Stefan Wolff has spent three decades studying the fracture lines of European security — from the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia to the Russian aggression against Ukraine. His analyses of Ukraine do not trade in the usual optimism or alarm; they map the institutional terrain that determines whether political gestures translate into durable outcomes.

On the day the EU formally unlocked its €90 billion loan to Kyiv following the removal of Hungary’s veto, Stefan and his long-time collaborator Tetyana Malyarenko apply that lens to a question that many headlines are already answering too quickly: does Orbán’s exit actually change Ukraine’s trajectory toward EU membership? The answer — as readers of Navigating the Vortex will not be surprised to find — is considerably more complicated than it appears.

The veto falls — but the coalition that replaces it is not unified

As widely expected, the EU has unlocked the disbursement of its previously agreed €90 billion loan to Ukraine. Together with the approval of the 20th package of sanctions against Russia, this is good news for Brussels. It became possible after Hungary dropped its opposition following a change of government after recent parliamentary elections. How many more such decisions the union will be able to make, and how fast, remains to be seen.

Former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán may have been the most vocal disrupter of the EU’s Ukraine policy, but he was not the only one. Former close allies of his — Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic and Robert Fico in Slovakia — stay in power. Another election in Bulgaria on April 19 returned the arguably Russia-leaning former president, Rumen Radev, as the likely next prime minister in Sofia.

None of these are as explicitly hardline as Orbán was. But the combined ability of ‘Ukraine-sceptics’ to at least water down EU policy — limiting or conditioning aid for Ukraine and potentially delaying or softening sanctions on Russia — remains real. So, for Ukraine the news is also rather more mixed than the headline of the end of the Hungarian veto would suggest.

“The combined ability of ‘Ukraine-sceptics’ to at least water down EU policy — limiting or conditioning aid for Ukraine and potentially delaying or softening sanctions on Russia — remains real.”

The divergence on membership is the deeper problem

Granted, the disbursement of the €90 billion will help Kyiv plug critical financing gaps over the next several years. However, Orbán’s exit doesn’t deal with other critical challenges in the EU-Ukraine relationship, especially regarding the divergent views on Ukraine’s path to EU membership.

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Apart from Kyiv’s most ardent Baltic supporters, scepticism about Ukraine’s membership abounds. Some EU member states — like France and Germany — have already made it clear where they stand regarding the union’s future relationship with Ukraine. For them, it’s about due process and avoiding shortcuts. At best, they seem to contemplate a somewhat enhanced status for Ukraine within the EU in the interim.

Others hold more Ukraine-sceptical positions, especially regarding certain policy areas that they consider core national interests. For example, with parliamentary elections in Poland scheduled for 2027, it is unlikely that even the current clearly pro-European government of Donald Tusk will endorse the early and full access for Ukrainian agricultural products to the EU market or the application of the bloc’s common agricultural policy.

This scepticism in national capitals potentially also complicates relations between member states and EU institutions in Brussels. After a meeting on the sidelines of the EU leaders’ summit, European Council president António Costa, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky called “for the opening of negotiation clusters without delay”. But the power to decide on this lies with member states’ foreign ministers who are likely to vote on the issue at the end of May. If they approve, this will be the next important move in Ukraine’s accession process. But it’s only the first step in what could be a protracted journey.

Common cause — and where it breaks down

On average, any country’s journey from application to accession has gotten longer and longer since the end of the Cold War. Sixteen countries have joined the EU since 1995. Apart from Ukraine, there are eight more official candidate countries and one applicant — all at different stages of the process and with vastly divergent prospects of successfully completing their accession negotiations.

Ukraine’s prospects might be above average, but Zelensky’s ambition to achieve membership by 2030 seems more unrealistic than ever. With his timeline knocked off course and even the terms of membership unclear, the question arises how Ukrainians will respond to this.

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The EU and Ukraine both see Russia as an existential threat. And both agree that Ukrainians’ defence of their country is crucial for European security. This has made it easy to reach an understanding that Europe will financially and politically support Ukraine’s effort to defeat Russia and open the doors to EU membership. This basic understanding remains intact. But translating it into concrete policies has revealed important divisions about the affordability of financial commitments and the timelines and conditions for Ukraine’s EU accession.

“Zelensky’s ambition to achieve membership by 2030 seems more unrealistic than ever.”

The compromise trap

As always, the EU will hash out a compromise that articulates the lowest common denominator between those that prefer a swift accession for Ukraine, and those that oppose the watering down of accession conditions. It remains to be seen whether this compromise will be palatable to Ukrainians.

Individual Ukrainians would gain access to the benefits of EU citizenship — the ability to live and work in the EU. But Ukraine as a country would not enjoy the benefits of full and equal state membership — including voting rights on EU legislation and the automatic disbursement of EU structural funds.

It’s questionable whether this is economically viable for Ukraine. The country has already suffered a serious loss of human capital — on the frontlines and through emigration. If this were to continue, let alone accelerate if Ukraine’s young people were offered free movement, it would seriously weaken the country’s resilience in the face of Russia’s continuing onslaught.

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This, in turn, could add to narratives inside and outside Ukraine that question the possibility of continued resistance and urge seeking a settlement with Russia. Pro-Russian arguments could well be strengthened by blaming the EU for weakening Ukraine by luring its young and talented workforce into the bloc while denying full membership to Ukraine as a country, casting further doubt about the dependability of the west as a credible partner.

“Declining trust in the EU and a desire for rapprochement with Russia would ultimately reinforce the idea of positioning Ukraine as a bridge between Russia and the west — the approach that already failed in 2014.”

Declining trust in the EU and a desire for rapprochement with Russia would ultimately reinforce the idea of positioning Ukraine as a bridge between Russia and the west. This was the approach tried, under significantly better circumstances, in the first two decades after Ukraine’s independence. As the EU-27 decide how to move forward, they need to remember that this Ukraine-as-a-bridge approach already failed once in 2014 — with the devastating consequences of this failure only becoming fully apparent in 2022. There is nothing to suggest that this approach would fare any better if it were tried again.

This analysis draws on an article published in The Conversation on 24 April 2026.

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Keir Starmer told the Commons that he is not going to yield to pressure from Donald Trump over the Iran war, after the president threatened he could change the terms of the US–UK trade deal. Last night Donald Trump said talks between the United States and Iran could restart in the next two days, following their collapse in Islamabad on Sunday. Yesterday, at Turning Point USA in Georgia, Vice President JD Vance said that the president wants to strike what he called a “grand bargain”. This comes as America enforces its naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz — it has seen some ships getting through, including a Chinese-linked tanker, while others have turned back.

Click to view this as an interactive chart

Q. Iranian officials, when asked about these new talks, say they’ve received no new information. Have you any idea what is actually going on? What’s the latest here?

