This interview was originally published in Norwegian by Geopolitika and in French by Conflits on March 1, 2025, and appears here in English translation.
Henrik S. Werenskiold, Geopolitika: The Trump administration has just come into office and already made quite the fuss among allies and adversaries alike. What is your perception of the first month of this administration? It all seems very crazy from this side of the Atlantic, but there might be a design to it. Could he be following the Madman theory of international relations, or is this behavior just who he is?
Stephen Wertheim: The Trump administration is simultaneously purposeful and improvisational. It needs to be taken extremely seriously, then, but not in its every move. For example, President Trump really does want to broker an end to the war in Ukraine. But Trump’s tactics—from threatening Russia with tighter sanctions at one moment, to denouncing Zelensky the next—vary and veer.
Trump is showing much greater tactical boldness than in his first term. In just a month, he has staked out one extreme position after another. He has declared that he wants to acquire Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Gaza. Yet whether Trump is prepared to will the means to those ends is clearly another matter. He’s probably outright bluffing in some cases and seeking a compromise in others. His 25 percent tariffs against Canada and Mexico were promptly revealed to be a negotiating ploy when they were suspended in return for minor concessions—but then again, those tariffs may yet return.
There’s a second way, besides tactical boldness, in which Trump is behaving differently this time around. In his first term, Trump delivered a largely conventional Republican foreign policy, which was most distinctive for identifying China as America’s primary adversary. But in his second inaugural address, Trump referred to China only in reference to the Panama Canal. His administration has focused on asserting U.S. power in the Western Hemisphere, while signaling that it is open to reaching geopolitical accommodations overseas. Secretary of State Marco Rubio referred to a “multipolar” and “multi-great power” world. None of this means the Trump administration will prove accommodating in its policies, but there appears to be some intent to do so.
What do you read into this? The most hardcore realists argue that the United States should give Russia a sphere of influence based on the old Soviet sphere as a concession to drive a wedge between Russia and China. Do you think the Trump administration is willing to do that? Is it even possible in these days?
Despite President Trump’s longstanding desire to improve relations with Russia, I see little evidence that Trump or his senior officials want to let Russia dominate eastern Europe as the Soviet Union did. Even if that were their intention, Russia lacks the military, economic, and demographic power to overrun East and Central Europe. Ukraine has managed to keep Russia out of 80 percent of its territory, even without having the benefit of any external powers coming to its direct defense.
At most, some Trump officials want the United States to make an accommodating peace over Ukraine and reduce the U.S. military presence in Europe while Europeans take the lead in providing for their collective defense. Others want European countries to pay more for defense while keeping the United States as the region’s preeminent military power and security actor. I find it extremely unlikely that the United States will walk away from NATO altogether, much less condone or encourage Russian aggression against NATO countries.
What do you make of the meeting between the United States and Russia in Riyadh? From a European perspective, the meeting is reminiscent of the Yalta Conference in 1945 where the great powers decided the geopolitical fate of the European continent, only this time without the British. If the United States caves to Russian demands without getting anything in return, many argue that it will lose all credibility as a reliable security partner for Europe. What do you think of this argument?
People’s imaginations are running away with them. The United States and Russia did not meet to carve up Europe. They met to reestablish diplomatic contacts between them, after a long period of deep isolation, and to set up a process for improving bilateral relations and initiating talks to settle the war in Ukraine. Ukrainian representatives should be fully included in peace talks on equal terms with their Russian counterparts, and I am cautiously optimistic that they will be [Editor’s note: Since the interview was conducted, Trump and Zelensky descended into an argument in the Oval Office, putting Ukraine’s participation in negotiations into greater doubt].
Europeans should take heart that the U.S.-Russia meeting in Riyadh did not produce an immediate agreement to move to a Trump-Putin summit. It appears instead that teams of diplomats will get to work. This outcome is an improvement upon the one major attempt at diplomatic outreach Trump previously attempted, when he met twice with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. That effort failed in part because the leader-to-leader summits weren’t accompanied by much of a lower-level diplomatic process. Hopefully the new administration will do better.
