The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Attorney, columnist and evangelical Christian David French poignantly observes that it is understood that American elections “could reset our national security strategy, but they did not change our bedrock alliances.  They did not change our fundamental identity.  Until now.”  Donald Trump is upending the entire national security strategy of the United States.  His vision is destructive and dangerous.  As Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker observes, “Trump’s mendacious contempt for Ukraine and . . . his cringing admiration for Russia and the ‘genius’ in the Kremlin” raise real concerns, but also signify a “new world order,” one that “will come at a steep price.”

Yaroslav Trofimov provides a helpful historical perspective on the world order Trump seeks to kill:  “America’s 80-year run as the world’s strongest power, a relatively benevolent hegemon that attracted willing partners and allies, has been rooted in two major U.S. initiatives launched in response to the upheaval of World War II.  One was to convene the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, which enshrined the idea of free trade and low tariffs, generating unprecedented prosperity for the West. The other, five years later, was to lead the establishment of NATO, an alliance that won the Cold War and has ensured peace in Europe . . . Both of these legacies are being undone with stunning speed by President Trump. His second administration has targeted America’s closest allies with punitive tariffs, has ordered an abrupt stop to military assistance for Ukraine, has frozen foreign aid—and is raising the prospect of a geopolitical realignment toward authoritarian Russia.”

Trofimov offers additional insights:

• “While Trump says he seeks global peace with his radical shifts in America’s generations-old consensus, the explosive combination of his neo-mercantilism and his embrace of 19th-century-like imperial thinking could actually push the world toward a new conflagration, warned Evelyn Farkas, executive director of the McCain Institute, who served as U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia under President Obama.  ‘Both aspects of his foreign policy, the security component as well as the trade and economic component, hold a lot of danger, not just for the United States but for the world,’ she said. ‘We are seeing actions put into place that contain the kernels of a potential world war.’  Trump’s drastic shift is not rooted in American public opinion. A recent CBS-Yougov poll showed that 52% of Americans support Ukraine, versus just 4% supporting Russia. Most Americans, including 59% of Republicans, consider Russia to be either an unfriendly power or outright enemy, according to the survey. Another poll, by Reuters-Ipsos this month, found that 50% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s foreign-policy moves, and only 37% approve, a 15% decline in net approval since January.”
• “Trump’s trade wars, his humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, threats to Canada, Panama and Denmark, and the sidelining of European allies have eroded that legacy around the world, including in Asia. America’s image in Asia has changed “from liberator to great disrupter to a landlord seeking rent,” said defense minister Ng Eng Hen of Singapore, one of Washington’s closest Asian partners.  The critical question these Asian allies are asking themselves is whether, after seeming to accept Russia’s right to a sphere of influence in Europe, the Trump administration would also seek a similar accommodation over their heads to divvy up the world with China’s Xi Jinping.”
• “Trump’s open embrace of Russian positions over Ukraine in recent weeks has shattered that illusion. “We used to have wake-up calls, but in recent days we received an electroshock,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to Washington and a former chairman of the Munich Security Conference. In a recent opinion poll by French broadcaster BFMTV, 73% of French respondents said they no longer considered the U.S. an ally—and 67% supported sending French troops to Ukraine to police a cease-fire.  Nowhere is the mood shift more abrupt than in eastern and central Europe, which has been for decades among the most pro-American parts of the world. While French strategic thinking, underpinned by a fully independent nuclear weapons force, is shaped by what Paris and London viewed as an American betrayal during the 1956 Suez crisis, countries such as Poland or the Czech Republic have long credited Ronald Reagan’s America for their freedom.  Former Polish President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa, the founder of the Solidarity movement that challenged Communist control of Poland in 1980, put Trump and Vice President JD Vance in a very different category. The scene of Zelensky’s humiliation in the Oval Office reminded him “of interrogations at the hands of the Security Service and the courtrooms of Communist tribunals,” Walesa wrote in a letter signed by 39 fellow former dissidents, adding that Communist judges and prosecutors at the time “also used to tell us that they hold all the cards, while we have none.”

On Monday, 24 February 2025, for the third anniversary of Russia’s brutal lunge toward Kyiv, the Ukrainian government put forward a resolution in the UN General Assembly demanding Russia’s withdrawal of its forces and accountability for its war crimes as the basis of a “comprehensive, lasting and just peace.” Ninety-three countries supported the resolution; 65 abstained, including China. Among the 18 who opposed it were Russia, North Korea, Nicaragua, Belarus, Equatorial Guinea and, “vomitously,” (as Bret Stephens put it) Israel and the United States.

Stephens puts this horrific vote in proper perspective:   “Putin spent the first part of his career as a low-level enforcer of that system. He’s spent 25 years in power perfecting it from the top, creating a world in which his dictatorship is ‘sovereign democracy,’ political opposition is ‘terrorism,’ the Jewish president of Ukraine is ‘a neo-Nazi’ and the biggest war in Europe in 80 years is just a ‘special military operation,’ undertaken as a defensive measure against an aggressive NATO.  At nearly every turn, he’s been able to get away with it, often with the reluctant acquiescence of Western leaders, from George W. Bush to Angela Merkel, who looked away from his misdeeds for the sake of diplomatic comity. But he’s never had a bigger accomplice in deceit than Donald Trump.  By participating in the moral and factual inversions that Putin has deployed for his invasion of Ukraine, the Trump administration isn’t setting itself up as some sort of evenhanded broker to end the war. It is turning the United States into an accessory to Russia’s crimes — or at least to the lies on which the crimes are predicated. Unlike Nixon, who moved China toward our corner, at least for 30 years, Trump is moving America toward Russia’s corner, while betraying an ally and breaking the Atlantic alliance.  This administration, like its predecessor, had the opportunity, through an easy U.N. vote, to live within the truth when it came to Russia and its malevolence. Instead of working to deconstruct Putin’s panorama of lies, it opted to keep it in place, to reinforce it, to build on it. It’s a choice that will haunt, and shame, America for years.”