A. Well, I think what’s going on is that we have quite a number of back-channel talks again, mediated by Pakistan. These have apparently been going on since the breakdown of the talks over the weekend, and it seems that at least some of the gaps between what the Americans demanded and the Iranians were willing to accept seem to have been narrowing on this very crucial issue of Iran’s nuclear programme. So I think there is some progress here. But it’s not entirely clear what Donald Trump now has in mind with this so-called grand bargain that JD Vance floated yesterday. Nor is it really clear what the American exit strategy at the moment is.

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Q. I read this morning a rather interesting point — that the Iranian government, or the different parts of it, had no opportunity to get together in Tehran, because of course we now know that the Americans and the Israelis seem to be able to target everybody’s kitchen in that city, and therefore they couldn’t bring the top people together in Iran. But they got together in Islamabad because they felt safe there. Do we actually know who’s in charge? I mean, we haven’t seen the Supreme Leader, and so on and so forth.

A. Well, I think from what we can sort of gather — both in terms of how the Iranian regime generally works, and what the intelligence analysis is in relation to how they had envisaged the transition of leadership — it definitely seems we do have the new Supreme Leader. But there’s very strong influence now of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which really seems to have evolved into the key power broker in Iran. So from that perspective, it is in a way a continuation of the old regime — in my view, probably more hardline, more hostile, but potentially also more paranoid. And what you just said about the way in which the Iranians were able to prepare for this is absolutely correct. They arrived with a delegation of approximately 40 people in Islamabad, and I think partly that was so that they could actually properly coordinate and sit down before they got into the talks with the American interlocutors.

“Ceasefires tend to collapse as a result of minor incidents that then spiral out of control.”

Q. The Iranians say the blockade will constitute a prelude to a violation of the ceasefire — i.e., at some point they’re going to get fed up with this. Mr Trump says it means the war is over. Can they both be right?

A. Well, in Trump’s world, everything is possible. So from that perspective, one of the key challenges we have is that the ceasefire at the moment is still in place for another roughly two weeks. From that perspective, there is a potential that a deal could be wrapped up by then. There’s also a possibility that the ceasefire might be extended. But I think the key thing to bear in mind is that ceasefires tend to collapse as a result of minor incidents that then spiral out of control. So I think it’s less the question of whether there is a deal by the time the ceasefire comes to an end — if there is enough momentum in the talks, it would be very easy for the sides to extend the ceasefire. But if one of the enforcement operations that the Americans are currently running in terms of the blockade of Iranian ports spirals out of control, I think that could signal the end of the ceasefire and we could see a full resumption of hostilities.

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“In Trump’s world, everything is possible.”

Q. There’s another actor here for whom this matters: China. They’ve condemned the blockade as dangerous and irresponsible. How long are they going to put up with this? If there is a blockade on Iranian oil, roughly 80% of it goes to China — and it constitutes something like 15% of China’s energy imports. How long are they going to put up with it?

A. Well, I think the question is at what point they will actually be able to do anything credible about it. The Chinese are clearly reluctant to be drawn into this — not just militarily, but also in terms of any mediation effort. And I think what this reveals in a broader sense is that China is not the kind of global leader that Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, aspires to be. There simply doesn’t seem to be either the inclination or the capacity on the Chinese side to do anything about either the blockade or the war, or the broader escalation of tensions in the Middle East that we have seen over the past year.

“China is not yet the kind of global leader that Xi Jinping aspires to be.”

Professor Stefan Wolff is co-founder of Navigating the Vortex. This interview was conducted by Trevor Phillips on The Times at One, Times Radio.

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Within less than 24 hours, United States President Donald Trump went from threatening that Iran’s “whole civilisation will die tonight” to announcing a two-week ceasefire, subject to “the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz.” Another six hours later, he mused that “this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!!”

That golden vision quickly disappeared behind the smoke of a massive Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, exposing a major flaw in Mr Trump’s deal with Iran — no explicit inclusion of Israel — and laid bare just how his administration lacks a coherent strategy for the Middle East as a whole.

Iran called Israeli attacks in Lebanon a “grave violation” of the deal and warned of “strong responses”.

The US and Israel have insisted the ceasefire did not include Lebanon. Mr Trump called it a “separate skirmish”, keeping Lebanon distinct from Iran while urging Israel to scale back its attacks to help with US-Iran peace talks over the weekend, which subsequently collapsed over Iran’s nuclear programme and prompted the US president to impose his own blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. In parallel to this escalation, Trump continues to float ideas about a grand bargain with Iran and a resumption of talks with Tehran.

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If Trump’s intention is to buy himself time to secure a halfway intact deal and walk away from an unpopular war, then Israel’s continuing war in Lebanon is a major liability for him. This is hardly surprising for three reasons.

First, Israel’s objectives do not align well with Mr Trump’s war goals that have been shifting since the first US strikes on Feb 28.

The US president now seems more concerned with the economic backlash – domestic pump prices, consumer inflation and the volatile stock market. This could explain why he readily agreed to a truce that leaves him in a much weaker negotiation position. If the Strait of Hormuz reopens, it will make it more difficult for him to restart the war.

Israel, by contrast, views the war as an existential conflict. The minimum victory from an Israeli perspective is a substantially weakened regime in Tehran, deprived of its current military capabilities, of its regional proxies and most importantly, of any meaningful capacity to rebuild them.

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For Tel Aviv, a ceasefire is but a pause to rearm and regroup. The easiest way out of the current pause in the war would be to get Iran to restart the war and bring Mr Trump back into military action.

Second, Israel’s continuing attacks on Hezbollah serve a different function.

To Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this is part of a survival strategy that is predicated on the creation of ever-larger buffer zones around Israel – in Lebanon, where attacks are currently focused, but also in Gaza, the West Bank and Syria.

Israel has vowed to occupy the parts of south Lebanon it currently controls and has been carrying out ground incursions into southwestern Syria. An Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire has officially been in place since the end of November 2024, though this was never fully implemented or respected by either side.

This strategy predates the current war with Iran, with public calls for the annexation of southern Lebanon by one of Mr Netanyahu’s coalition partners going back to March 2023.

And it is likely to outlive the US war with Iran, especially if a deal that Mr Trump negotiates leaves the Iranian regime with enough capacity to continue supporting its regional proxy forces.

Third, the reaction of other countries in the region, especially the Gulf states, is something of a wild card.

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Initially opposed to the war against Iran, Tehran’s direct attacks on their critical energy and water infrastructure have likely hardened their opposition to the Iranian regime.

With Mr Trump now potentially walking away from an essentially unfinished project of regime degradation — let alone regime change — it could leave them more vulnerable and exposed. This is likely to be one reason for now confirmed talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The Gulf states will have little sympathy for either Israel or Hezbollah, but they are heavily dependent on a return to calm and stability in the region. They will likely see Mr Trump as a less dependable ally but will also be less dependable allies for him.

How these tensions play out in the coming weeks and months will be critical for another one of Mr Trump’s “peace projects” — Gaza.

A ceasefire has been in place in the strip since Oct 10, 2025, after a two-year war. And the Gulf states, in particular, are meant to play a major role in the region’s recovery.