Look, no one should feel good about the events of the past few weeks. The United States has made accommodating gestures toward Russia—Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that it is unrealistic for Ukraine to join NATO or restore its pre-2014 borders as part of a negotiated settlement of the war—whereas Russia has held firm to its previous positions. Certain transatlanticists are already screaming “appeasement.” But the reality is that Russia has the upper hand on the battlefield, so it makes sense that the side in the weaker position is having to demonstrate its openness to compromise. Thankfully, the United States has not in fact made damaging concessions. Ukraine cannot regain all its territory, and NATO was not about to admit Ukraine (nor should it admit Ukraine, in my view). Russia will need to make concessions as negotiations move forward. I would recommend that Ukraine and the United States work toward a deal in which Russia makes two main concessions: it stops fighting and, contrary to its objective of Ukrainian “demilitarization,” allows Ukraine’s peacetime military to be large, sophisticated, and supplied by the West. Ukraine’s best security guarantee is the defense capability of its own forces. While making concessions elsewhere, Kyiv and Washington should hold firm against Russian attempts to impose draconian restrictions on Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.
According to the Costs of War project at Brown University, the United States has spent approximately $2.3 trillion on the war in Afghanistan, a country that is hardly within the United States’ core interests. The war in Iraq, which most people now agree was a mistake, cost the United States $2.9 trillion. These wars, therefore, cost the United States approximately $5.2 trillion in total.
To date, the United States has spent somewhere in the vicinity of $175 billion (3.3 percent of the cost of Afghanistan and Iraq) in Ukraine, a country willing to pay the one thing that the United States truly has a deficit of—blood—to defend itself against Russia, a major U.S. adversary. Even though Russia is advancing on the battlefield now, this war is taking a much bigger toll on Russia and weakening it far more than the United States and its allies, which is at the very least not detrimental to U.S. interests. This war has also forced Europeans to take defense more seriously, which benefits the United States.
The United States’ European allies have also made it clear that making major concessions to Russia is not in their interest. The fact that the United States was willing to spend trillions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan but is reluctant to spend even a fraction of that on what is essentially an assault on the post-WWII security architecture in Europe is worrying for many in Europe.
Leaving aside the argument that one needs to stop the death and destruction, is this war really that costly for the United States, relatively speaking? Why force the Ukrainians’ hand if they want to keep fighting? Why push for such an unfavorable settlement when doing so also alienates the United States’ closest allies?
The war is costly for the United States. Beyond the financial cost is the risk of escalation into a direct NATO-Russia conflict or a nuclear conflict. That risk is low right now because the war is basically stalemated, but it would rise if either side were to make major advances. You have a point that the United States overinvested in its post-9/11 wars, but that hardly justifies overreaching elsewhere. And one factor that has induced restraint in this case is that Russia is a major power with nuclear weapons. The same high-end escalation risks simply did not exist in Iraq or Afghanistan.
You correctly note that the war is taking a massive toll on Russia. But that’s only half of the equation. The key consideration is whether time is more on Russia’s side or on Ukraine’s? Unfortunately it is hard to argue that a longer war would put Ukraine in a better position. Ukraine has performed incredibly well given its inherent military, economic, and demographic disadvantages relative to Russia, but it is now facing a serious manpower shortage. That is a deficit for which Ukraine’s Western partners cannot compensate. Moreover, especially after Trump’s return to the White House, it seems likely that the West’s support for Ukraine will diminish in the coming years and highly unlikely that it will increase. Even if a Democrat had won the presidency, defense production limits and flagging political support would have been major obstacles. The Biden administration was reportedly preparing Ukraine for negotiations in 2025 regardless of the outcome of the U.S. election.
In Ukraine, opinion has become more open to a negotiated settlement recently. But even if the Ukrainian government wants to keep fighting, the United States should not simply defer to Kyiv’s preferences. U.S. and Ukrainian interests overlap but are not identical, and I fear that Ukraine’s partners have fostered false hope about what Ukraine can obtain. NATO declared last summer that Ukraine was on an “irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership.” But nothing is irreversible, and there was and is no consensus within NATO for admitting Ukraine. An open letter I signed put it well: “Ukrainians deserve to weigh their strategic options through clear eyes, not through rose-tinted glasses held out by outsiders who do not have the support of their countries.”
