US Presidency: retreat from world stage boosts Russia and China
US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, 2018. Trump White House Archived/Flickr.com
Donald Trump’s second presidential term, with its dizzying array of executive orders, policy revocations, funding cuts, tariff threats and withdrawals from international bodies, has sent both the country and the world into a tailspin. As the US relinquishes its leadership role on the world stage, China and Russia are filling the resulting vacuum.
The US administration’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization, the United Nations Human Rights Council and the Paris Climate Agreement were met with dismay by world leaders. Arguably though it was the government’s decision to end more than 90 per cent of USAID's foreign aid contracts – which fund humanitarian projects in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Europe, including Ukraine – that sparked the most controversy.
Angela Stent, a Russian foreign policy expert and senior non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution in the US, says stripping back federal funding to USAID as well as media outlets like Radio Free Europe and Voice of America signal the new administration’s resolve to roll back decades of international alliances. ‘What you essentially have is a country that over 80 years built up a very robust and successful alliance system that abided by certain international rules,’ she says. ‘It was a multilateral country that understood the attraction of soft power, but Trump views other countries as exploiting the US and not paying their fair share. What he's doing now is consciously dismantling that successful system. Who knows what he's going to put in its place.’
Stent says the administration’s pursuit of the ‘America First’ agenda risks ‘abandoning all ideas of interdependence and the international rule of law’ as regards US foreign policy. ‘That's all wonderful news for Putin,’ she says, ‘I would say the Kremlin cannot believe its luck.’
The soft power retreat of the US since Trump re-entered the White House is not only affecting great power dynamics with Russia, says Ruth Deyermond, a Senior Lecturer at the Department of War Studies at King's College London. ‘This time last year it would have been unimaginable that we would be seriously talking about whether other states of NATO are going to be able to support Canada if the US tries to invade it, or thinking about European security where the US is not only not an ally, but perhaps a threat,’ she says. ‘This shows how fast things have changed. None of that is good for America, but very, very good for China of course.’
I would say the Kremlin cannot believe its luck
Angela Stent
Senior non-resident fellow, the Brookings Institution
Robert Russell, senior counsel at the RS Russell Professional Corporation in Ontario, Canada, believes the US government’s actions may inadvertently help China strengthen its own sphere of influence both north and south of the US border. ‘The US is already starting to lose influence in a lot of countries – Canada, Panama, other South American countries – because China stepped in,’ he says. ‘This is an attempt to reverse that and an attempt to bully as opposed to an attempt to get along. Personally I don't think it'll work. Historically it never has.’
Stent has studied previous attempts by US administrations to ‘reset’ relations with Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. 'Everything failed,’ she says. ‘One of the underlying reasons was that US presidents had a fundamentally different view of the drivers of world politics than Russia did. Now we have an administration, or particularly a president, that actually shares the Putin view.’
Where this leaves the prospects of ending the Russia-Ukraine war is still unclear. Deyermond is sceptical that any brokered agreement will provide credible and sustainable security guarantees for Europe, let alone Ukraine. ‘Putin’s got what he wanted, which is a fundamental reshaping of the global order by weakening America and creating or rather benefiting from an American government that is now speaking Russia's language and has Russia's world view,’ she says. ‘That's already an enormous gain for Russia.’
US foreign policy decisions and federal budget cuts are already jeopardising efforts to hold perpetrators of war crimes in Ukraine to account. In early February the US announced it was re-imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court, which issued an arrest warrant for the Russian president in March 2023.
Funding has already stopped to a humanitarian research lab at Yale University which exposed Russia's deportation of children from occupied areas of Ukraine. The US Department of Justice has also said it will withdraw from the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine (ICPA).
Kirsty Sutherland, Co-Chair of the IBA War Crimes Committee and barrister at 9BR Chambers in London, says these changes will have a detrimental impact on Ukraine and other countries struggling to challenge authoritarian regimes. ‘The cuts have massive security and humanitarian implications that cut across the world and the aid freeze has already had a huge impact on Ukraine,’ she says. ‘My bigger concern is that [America’s] behaviour is giving licence to all the other demagogues around the world. That's probably the most serious, destabilising impact.’
Both Sutherland and Russell voice concern that the Trump administration’s actions are rapidly undermining global trust in US governance. ‘The US is not a trusted party anymore,’ says Russell, who also co-chairs the IBA North American Regional Forum.
Russell believes it’s important for the wider legal profession to call out Trump’s continued attacks on the rule of law and constitutional checks and balances. ‘Even if our American friends can't be as vocal at the moment,’ he says, ‘we can't stay quiet, this is the way bullies operate – they keep people from talking out. If this becomes a trend, which it looks like it could become, this will be very dangerous worldwide.’