But the Iran war has diverted resources and attention away from the implementation of the second phase of the Gaza deal, which is more complex than pausing hostilities and exchanging hostages and prisoners.

Mr Netanyahu might soon find himself in a situation where he is not just fighting a war in Lebanon but where full-on confrontation with Hamas resumes in Gaza. Israel is capable of fighting such a two-front war, but more easily so if he can further weaken Hezbollah now.

For that reason alone, any pause to Israeli strikes in Lebanon is unlikely to lead to a sustainable peace. And if the US does withdraw from the Iran war in these conditions, peace will also be less attainable for the region it leaves behind.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by Channel News Asia on April 11, 2026.

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When Hungarians are heading to the polls on 12 April to elect a new prime minister, the world will be watching. This may sound exaggerated, but these parliamentary elections are about much more than simply whether the incumbent prime minister, Viktor Orbán, will serve another term as his country’s leader.

His main challenger, Péter Magyar, until two years ago was a close ally of the Hungarian prime minister. On some key issues — future oil purchases from Russia, resisting fast-track EU accession for Ukraine — Magyar is a continuity candidate who, at best, signals moderation, rather than radical change. If he fails to win a two-thirds majority, which would allow him to change the constitution and undo many of the deeply undemocratic changes Orbán has made to Hungary’s political system, Magyar’s hands will also be tied domestically and he may not even be able to deliver on his key campaign promise — to clean up the systemic corruption that has thrived under Orbán.

In fact, while important, the outcome of the elections is almost secondary in a bigger picture of an election campaign that has revealed much about the broader, and increasingly fraught, geopolitical dynamics of geopolitical dynamics of European politics.

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Throughout his campaign, Orbán leaned into the close relationship he has built with Trump over many years. This is not surprising. The US president publicly endorsed him twice — first in February and then again in March. Trump also dispatched both his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and vice president, J.D. Vance, to Hungary. Vance, visiting Hungary just days before the elections, praised Orbán’s governance model and leadership style as a model for Europe and attacked the EU for trying to influence the outcome of the vote.

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Such blatant election interference by the US in a Nato and EU member state is as unprecedented as it is worrying. It signals a new level of determination by the White House to shape alliances with other far-right populists predicated on the vague notion of “moral cooperation…and the defence of western civilisation”, as Vance put it during his visit to Budapest on April 7.

While Orbán revelled in Washington’s endorsements, his unconditional embrace of Trump is no longer the dominant approach to Washington among Europe’s right-wing populist parties. The appeal of the MAGA movement is rapidly diminishing in Europe. While fulsome in their support for Donald Trump for more than a decade, many European right-wing populists have begun to realise the fraught nature of their association with Trump. “America first” is exactly what it says on the tin, and Trump’s interpretation of what it means makes it even worse for some of his erstwhile supporters.

For Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki, Trump’s cosy relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin runs counter to the almost universal perception of Russia as the main threat to Polish security. For the Danish People’s Party, which sits with the far-right Patriots for Europe faction in the European parliament, Trump’s designs on Greenland were so unpalatable that one of its members, Anders Vistisen, told the US president to “fuck off”.

For, others, like the French National Rally, Trump’s tariff threats have affected some of their core constituencies among farmers. Even more so, Trump’s illegal war against Iran, hugely unpopular across European electorates, exposes the electoral liabilities of an association with Trump.

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This does not make these right-wing populist movements more liberal. They still share a broad resentment of liberalism and what it stands for: open societies, open borders, and a commitment to global institutions. Many of these parties have staked their political legitimacy on the defence of the sovereignty of their individual nation states. They now need to ask themselves whether this sovereignty is perhaps more threatened by Washington — and Moscow — than by Brussels.

The answer to this question will partly be determined by the outcome of Sunday’s elections in Hungary. A win for Orbán would, at a minimum, indicate a sufficient appeal for an autocratic and illiberal model of governance and a residual appeal for an alignment with Trump. But this may not be a logic that prevails for long.

On the one hand, the defeat of Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni in a constitutional referendum that would have increased political influence over courts signals that a sizeable pro-liberal core electorate can still be mobilised.

On the other hand, Orbán’s close relationship with Putin and his persistent obstruction of the EU’s Ukraine policy is likely to leave him more and more isolated, even among otherwise ideologically close right-wing populists. This vulnerability became apparent as early as 2022 when Orbán’s long-time ally Jaroslaw Kaczynski, then Polish deputy prime minister, publicly bashed his pro-Russian leanings.

Divisions over the EU’s Russia policy have exposed one significant faultline among right-wing populist movements across Europe between those seeking accommodation with the Kremlin and those seeking deterrence and containment. The far-right Sweden Democrats, for example, threatened to leave the European Conservatives and Reformists parliamentary bloc in the European parliament if Orbán’s Fidesz party had been allowed to join — precisely because the Hungarian prime minister was seen as too close to Russia.

For these Russia-sceptical parties, Orbán’s alignment with Putin is clearly anathema, and Trump’s rapprochement with the Russian president is likely to cement their weariness of too close an alignment with the White House. Geographical proximity to Russia and a long history of confrontation with Russia will remain powerful drivers for these parties’ foreign and security policies. Ironically, but consistent with general absence of strategic vision in the White House, Trump’s endorsement of Orbán may thus effectively accelerate Orbán’s isolation among right-wing populists in Europe and undermine Washington’s agenda of building a powerful coalition of like-minded illiberal leaders eroding the EU from within.

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These tensions and contradictions at the heart of a supposedly ideologically well-aligned transatlantic populist right movement predate Hungary’s parliamentary elections and they will outlast them. At a time of almost unprecedented global disorder and uncertainty, the battle for Hungary is as much an election campaign as it is part of an ongoing debate over the meaning of the west as a geopolitical project.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on April 9, 2026.

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Instead of bombing Iran back to the Stone Age — as was loudly threatened — there is now to be a deal between the US and the Mullahs. How should this development be assessed? What does it mean for the Middle East, for the standing of the United States in the world, and what lessons are autocrats worldwide drawing from the past few weeks? Constantin Schreiber discussed this with Professor Stefan Wolff from the University of Birmingham. Stefan Wolff is co-founder of Navigating the Vortex , which publishes analysis and assessments on geopolitics and the global economy, and has built a community of over one million people in more than 140 countries.

Q. The stock markets are jubilant, the economy relieved. The Strait of Hormuz may be navigable again. But how does this ceasefire look geopolitically — is it good or bad?

A. Overall, this is initially a positive development — but one must also consider that Donald Trump’s foreign policy is not characterised by great consistency. A somewhat more pessimistic view would be: deferred is not cancelled. We now have a ceasefire for approximately 14 days, but it is entirely unclear what will ultimately be agreed in an actual deal between Washington and Tehran, how far that would be acceptable to both sides, and whether it will lead to a longer-term resolution of the dispute between Iran and the US, but also between Iran and Israel.