With Vance’s divisive Munich speech fresh in mind, what do you think is Trump’s design for the future of the transatlantic alliance and NATO, the security architecture of Europe and Russia role within it?
My eyebrow arched at “Trump’s design,” but it’s a good question. At a minimum, Trump wants much greater levels of European defense spending. That alone wouldn’t necessarily alter the European security architecture, especially if Europeans buy American weapons systems rather than investing in their own defense industries. But I do think the Trump administration seeks bolder change. In Europe, Secretary Hegseth spoke of shifting the burden of conventional deterrence and defense onto European shoulders. He seemed to be calling for burden-shifting, not just burden-sharing: making Europe bear primary responsibility for European defense, rather than making Europe pay more for the privilege of having America orchestrate its protection. So, I expect to see some U.S. troops and military systems withdrawn from Europe, especially from NATO’s eastern front, over the next four years. Washington could draw down its military presence either unilaterally or in exchange for Russian actions.
But if the United States is stepping back from Europe, does the Trump administration want to see a strong, united, collective Europe that can step up, thus minimizing the window of vulnerability that Moscow would exploit? Or would it prefer a weak and divided Europe, with right-wing populists in the vanguard? Hegseth’s speech implied the former, but Vance’s the latter. The more the Trump administration lifts up European populist parties and turns the screws on Europe economically, the riskier the transition to European leadership of European defense will become.
Americans say that Europe doesn’t do its part when it comes to defense spending in NATO, but European countries have been helping the United States in other ways. The United States is the only country that has invoked NATO Article 5 after 9/11, providing it with significant moral support and legitimacy to pursue al-Qaeda worldwide.
Related to this is how European countries have supported the United States in its foreign military adventures after 9/11—not only in Afghanistan, where approximately 30 percent of ISAF casualties were Europeans, but also in Iraq, a war that most European countries were firmly against. Given its proximity to Europe, it’s also clear that the disastrous consequences of the war cost Europe far more in secondary effects than the United States. Europe obviously incurred a big cost for what was essentially the United States’ wars (especially Iraq) in the name of the transatlantic alliance. Given the United States’ worldwide military posture and, it’s not unrealistic that they will be asked to do something similar in the future.
Is this support worth something? If yes, how do you quantify such support and, how should these factors also be accounted for in the balance sheet when calculating exactly how contributions should be measured?
I appreciate how European allies have supported U.S. military expeditions in the greater Middle East. I also appreciate allies who opposed American misadventures and said so at the time. Nor am I among those who fault European allies for accepting the deal that Washington repeatedly offered, by which, in effect, the United States agreed to orchestrate European defense so long as Europeans contributed to key U.S. foreign policy goals and purchased American weapons.
So transatlantic relations have always been transactional. The question is what kind of transaction makes sense. It is time to renegotiate terms, because European dependence on the United States no longer makes sense for anybody. Over the next decade, Europe should take the lead in handling its own defense while the United States remains within NATO in a supporting role. There is still time for the transition to be orderly and consensual.
I am happy to forgo European support for future out-of-area military missions if that means Europe will become responsible for and capable of defending its own territory. Europe has an economic role to play in deterring China from attacking Taiwan, but it makes no sense for Europe to play a significant military role in the Indo-Pacific while Europe cannot defend its own territory.
On a psychological level, I’d like to see Europeans stop desperately trying to prove at every moment that they are good, loyal allies of the United States. It’s no wonder that Americans look down on Europeans as dependents: Europeans present themselves as dependents! If Europe provides for its essential defense needs, that might just breed self-respect, and inspire a new respect in Washington and the wider world.
After the war in Ukraine and Trump’s return to the White House, the shift in the security Zeitgeist in Europe is clear. Europeans would like to take more responsibility for their own security, but there are still many internal differences between European countries that need to be resolved to get there. What would be your advice to the leaders of Europe on creating defense capabilities that are in tandem with its GDP?
First, Europeans need not feel desperate. European members of the EU and NATO hold vast economic and demographic advantages over Russia. There is much work to be done, but if I were sitting in Moscow, I wouldn’t think that today’s Russia could reconstitute the Soviet empire even if the United States completely abandoned Europe—which it won’t.
