Zelensky won 73% of the vote. It is also true that, since then, the war and martial law in Ukraine delayed the elections that were scheduled for last May, and concerns about that are legitimate. But as the UK prime minister pointed out, during World War II, Britain also suspended elections.
Zelensky responded in fury, saying that Trump “lives in this disinformation space.”
Europe is reeling at the pivot — suddenly aware that their closest ally and friend has shifted toward Russia. European leaders, who have been holding a series of emergency meetings, are now realizing that if they want to defend themselves from Russia, they have to do it themselves. It’s not so much a wake-up call as a lifesaving shock from a political defibrillator. But it will be expensive and fraught with internal obstacles.
The sense of betrayal in the EU is overwhelming. Kaja Kallas, vice president of the European Commission, described this as “appeasement,” while Friedrich Merz, the man most likely to lead Germany after Sunday’s election, called it “a classic reversal of the role of perpetrator and victim.”
Even former British Prime Minster Boris Johnson, who supports the idea of helping Trump end the war, couldn’t defend the absurdity of Trump’s view. “Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor,” he wrote.
The truth is that European leaders are in full panic, watching the postwar multilateral world they worked so hard to build on the foundation of US support collapse.
Meanwhile, the Russians aren’t just throwing a Lewis Carroll-like tea party but a Kremlin-sponsored vodka chug-a-thon. The Russians have long courted far-right MAGA types like Tucker Carlson through their common interest in fighting “woke” culture and promoting Christian nationalism — all while maintaining their focus on weakening NATO and breaking up the alliance. Even they can’t believe their success.
“If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud,” Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president wrote, not bothering to hide his gloating. “Trump is 200 percent right.”
“He is the first, and so far, in my opinion, the only Western leader who has publicly and loudly said that one of the root causes of the Ukrainian situation was the impudent line of the previous administration to draw Ukraine into NATO,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, cementing Russian propaganda as a Trumpian truth.
As I argued last week, this is part of Trump’s empire state of mind, his neo-imperialist goal of dividing the world into spheres of influence controlled by strongman leaders in countries like Russia and China. China is seeing all this through the lens of invading Taiwan, something that must look far more palatable to the current US administration as it retreats from its role as a global police officer and looks increasingly likely to join the mob looting weaker sovereign territories. Small countries who get in the way — Ukraine in this case, the Panamanians in another, and maybe Taiwan — have little or no say in the outcomes.
Other countries that have been threatened by Trump, like Canada, are watching nervously. After all, the propaganda Putin uses to talk about Ukraine — there is an artificial border where one never should have existed, that Ukrainians actually want Russia to come and protect them — sounds eerily familiar to the language Trump has used about Canada. He has called the US-Canada border an “artificially drawn line” and claimed, without proof, that most Canadians would welcome the US taking over the country to offer protection.
Earlier today, just hours before the 4 Nations hockey final between the US and Canada, Trump made it political. The event has been supercharged by the political climate to the point where Canadian fans booed the US national anthem during a round-robin matchup last weekend in Montreal. Expect the Canadian anthem to receive a similar treatment tonight in Boston. “I’ll be calling our GREAT American Hockey Team this morning to spur them on towards victory tonight against Canada, which with FAR LOWER TAXES AND MUCH STRONGER SECURITY, will someday, maybe soon, become our cherished, and very important, Fifty First State,” Trump posted.
The threats are by now familiar, but the pivot toward Russia adds a more concerning element. Once he went through the looking glass and accepted the lie that Ukraine started the war, Trump implicitly accepted the idea that a manufactured threat can be a justifiable pretext for the most radical action.
Trump 1.0 already used the pretext of national security to slap tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, and his Trump 2.0 tariff wars and threats are no different. What happens when Canada responds in kind with reciprocal tariffs designed to hurt the US economically? Will it be long before Canada is accused of starting the tariff war? Does that quickly evolve into a pretext for more drastic US action to make Canada the 51st state? After all, it is just … self-defense.
All this sounds like phantasmagorical, political hyperventilating, and frankly paranoid. The rhetoric about the US taking over Canada the way Russia invaded Ukraine must be a joke, a trick to gain the upper hand in good old-fashioned trade negotiations. Right? Right?
Let’s hope.
But then, Trump has a Napoleonic view of his powers and the rule of law. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he posted on social media last weekend. If he does not see himself bound by US constitutional law, why would he feel bound by international law?
This US pivot toward Russia marks the most dangerous threat to the multilateral world’s adherence to the rule of law and the NATO alliance in general. It is not a bug of the Trump presidency; it is a feature. Everything has changed. “I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then,” Alice says as she absorbs what has happened to her.
The Western world can’t go back either. There is malice in Wonderland now, and it is no longer just Russia; it’s the United States itself.