“Deferred is not cancelled.”

Q. The Mullah regime has been described as the control centre for terror networks across the entire region. But it now looks as though this regime will in some form remain, even after the war?

A. Yes, absolutely. And it is not just that the regime itself remains — the regime now has considerably stronger incentives to pursue a harder line within the region. There was the agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, brokered by China — a normalisation of relations, an exchange of ambassadors. At the time, it was seen as very positive. But now it has become essentially irrelevant, given the direct conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia. That is an uncertainty the ceasefire announcement does not resolve. At the same time, Israel has confirmed the ceasefire with Iran but insists it does not extend to Lebanon and the conflict with Hezbollah.

Q. You say the Mullah regime now has an incentive to act even more confrontationally in the region. Was the war, then, counterproductive?

A. Absolutely — as is almost every war. And there is also cause to ask whether wars today can be won at all, even by superpowers like the United States. Trump originally insisted on regime change in Tehran, on the destruction of Iran’s nuclear programme, on eliminating Iran’s capacity to develop ballistic missiles. Essentially none of that is now being discussed. What Trump announced overnight on his Truth Social channel is just the vague hope that Iran’s nuclear programme will end — but that is not an immediate improvement compared to the situation before the war, when the universal assessment was that Iran was neither on the verge of building a nuclear bomb, nor that it was even clear Iran was moving in that direction at all.

Q. On the subject of nuclear weapons — there is still around 400 kg of missing highly enriched uranium. How close is Iran actually to developing nuclear weapons?

A. This so called highly-enriched uranium — which at the moment nobody quite knows where it is — is still not at a stage where it could be used immediately to build a nuclear bomb. It could potentially be used for a so-called dirty bomb, but even for that you still need rockets or other means to deliver it. So even the worst scenario one can imagine is not the immediate outbreak of a nuclear confrontation in the Middle East. That does not mean Iran has not thought strategically about maintaining a certain leverage — staying just short of nuclear weapons production capability. But there was no definitive proof that a nuclear strike was imminent, let alone that Iran was on the verge of a nuclear attack against Israel or the United States.

Q. I was on the ground in Israel at the start of the war and witnessed the first waves of Iranian missile attacks. At the time, it was said that within days up to 90% of Iran’s missile launch capabilities would be destroyed. Weeks later Iran is still firing at full capacity. Was there a massive miscalculation?

A. It was impossible to have 100% accurate information about how far Iran’s capacities were developed, or what stocks existed. The clear miscalculation, in my view, was in the access to the enormous underground facilities where Iran stores its missiles and launchers. There was simply no way of knowing how many of those there were, or how many had actually been effectively destroyed. The number of Iranian missiles and drones being sent toward Israel, US bases, and allies in the region has definitely declined — but the overall capacity persists, and one cannot say definitively when Iran will run out of launchers, missiles, or drones, or the capacity to produce more. One of Trump’s stated war goals — reducing Iran’s military capability — has definitely not been achieved.

Q. And yet — given the scale of the underground infrastructure, the tunnel systems, the way Iran has been firing in all directions including at Gulf states — surely removing this regime was the right goal?

A. Absolutely. But the question is whether the currently heightened hostility of the regime was not itself provoked by this war of aggression. That is not to say a longer-term deal could have been made with the regime — even with the old regime under Khamenei senior— I do not think so. But one could possibly have found other and more effective means to remove from the regime both the ability and the incentives to create an entirely new level of misery across the region.

Q. What could that have looked like?

A. One could simply have continued on the diplomatic track. Just before the war began, mediation through Oman had been relatively productive. The Omani foreign minister said literally the night before Trump and Netanyahu launched the attack that they were extremely close to a deal. In my view, what is ultimately achieved in a new agreement between the United States and Iran will be very close to what was already negotiated in 2015 under Barack Obama — but with a ten-year delay, a massive war in the Middle East, and consequences for the global economy that are far from resolved.

“What is ultimately achieved will be very close to what was already negotiated in 2015 under Barack Obama — but with a ten-year delay and a massive war in the Middle East.”

Q. When I speak with Israeli representatives and American security experts, they say the Mullahs are simply a partner you cannot trust — that any deal would be cover for continuing to build toward nuclear weapons. Is that unrealistic?

A. That is by no means unrealistic. Though I would also say the question of trust operates in both directions — how far can Iran trust the United States under Donald Trump to behave constructively, rather than using talks merely as a pause before resuming the war. As for Iran — of course there are massive doubts — but we must keep in mind that for decades there have been fears Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, and yet even today Iran does not have nuclear weapons. The greatest uncertainty exists for Israel, which is far more directly at risk given its geographical proximity. For Israel, what the US is now probably enabling is arguably the worst outcome: a considerably more hostile regime, with sufficient capabilities, remaining in Tehran. That will further increase Israel’s fears — and partly explains why Israel will definitively continue trying to eliminate Hezbollah in Lebanon.

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Q. But it is also tragic for the people of Iran — tens of thousands dead, people who wanted to overthrow this regime, who have been oppressed for decades. A regime so unpopular with its own population.

A. Absolutely. And that underscores the complete loss of confidence in a consistent US foreign policy. The protests in Iran at the start of the year — which by some estimates led to up to 45,000 deaths on the protestors’ side — were partly a direct response to Trump’s promises on social media that help was on the way. That help did not come. In his first statement after the war began on 28 February, regime change in Tehran was clearly stated as a war goal. That is entirely gone now. Trump is in effect negotiating with a regime he has partly destroyed — and that regime’s own capacity to engage constructively in negotiations has been at least decimated.

Q. What does this mean for other authoritarian systems? What have Russia and China learned from the past few weeks?

A. I think different conclusions are being drawn in Moscow and Beijing. For Moscow, the fundamental lesson is that Trump cannot be trusted — that his foreign policy is entirely inconsistent. That also has consequences for the deal Putin and Trump were trying to arrange, which is not something Moscow can rely on long-term. For Beijing, the lessons are different. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has had massive consequences for the global economy, and for China as the world’s second-largest economy there are direct effects. Beijing can also lean back somewhat, since US leadership capacity has been further eroded — we also see this in how transatlantic relations have suffered. On the other hand, the complete collapse of the existing international order is also problematic for China. If there are no rules that global actors feel bound to respect, that is not good for anyone, including an economy the size of China’s. The challenge for China now is to decide how far it actually wants to take on a global leadership role, and how far it has the capacity to do so. Those questions have not yet been definitively answered in Beijing.

Professor Stefan Wolff is co-founder of Navigating the Vortex. This interview was conducted by Constantin Schreiber. The English-language transcript has been slightly edited for clarity. This episode is also available as a podcast.

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On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched a joint military campaign against Iran — striking its leadership, regime infrastructure, and nuclear programme in the opening hours. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed. Within a few days, the Strait of Hormuz was closed. Oil spiked to $120 a barrel.