The third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a good moment to recall the post-Cold War history of Russia’s broken promises.  Editorially, the Wall Street Journal provides the review:

1. They began with the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 amid the illusion of the “end of history.” Ukraine yielded its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees from the U.S., U.K. and Russia. Moscow explicitly promised to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and refrain from economic coercion. So much for that, and here’s a trail of Russia’s other broken commitments.
2. In 2003 Russia began building a dam on the tiny Ukrainian island Tuzla without warning or permission from Kyiv. Ukraine responded to this territorial violation by deploying troops, and the crisis diffused only after Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma struck a compromise with Mr. Putin on terms favorable to Moscow.
3. After Tuzla, Ukraine sought to deepen political and economic ties with Western Europe. Moscow resorted to energy extortion to draw Kyiv into its orbit and weaponized its trade ties with Ukraine. In 2013 Moscow blocked Ukrainian exports at the border while offering financing for the Ukrainian government as an inducement for closer ties.  Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych succumbed to this economic coercion and withdrew from a political association and free-trade agreement with the European Union in November 2013. That prompted mass protests in Ukraine. Mr. Yanukovych abdicated and fled to Russia in February 2014.
4. Russia responded in 2014 by sending troops in disguise to seize Crimea and the strategic port of Sevastopol. The same year it armed pro-Russian separatists who launched a war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and seized much of two eastern provinces.
5. The Kremlin claimed its military wasn’t involved in the fighting in eastern Ukraine, but that wasn’t true. In one prominent example, nearly 300 Russian military vehicles were spotted in and around the Donetsk provincial city of Ilovaisk in summer 2014.
6. Ukrainians seeking to liberate Ilovaisk were surrounded in August 2014 by Russian forces. Mr. Putin personally calledfor a “humanitarian corridor” so the Ukrainian troops could retreat to safety. But after Ukrainians laid down arms, the Russians ambushed and slaughtered more than 360 retreating soldiers.
7. Russia seized the military initiative in eastern Ukraine after Ilovaisk, but Barack Obama refused lethal aid for Ukraine while Washington and Europe pushed Kyiv to negotiate a cease-fire. Ukraine agreed, under U.S. and German pressure, to the Minsk I accord in late 2014 that promised a cease-fire. It didn’t hold and in early 2015 Ukraine agreed to Minsk II.  Russia later claimed it wasn’t a party to Minsk II, that the deal was only between Ukraine and the Russian separatists in the Donbas. Meanwhile, the Kremlin poured heavy weapons into the Donbas in preparation for what became the 2022 invasion.
8. Ukrainian survivors of Russian captivity since 2014 have reported widespread torture and abuse. Moscow has signed the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit violence and abuse of prisoners of war.
9. The Russian invasion that began in February 2022 was intended as a lightning strike to decapitate the government in Kyiv and then control the country. President Volodymyr Zelensky refused a U.S. offer to help him flee the country, and Ukraine’s forces repelled the siege of Kyiv. Russia then turned to its current strategy of assaulting civilian targets from the air while grinding out gains in the east amid enormous casualties.

Noted Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama made this observation:  “The United States under Donald Trump is not retreating into isolationism.  It is actively joining the authoritarian camp, supporting rightwing authoritarians around the world from Vladimir Putin to Viktor Orban to Nahib Bukele to Narendra Modi . . . He is damaging American democracy, diminishing American power, and destroying American alliances with an energy and an efficiency that must exceed their wildest dreams.”

In most situations of foreign policy, the moral questions are usually debatable. Hawks and doves usually agree on the underlying ideals and values to be defended but disagree on the best prudential way to achieve them. Sometimes, however, those ideals and values are definitively tested. In those moments, what’s at stake is not just the survival of nations or even of the world but the consciences of those who align themselves with what is unquestionably wrong.  In Trump’s “new world order,” we see the defense of a bloodthirsty, empire-seeking Russia, led by murderers and oligarchs in their illegal invasion of a neighboring country, kidnapping children and killing Ukrainians, with a Russian Orthodox Church cheering it on as a “holy war” of Russian Christendom against the decadent Western world.  As William A. Galston of the Wall Street Journal correctly contends, “When a US president rejects the language of right and wrong in favor of strength as the highest virtue and weakness as the gravest sin, the law of the jungle is the inevitable outcome.”

See David French in the New York Times (3 and 5 March 2025); Yaroslav Trofimov in the Wall Street Journal (8-9 March 2025); Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal (25 February 2025); Bret Stephens in the New York Times (25 February 2025); Wall Street Journal editorial, 24 February 2025; Russell Moore,  Moore to the Point (5 March 2025); William A. Galston in the Wall Street Journal (26 February 2025); And David French in the New York Times (24 February 2025).