I remember a time when President Trump seemed to embody a long-awaited political corrective—a repudiation of America’s imperial overreach, a purge of the entrenched bureaucracy of the deep state, and the promise to restore sanity in national security and foreign affairs. But that promise is rapidly fading.
His recent decision to bomb Iranian nuclear sites—just three days before the expiration of a negotiation window—already raised alarms. But the current decision to resume arms deliveries to Ukraine reeks of strategic confusion. Quite obviously, the warmongering neocons and deep-state operatives tied to the military-industrial complex have outmaneuvered the president, confirming a suspicion long in the making: the deep state is not only alive but thriving. The very machinery President Trump once vowed to dismantle appears to have prevailed over him.
Let me be clear once again and say this to political advisors on both sides of the Atlantic: the political elites of international affairs and security in the US and the EU have placed themselves, from the very beginning of the Ukraine conflict, on the wrong side of history. The war could have easily been prevented.
I have meticulously detailed the origins of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict—most notably in this very blog, in entries since before the outbreak of the war in 2022. From the outset, I argued that the root cause was not Russian imperialism, but the West’s refusal to recognize Russia’s legitimate security concerns. NATO’s relentless eastward expansion, the betrayal of promises once made to the contrary, and the refusal to grant Ukraine neutral status were all ingredients in a recipe for war. Ukraine could have served as a bridge between East and West. Instead, it was converted into a proxy for a delusional confrontation—one orchestrated by American neoconservatives and executed by an ideologically compromised, corruption-prone Ukrainian leadership.
Mr. Trump seemed to know all of this. His initial rhetoric rightly identified NATO as obsolete, the EU as bureaucratically overreaching, and Ukraine’s role in the conflict as problematic. His claim that, had he been president in 2022, the war would not have happened bears truth. In his first term, he signaled clearly that he intended to cooperate with Russia and respect its national security concerns.
But what are we to make of his latest decision—resuming weapons deliveries to Kyiv, implicitly blaming Putin while giving Zelenskyy a free pass, and backtracking on what was once a principled rejection of globalist interventionism?
One can only hope that this does not mark the collapse of Mr. Trump’s America First doctrine. His policy shift bears the signs of a betrayal of his own strategic project—which was never about isolationism but about prioritizing national interest and strategic restraint. Yet by supporting the extension of a war that, by his own account, would never have occurred under his presidency, he now legitimizes the very structures he once challenged.
President Trump—once an opponent of ideological dogmatism—now joins the chorus of moralizers in the European Union, most notably in Germany, France, and Great Britain, who refuse to face geopolitical reality.
Even now, in the fourth year of this tragic conflict, the West’s political elites have failed to learn their lessons. Instead of critical reflection, they double down on failed policies and reject the application of long-established theoretical frameworks in international relations. They ignore the philosophical underpinnings required to understand global affairs. They dismiss, for instance, the insights of thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, whose central warning—the need for recognition in global relations—remains as relevant as ever. It is precisely the failure to recognize Russia’s demand for dignity, its civilizational space, and its strategic red lines that led to war.
For now, the neoconservatives and other war hawks have won. They have reasserted their control over foreign policy by outlasting Mr. Trump’s initially meaningful stance. They are exploiting a moment of crisis—the Russians have intensified their military advance, and the war is clearly lost for Ukraine—to reinstall their failed doctrines. It is quite disheartening that Mr. Trump would fall prey to their pressure and allow himself to be talked into such an intellectually dishonest and historically tragic course.
The president demonstrated throughout his first term that he understood the conceptual tragedy of America’s post–Cold War strategic design. He took promising steps to reverse it, returning to a more principled and philosophically grounded posture—one that drew inspiration from the restraint of the Monroe Doctrine.
As I’ve written repeatedly on www.edwinseditorial.com and elsewhere, including in my political-philosophical study 44 & 45. The Tenures of US Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, the proper orientation of international relations demands a return to foundational insights of political theory: sovereignty, recognition, the minimum standards of international law, an ethics of foreign policy, and respect for civilizational diversity. These would be the prerequisites for peace.
Trump once seemed to intuitively grasp all this. That he has now forgotten—or forsaken—it is cause for serious concern.