We have spent the days since working through what this means — not just for the Middle East, but for energy markets, food systems, the global financial order, nuclear non-proliferation, and the wider trajectory of the Russia–Ukraine war. The consequences are cascading in real time, and the full effects will play out over years, not weeks

Below is our full analysis so far, structured across three tiers: the direct and immediate impacts; the secondary geoeconomic and geopolitical shocks; and the longer-term butterfly effects that this war has already set in motion.

Epic Fury & Its Consequences

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📄 Download the full report — The complete infographic is available as a PDF with hyperlinks

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Tier One: Primary Impacts — Direct & Immediate

Strait of Hormuz Closure

20% of global oil and 20% of global LNG supply transits the Strait of Hormuz daily. There is no viable rerouting option for tankers caught inside the Gulf, and with Iranian forces actively targeting maritime traffic, marine transit has nearly halted through the world’s single most critical energy chokepoint.

Oil Price Shock & Fuel Prices

Brent crude surged from roughly $70 per barrel pre-war to a peak of $120, settling around $100 — a spike larger than the one that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. At the pump, Americans saw the national average rise from $2.98 to $3.58 per gallon, with California hitting $5.34. That is the highest price per gallon since 2024.

Gulf Production Collapse

Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE collectively cut production by approximately 6.7 million barrels per day by 10 March. Saudi Aramco’s Ras Tanura terminal — one of the largest oil export facilities on earth — was shut. Qatar declared LNG force majeure, instantly affecting 20% of world supply.

Aviation Chaos

The airspace of the UAE, Iran, Qatar, and Kuwait closed simultaneously. British Airways, Lufthansa, Virgin Atlantic, Air India, and Cathay Pacific all suspended Middle East services, with knock-on disruption across global transit routes that will take time to resolve.

Decapitation of the Iranian Regime

Ali Khamenei was killed alongside nine or more senior officials — including the army chief and defence minister. This is unprecedented in the modern era. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has stepped into the leadership vacuum and is described by analysts as more hardline and vengeful than his father. The regime has not collapsed. It has radicalised.

Market Shock & Legal Crisis

The Dow Jones fell more than 400 points on 2 March. Central banks globally were placed on emergency watch, with sovereign wealth funds doing urgent scenario analysis. On the legal front: there was no congressional declaration of war, no UN authorisation, and no confirmed imminent threat. The US attacked a sovereign state, raising serious questions about violations of UN Charter Article 2(4) and the 1973 War Powers Act.

Tier Two — Secondary Economic Impacts

Inflation & the Stagflation Spectre

The IMF formula holds that every 10% rise in oil prices produces approximately +0.4% global inflation and −0.15% GDP growth. With oil up nearly 70% from pre-conflict levels, those numbers are not academic. Central bank governors are openly citing the 1970s stagflation episode as the relevant historical parallel — a period from which recovery took a decade.

Food Price Shock

This is the underreported story. 30% of global fertiliser exports transit the Strait of Hormuz. The shipment cutoff translates directly into higher farm production costs, with downstream food price rises expected within six to ten weeks in import-dependent nations. The food shock will outlast the oil shock.

Developing World Crisis

The Philippine peso has dropped to 59.5 PHP/USD, while diesel prices surged +38.6% in the country. Egypt declared a near-emergency. South Korea, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Pakistan have all introduced price caps and fuel rationing. The countries least responsible for this conflict are bearing some of its highest costs.

Europe on the Brink of Recession

European gas prices nearly doubled. The continent is still rebuilding its energy architecture following the decoupling from Russia, with strategic reserves currently limited. The IEA agreed to a strategic release of 400 million barrels of reserves, the largest in history.

The Fed is Caught

The US Federal Reserve faces the classic stagflation trap: cutting rates risks accelerating inflation; raising them risks deepening an employment downturn. Both actions carry severe risks simultaneously, and there is no clean exit from this position.

Tariff Shock Compounding

The Iran war compounds the pre-existing tariff shock from Trump’s trade policy. American households now face simultaneous energy cost spikes and supply chain disruption — a double-squeeze not seen since the 2008 financial crisis.

Tier Two — Secondary Political Impacts

Russia Wins the Lottery

Washington announced a 30-day waiver for countries to buy sanctioned Russian oil and petroleum products currently stranded at sea. Russia is simultaneously providing targeting intelligence to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard while having its economic constraints eased by the US. The European Council’s assessment is blunt: “So far, only one winner — Russia.”

Ukraine Sacrificed

Abu Dhabi peace talks planned for early March were disrupted. Patriot interceptor stocks — Ukraine’s primary shield against Russian ballistic missiles — are being drained by the Iran war. Trump has resumed blaming Ukraine for failing to accept Putin’s terms.

Nuclear Non-Proliferation at Risk

The IAEA chief warned that the strikes risk collapsing the global non-proliferation regime. Iran was bombed despite having no confirmed nuclear weapon. The lesson this writes for every other state watching — including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and South Korea — is devastatingly simple: only nuclear weapons deter US military action.

Sanctions as a Tool — Broken

If the US lifts Russian oil sanctions to solve a crisis caused by its own military action, the signal to every future adversary is permanent: create a crisis large enough and Western sanctions dissolve. The cornerstone of non-military foreign policy leverage has been weakened, possibly fatally.

US Domestic Blowback

Fuel up 20%. Over 1,800 Iranians killed in the first 14 days, including children at a school. Russia handed a windfall. No congressional authorisation. Every element of Operation Epic Fury creates midterm vulnerability in November 2026, with downstream effects on trade policy, NATO commitments, and global economic governance.

Tier Three — Butterfly Effects and Long-term Consequences

Taiwan Challenge

Two US navy aircraft carrier groups are in the Persian Gulf. Patriot stocks are dangerously down. US political capital is consumed. The Taiwan Strait is less defended than at any recent moment. If the Iran war extends past summer 2026, the window of reduced US Pacific capacity becomes strategically tempting to Beijing. China is treating every engagement against US carrier strike groups as live-fire doctrine refinement for a Taiwan scenario.

Nuclear Proliferation Cascade

The lesson that nuclear weapons are the only insurance policy against a US attack is now written in fire over Tehran. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and South Korea have all previously signalled nuclear hedging interest. If the non-proliferation regime collapses, the world twenty years hence is fundamentally more dangerous.

Russia’s War on Ukraine Gets Longer

Higher oil revenues, eased sanctions, diverted US military attention, depleted Patriot stocks, stalled peace talks, European financial support for Ukraine under strain — every variable moves in Russia’s favour. Russia benefits from Iran bleeding US and allied forces and drain interceptor stocks. The Iran conflict is likely to make Russia’s war on Ukraine both longer and harder to resolve.

Energy Transition Leap

This is the one consequence that cuts differently. The oil price spike makes renewables dramatically more cost-competitive. European and Asian governments will likely accelerate domestic clean energy investment regardless of climate politics. Long-term losers: petro-states. Long-term winners: clean energy industries and the fastest-moving economies.