Second, the task of devising and implementing new European defense concepts is too important to be left to military planners. I have heard NATO planners say that all of Europe must spend 4 percent of GDP on defense while the United States also maintains or increases its own commitment to European security. I have to believe that this so-called requirement is based on some combination of overly ambitious political-military objectives for European defense and overly pessimistic assumptions about Russian intentions and capabilities. The practical effect of demanding such high levels of Europe-wide defense spending, I fear, will be to demoralize publics and create pressure to make deals with Moscow. Instead, political leaders need to set the political objectives that military means are instituted to achieve. They should set realistic goals that are politically achievable and not make the perfect the enemy of the good.
What do you make of the future of great power competition between the United States and China in East Asia and Taiwan’s place in it?”
The United States and China have embarked on a long-term strategic competition in Asia and beyond. I agree with the bipartisan consensus in Washington that China poses a far more serious, consequential long-term challenge to U.S. interests than any other country, including Russia. Still, it is imperative for Washington and Beijing to start working out terms of mutual coexistence rather than sliding into ever-deeper hostility. If a U.S.-China war occurs, it will most likely be triggered by events across the Taiwan Strait. Conversely, if the Taiwan issue were to stabilize and all three parties had confidence that the others would not cross red lines, then the prospects for U.S.-China peace and stability would greatly improve.
In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, the defense analyst Jennifer Kavanagh and I argue that if China invades Taiwan, the United States should not fight a war with China directly. Such a war would come at an enormous cost, in terms of lives, security, and prosperity, to the United States and the world. Beijing might well win the war regardless. And even if China succeeded in seizing Taiwan, the United States and its regional allies and partners could still prevent China from attaining dominance in East Asia. On the other hand, preserving Taiwan’s self-rule as a vibrant democracy with a strong economy is very important. The United States should do a great deal to support Taiwan—to prevent a Chinese attack in the first place and frustrate any attack that occurs. So Jennifer and I propose a middle path. We argue that over the next decade the United States should enable Taiwan to mount a viable self-defense if China invades, plan to assist Taiwanese forces from a distance, and strengthen the self-defenses of other East Asian states so that they can resist Chinese coercion regardless of how cross-strait relations develop.
This view is nevertheless in stark contrast to Elbridge Colby and the arguments he puts forward in A Strategy of Denial. According to him, a successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan would most likely lead to the collapse of the United States’ credibility as a security guarantor and the breakdown of the United States-led alliance system in East Asia, paving the way for a Chinese hegemonic region to emerge. What are you counter arguments to this?
Some, like Colby, argue that it’s all or nothing: the United States must fight for Taiwan because otherwise the rest of the region would lose trust in the United States and succumb to Chinese pressure. That is a valid concern, but countries in the region would also be concerned if the United States fought for Taiwan and risked turning a cross-strait war into a region-wide war. U.S. treaty allies should be able to appreciate that the United States does not have a treaty obligation to wage war on behalf of Taiwan, so it would not be defaulting on a legal commitment. Finally, China would gain limited military advantages from controlling Taiwan—advantages that it may well obtain anyway as its military modernizes—and would leave countries in the region with time to bolster their defenses, supported by the United States.
Although there is opposition to Colby’s appointment at the Defense Department, it seems likely that he will be appointed and will have a significant influence on U.S. East Asia strategy. Which view do you think is most likely to “win” regarding U.S. Taiwan policy in the years to come, and why?
Hopefully we won’t find out which side has won—because that will mean China will have invaded Taiwan. But I predict that the United States start more aggressively pushing Taiwan to build the “porcupine” defenses that Jennifer and I recommend. And there is a decent chance, though perhaps not a likelihood, that Trump will issue diplomatic assurances meant to improve China’s confidence that the United States is sticking with its traditional One China policy and is deterring Taipei from making unilateral moves toward independence or permanent separation. In return, China could, for example, scale back its military activities around the island and declare that it has no deadline for resolving the Taiwan question. This exchange of assurances would cost the United States little and has a decent chance of reducing tensions over the single dispute most likely to plunge the world’s two leading powers into direct conflict.
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