MJ Akbar
THE Nobel Prize for Peace might be a step or two beyond the horizon but Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin entered the Guinness World Records on March 18, 2025 with the longest telephone conversation in the history of America-Russia relations. They spoke for two-and-a-half hours, which means their agenda encompassed a world far wider than the war in Ukraine. Message: Russia’s isolation is over.
There are now only two nations in the Ukraine negotiation hall. Ukraine and its fierce partisans in Europe are in the waiting room. If there is an evolution from a partial, uncertain ceasefire to a Contract for Peace, it will be because of two signatures on a contemporary modern parchment.
The policy pursued by the Joe Biden White House, with loud applause from muscle-free London, Paris and Berlin, to inflict an economic and political quarantine upon Russia that would cripple its economy and ruin its military strength is in deep coma.
Wailing in Europe
The wailing and gnashing of teeth has begun in Western Europe. If you are President of Futility in Paris, the decibels fade before they reach the Champs-Élysées. In his latest soundbite, Emmanuel Macron has exhorted Europe to stop buying American arms, on the assumption that they are finally willing to build the arsenals they should have stocked from the 1980s.
The pathos must be evident to everyone except Macron. Even if anyone listens, the makers of the Rafale fighter jets might get first orders in 2040, but only if Dassault Aviation has switched to production of near-invisible nuclear drones.
If you are Prime Minister of the Helpless trying anxiously to be helpful from Downing Street, your word will not travel much farther than the media headquarters in Fleet Street or Wapping, where the principal strategic objective is triumph in the war of words rather than any war of blood and gore. If you are the Aluminium Chancellor of Berlin, you can celebrate passage of a defence budget that will radically improve the Home Guards by 2026 and, if all goes well, help the army by 2035.
Washington and Moscow know this. The Iron Chancellor of Germany between 1871 and 1890, Prince Otto von Bismarck, has been out of fashion for a couple of generations. A revival can begin with his famous remark made in 1867: “A conquering army on the border will not be stopped by eloquence.”
An equitable peace
If Western Europe’s leaders had been as committed to security as they are to the cadence of their voice, Russia would have held talks in 2022 over Ukraine’s slide into NATO. An equitable peace is likely when two antagonists negotiate from positions of strength. A weakling pays a price for peace. The historic lesson for the unfortunate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is simple and stark. A cat’s paw is never more important than the cat.
Neither Trump nor Putin is famous for eloquence. Putin has a laconic tongue; Trump is temperamentally exuberant. Putin is never going to be underestimated now, not by his worst enemies, but Trump faces the familiar hurdles placed before an iconoclast who challenges a well-entrenched establishment. It is almost heretical in European media to trace any logic in his policies, while his adversary Joe Biden’s stop-start incoherence was advertised as deep thought.
Remove the flab and the skeleton of strategy becomes evident in the 150-minute telephone dialogue. Donald Trump is emerging as the Richard Nixon of 2025.