Key Variables — Determining the Severity of Outcomes

• Whether the Strait of Hormuz remains closed

• Whether Iran’s regime collapses, escalates, or seeks negotiation

• Whether IEA release of strategic reserves at historic scale calms or spooks markets

• Whether the US can feasibly escort tankers through the Strait of Hormuz

• Whether conflict spreads via Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, or Yemen proxy escalation

• Whether Russian sanctions relief becomes permanent

• Whether Ukraine talks can resume

• Whether China interprets US overextension as a strategic window in Taiwan

• Whether ceasefire terms preserve or further degrade the IAEA non-proliferation framework

• Whether the US recommits to non-proliferation diplomacy or accelerates NPT regime collapse

We will continue to track this as it develops. The situation remains highly fluid — the Strait of Hormuz closure, the Iranian political transition (if any), the status of Ukrainian air defences, and the position of the Gulf states are all moving simultaneously. The range of possible outcomes from here is exceptionally wide.

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Epic Fury & Its Consequences

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As the war in the Middle East spreads and intensifies, the one in Ukraine continues. While geographically some 2,500 km (1,600 miles) apart, the impact of US president Donald Trump’s latest military adventure on the Russian war against Ukraine will be acutely felt across several areas. In the short term, the Kremlin will probably feel emboldened to double down on its aggression, but this is unlikely to shift the dial significantly towards Russian victory in the long term.

The targeted killing of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by a precision US strike will likely have reminded the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, of his reportedly “apoplectic” reaction to the killing of the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011. Comments on social media from the likes of far-right nationalist Alexander Dugin, who posted, that “one by one, our allies are being systematically destroyed”, and former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who alleged that the “talks with Iran were just a cover”, are unlikely to have steadied Putin’s nerves.

The Russian leader’s fears about being next after a string of US successes targeting foreign leaders may have been played up somewhat by the western media, but they are not completely unfounded. Putin continues to walk a fine line between paranoia and his outrage over the killing of Khamenei, which he condemned in a condolence letter to the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, as a “cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law”. But he did not mention Trump or the US as the culprits.

Concerns about his own longevity, however, will not be the only things weighing on Putin’s mind and compelling him to double down on his war against Ukraine. The escalation of violence in the Middle East also offers Russia several opportunities in its war of aggression against Ukraine — at least in the short term.

The sharp rise in oil prices throws Moscow a new lifeline for financing its ongoing war. Not only did prices spike — with Brent crude oil hitting $85 per barrel for the first time in almost two years — but the sudden, and likely lasting, inability of Iran to export oil will also have a major impact on China, which bought over 80% of all Iranian maritime oil exports, equivalent to some 13% of Chinese maritime oil imports.

China has large stockpiles of oil which will allow it to ride out current inflation. But Beijing is now likely to double down on its energy relationship with Russia. This will serve both countries well: Russia will deepen its economic ties with China and rebalance the relationship, while China will tap into a reliable supply line that will not be as vulnerable to being choked off as maritime supply routes in a future confrontation with the US.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian strikes against oil and gas facilities across the Gulf countries have destabilised global energy markets. With some 30% of global seaborne oil trade and 20% of all trade in liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade affected, this represents a market opportunity for Russia and its shadow fleet of tankers, at least in the short term, given that Moscow retains sufficient refining and port capacity — despite a long Ukrainian air campaign against the country’s oil infrastructure.

Another likely benefit the Kremlin will reap are problems with weapons supplies to Ukraine. While insisting that the US had “virtually unlimited supply” of weapons and munitions, Trump also conceded that there were areas “at the highest end, (where) we have a good supply, but are not where we want to be”. This is a view echoed within the Pentagon where officials are keen to discuss an acceleration of weapons production with key arms manufacturers.

With large parts of western military support for Ukraine consisting of US weapons paid for by Kyiv’s European allies via NATO’s Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) initiative, shortages on the US side will immediately impact the flow of vital equipment to Ukraine. Even deliveries already agreed could be derailed. In June 2025, during the so-called 12-day war with Iran, the US diverted some 20,000 missiles from Ukraine to the Middle East.

Russia is unlikely to face any similar constraints. On the contrary: a Russian-Iranian deal in late 2022 enabled Moscow to acquire technology from Tehran that allowed the Kremlin to kick-start domestic drone production based on the Iranian Shahed design. Not only has Russia improved the drones, it now also produces them faster and cheaper than Iran ever did.

If western military supplies to Ukraine now dry up even temporarily as a result of an increased focus of the US on the Middle East, Russia’s air superiority and the devastating impact its relentless campaign of missile and drone strikes has had on Ukraine is likely to continue unabated for now.

At the same time, however, this drives home the point that dependence on the US puts Ukraine and its European allies in an unacceptably precarious position. Ukraine’s own defence industry already meets half of the country’s needs, and the fallout from Iran war will likely further accelerate homegrown military production and innovation across Europe as the traditional US-European alliance frays.

In the short term, however, this ongoing transatlantic decoupling will serve Moscow’s interests more than Kyiv’s. European countries, including the UK, France, and Spain, have been critical of US and Israeli attacks on Iran, earning them the expected rebukes from Trump.

The White House might be too busy to follow through on threats “to cut off all trade” with Spain, but it will equally not put much effort into already fraught mediation efforts between Russia and Ukraine. Given the dismal performance of Trump’s own efforts and those of his negotiation team, as well as the pressure that the US had put on Ukraine rather than Russia to cut a deal, this may not be much of a loss.

But US diplomatic disengagement from the Russian war against Ukraine still poses a problem as Washington is the only player with the leverage to bring both sides together and — if Trump were to decide so — achieve a just and sustainable peace agreement between them.

Ukraine and its European partners may be able to prevent a Russian victory, but it will take some time for them to develop the military and political muscle to force Russia to make meaningful concessions that could pave the way towards a durable and acceptable settlement.

If nothing else, Trump’s war of choice in the Middle East is another factor in prolonging the war against Ukraine. Regardless of its short-term effects, it will not make a Russian victory more likely. But it has thrown the world into additional turmoil for no good reason whatsoever, and it will delay the much-needed restoration of peace in Europe.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on March 5, 2026.

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As Ukraine heads into a fifth year of defending itself against the unprovoked Russian full-scale invasion, the prospects of a just and sustainable peace agreement remain distant. On the ground, the land war continues to be in a stalemate, with the pace of Russian territorial gains now slower than some of the most protracted battles of trench warfare during the First World War.

In the air war, Moscow has demonstrated a ruthless and brutal efficiency in destroying much of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. The repeated destruction of power generation and distribution facilities has taken a serious toll on the Ukrainian population and economy. Yet beyond inflicting hardship, these strikes have not had the kind of strategic effect Russia needs to achieve in order to turn the military tables decisively on Ukraine.

All in all, the Kremlin narrative of inevitable victory looks more like Soviet-style propaganda than a reflection of battlefield reality. President Vladimir Putin, however, is not the only world leader guilty of wishful thinking. His American counterpart, President Donald Trump, at times, also appears to make policy untethered from the real world.

First, there was his claim on the campaign trail that he could end the fighting in Ukraine within 24 hours. Upon returning to the White House, Trump issued multiple ceasefire demands and associated deadlines that Putin simply ignored without incurring any cost. The latest plan from Washington is for a peace deal to be concluded between Moscow and Kyiv, approved by a Ukrainian referendum, and followed by national elections — all before June.

The timeline for the American plan aside, a US-mediated deal between Russia and Ukraine remains possible. However, it is unlikely that it will take the form of the just and sustainable settlement that Kyiv and its European allies demand. If it comes to pass as a result of the ongoing trilateral negotiations currently underway, it is highly probable that Ukraine will have to make significant concessions on territory in exchange for US-backed security guarantees and a mostly European-financed package of post-war reconstruction measures.

An additional bitter pill to swallow for Ukraine and Europe would be an unashamed US-Russia rapprochement with a simultaneous end to American sanctions on Russia, a flurry of economic deals between the two countries, and pressure on Ukraine’s other allies to follow suit, at least on sanctions relief and possibly on the release and return of Russian frozen assets.

The other — and more likely — possibility is that not even a bad deal will be forthcoming. The Russian side has given no indication that it is willing to make any significant concessions. Moscow’s position is that Kyiv should relinquish control over the entirety of the Donbas, including territory in Ukraine’s fortress belt that Moscow has so far been unable to take by military force. In return, or under the terms of what Russia refers to as the ‘Anchorage formula’ allegedly agreed between Putin and Trump at their Alaska summit in August 2025, the Kremlin is apparently willing to freeze the current frontlines elsewhere along the more than 1,000 km long line of contact.

Even at the very remote possibility that this was acceptable, or that Ukraine would be pressured into agreeing to such a deal, this would hardly seal a settlement, given that Russia continues to oppose the security guarantees currently on the table between Kyiv and its Western partners. Without them, territorial concessions make no sense for Ukraine, especially as there is no imminent danger of a collapse of Ukrainian defences.

The Hungarian blockage of the EU’s €90 billion loan to Ukraine — likely instigated by the country’s Prime Minister, Victor Orbán, at the behest of both Trump, whose Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, had visited the country just before the announcement, and Putin, with whom Orban has had close ties for a long time — is not going to change Kyiv’s calculations significantly. Not only is the EU surely going to find a work-around to deal with this blockage but Orbán’s days as Ukraine’s principal foe inside the EU might be numbered given that he is trailing in opinion polls ahead of April’s parliamentary elections. As any embrace of and by Trump and Putin is unlikely to improve Orbán’s prospects for another term, the Hungarian blockage might ultimately prove temporary regardless of the outcome of April’s elections.

If, as is therefore likely, Trump’s latest deadline passes without a deal being reached, the question arises what next? Trump could simply walk away from the war. He threatened to do so in the past but a likely mix of ego and the prospect of economic deals in the event of peace prevented him from doing so. Nothing suggests at the moment that this time will be different. There might be some angry exchanges and finger pointing, but after that, the current, deeply flawed negotiation process is likely to resume in some form because the alternatives are worse for all sides, Trump included.

The US President could walk away and finally realise that Putin is simply not interested in peace, no matter what is on offer. But this will not lead Trump to ramp up pressure on Russia in a significant way. He has had reason and opportunity to do so on multiple occasions since returning to the White House in January 2025. He has not done so then, and there is no reason to believe that he would do so now.

Trump could then instead pursue a bilateral deal with Russia. But without European participation, such a deal will be of limited benefit to both sides. The bulk of Russian foreign assets remain frozen in Europe and would very likely stay so in the absence of coordinated transatlantic action. Russia has little of value to export to the US and lacks the market conditions to make it an attractive destination for US foreign direct investment. Some US companies might return or expand their still existing operations in the country, but these will hardly be the trillion-dollar deals that Trump, and possibly Putin, envisage.

Even if any such separate US-Russia deal would be of limited economic value, it would still be politically damaging, especially to transatlantic relations. That, however, also makes it less likely to happen. By June, primaries in the United States ahead of the November midterm elections will largely have concluded and Republican candidates will be less susceptible to pressure from the White House. As was already obvious in the context of Trump’s threats to take over Greenland, if necessary by force, there remains a segment of foreign policy realists among congressional Republicans who, unshackled from the leverage Trump may have held over them in the primaries, are likely to push back more against his most disruptive foreign policy stances, including when it comes to any dealing with Russia reached at the expense of the transatlantic alliance.

All of these scenarios, and a likely myriad of more or less minor variations of them, contain the ingredients of a British and European strategy for what is probably another year of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The first is the utmost importance of unity behind Ukraine’s defence efforts. Across the multiple overlapping multi- and mini-lateral formats of EU, NATO, coalition of the willing, etc., there needs to be a clear message to Russia, the US, and Ukraine alike: Russia’s aggression is also Europe’s problem and will be treated as such for as long as the threat from Moscow — not just against Ukraine but against the fundamental tenets of the European security order as such — remains credible.

This means, second, that Ukraine needs to be supported materially with military and economic aid and politically when it comes to pushing back against both American and Russian designs for a deal to serve the interests of the current incumbents of the White House and the Kremlin first. For a more effective political pushback, Europe needs to cultivate relations with those in the US foreign policy establishment who continue to see value in established alliance structures, especially if they reflect more balanced burden-sharing.

Third, the UK and its European allies also need to think beyond Ukraine — because this is what Russia is doing as well, despite the demands of its war of aggression. Though it need not be limited to the EU-Russia borderlands, this is where the focus needs to remain for the foreseeable future.

Moldova, for example, remains particularly vulnerable to Russian interference, notwithstanding the success of pro-European forces in the country in presidential and parliamentary elections in 2024 and 2025. Moscow still retains multiple channels of influence, including through the unresolved conflict in the Transnistrian region, which, if left to fester, could significantly impede Moldova’s EU accession process and provide opportunities for renewed destabilisation.

Similarly, parliamentary elections in Armenia in June will create an opportunity for the Kremlin to destabilise another of its neighbours that has increasingly turned away from Moscow and towards Brussels. Given the role of the US, and of Trump personally, in the peace process between Armenia and Azerbaijan, this also offers an opportunity for the UK and Europe to cooperate with Washington in working towards constraining Russian influence in the South Caucasus region as a whole.

A fourth and final ingredient in an evolving British and European strategy is a focus on becoming a credible player in the emerging new international order. This requires a certain amount of realism and modesty in aspirations and messaging. The UK is not pursuing a fast track to rejoining the EU, but closer alignment and cooperation across the English Channel is essential.

Equally important is that declarations of intent, be they about a UK-EU reset or an expanding coalition of the willing, are followed with concrete action — especially on investment in defence and a more credible European deterrence posture. This means both a more capable defence industrial base and doctrine for the kind of war being fought in Ukraine and improved defence readiness and resilience at the level of society.

A reconstituted European alliance, with a coalition at its heart that is not just willing but also capable of deterring Russia, is not beyond the reach of the UK and Europe. It may not be, nor ever become, a traditional great power, but by continuing to back Ukraine today and integrating it tomorrow, it will feel, and be, less vulnerable to the whims of the current or any future mercurial leader in the White House or the Kremlin. Crucially, it preserves the opportunity to rebuild the transatlantic alliance in the future, and to do so on stronger European foundations.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Foreign Policy Centre on February 24, 2026.

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On 13 February 2026, we spoke with John Nagle and Tamirace Fakhoury to mark the publication of the latest edition of Ethnopolitics — a special issue on Contesting Power-sharing: Contentious Politics in Divided Societies, co-edited by John and Simon Mabon, to which Tamirace contributed the article “How Do Semi-Authoritarian Regimes Defeat Uprisings? Lebanon’s 2019 Uprising and the Dramaturgical Performances that the Post-Civil War Regime Plays”.

John is Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University Belfast, as well as a Fellow of the Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice and an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Irish Studies. More information about him is available here.

Tamirace joined us from Massachusetts in the United States where she works as Associate Professor of International Politics and Conflict at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. You can find out more about her by following this link.

The articles we discuss in this episode can be accessed for free on our website:

• John Nagle and Simon Mabon, “Contesting Power-sharing: Contentious Politics in Divided Societies”

• John Nagle and Cera Murtagh, “Contesting Power-Sharing? LGBTQ+ Activism and the Sexual Citizenship of Consociationalism”

• Tamirace Fakhoury, “How Do Semi-Authoritarian Regimes Defeat Uprisings? Lebanon’s 2019 Uprising and the Dramaturgical Performances that the Post-Civil War Regime Plays”

The whole special issue, Contesting Power-sharing: Contentious Politics in Divided Societies (Ethnopolitics 25(2), 2026), can be accessed here.

John’s 2009 article, “Potemkin Village: Neo-liberalism and Peace-building in Northern Ireland?” (Ethnopolitics 8(2), 2009, 173-190), is available here.

You can listen to episode two of Navigating the Vortex | Ethnopolitics Edition, which contains the whole interview with Tamirace and John, here for free.

We hope you’ll share Navigating the Vortex | Ethnopolitics Edition with anyone you think might find it of interest. Also, you can listen to our podcast editions via the website and on all major podcast platforms, including:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Amazon/Audible

• PocketCasts

• Overcast

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John is Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University Belfast, as well as a Fellow of the Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice and an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Irish Studies. More information about him is available here.

Tamirace joined us from Massachusetts in the United States where she works as Associate Professor of International Politics and Conflict at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. You can find out more about her by following this link.

The articles we discuss in this episode can be accessed for free on our website:

• John Nagle and Simon Mabon, “Contesting Power-sharing: Contentious Politics in Divided Societies”

• John Nagle and Cera Murtagh, “Contesting Power-Sharing? LGBTQ+ Activism and the Sexual Citizenship of Consociationalism”

• Tamirace Fakhoury, “How Do Semi-Authoritarian Regimes Defeat Uprisings? Lebanon’s 2019 Uprising and the Dramaturgical Performances that the Post-Civil War Regime Plays”

The whole special issue, Contesting Power-sharing: Contentious Politics in Divided Societies (Ethnopolitics 25(2), 2026), can be accessed here.

John’s 2009 article, “Potemkin Village: Neo-liberalism and Peace-building in Northern Ireland?” (Ethnopolitics 8(2), 2009, 173-190), is available here.

We hope you’ll share Navigating the Vortex | Ethnopolitics Edition with anyone you think might find it of interest. Also, you can listen to our podcast editions via the website and on all major podcast platforms, including:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Amazon/Audible

• PocketCasts

• Overcast

Share

The 25th Winter Meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) should have been a moment of celebration and of reflection on past successes in advancing the organisation’s broader goals of comprehensive, cooperative, and indivisible security. Yet, much like the 50th anniversary of the organisation in 2025, it was anything but. The OSCE continues to be in a deep crisis.

Triggered by the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, this is first and foremost a crisis of paralysis, with meaningful dialogue and decision-making among participating States in Vienna largely stalled.

The OSCE continues to function operationally, with at least some meaningful and substantive business being conducted in the organisation’s specialised institutions — the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), the High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM), and the Representative on Freedom of the Media — as well as in its eleven field operations in eastern and southeastern Europe and Central Asia.

The existing crisis of paralysis is further compounded by the wider crisis of multilateralism and the deliberate dismantling of the rules-based international order, which did not begin with, but has significantly accelerated since, the return of Donald Trump to the White House 13 months ago.

The implications for the OSCE became particularly evident at the Ministerial Council in Vienna on 4 December 2025, when a representative of the US State Department called for “a reduction of at least €15 million in the annual budget by December 2026”, a shift in priorities away from politically contentious issues, and renewed engagement with Russia.

Implied, if not explicitly stated, was the threat of US withdrawal from the OSCE: “If the OSCE continues on its current path, the United States will continue to assess our participation and support.”

As with previous periods of institutional strain, the key question that arises from it is not new: can participating States reform the organisation and help it find a way back to being an effective contributor to security across its vast geographic area, stretching from Vancouver to Vladivostok? And perhaps more importantly, should they?

The priorities of this year’s Swiss Chairpersonship under the theme “Dialogue – Trust – Security” certainly suggest that a serious attempt will be made. Key objectives include safeguarding the OSCE’s operational capacity (“preserve the basic instruments … and to ensure their financing”) and revitalising multilateral diplomacy (“foster an open dialogue on security”, “maintain channels of communication on security, including between States in conflict”).

Another priority — to work for lasting peace on the basis of the Helsinki principles (enshrined in the organisation’s 1975 founding act) — envisages that “the OSCE is mobilising its instruments across all three dimensions to support a just and lasting peace in Ukraine”. Not only does this naturally align with the very purpose of the organisation but it also could give the OSCE a new lease of life in light of recent developments in the war against Ukraine.

The prospect of elections, a referendum, and a possible peace deal could give the OSCE and its participating States an opportunity to bring to bear its experience and expertise in election observation, ceasefire monitoring, demining, on-the-ground mediation, and post-conflict institution building.

However, not all of the OSCE’s past experiences in these areas were stellar successes. Getting the organisation into a position where it could meaningfully contribute to a lasting peace in Ukraine will require pain-staking, detail-oriented work in the corridors of the OSCE secretariat and the Hofburg in Vienna, not the megaphone diplomacy that tends to take place in the meetings of the Permanent Council or the Forum for Security Cooperation.

For the UK, the OSCE – notwithstanding the organisation’s ongoing crisis – still represents an important forum to articulate and pursue its national interests. While just one among several mini-lateralisms that have recently emerged — including the ‘coalition of the willing’, the European Political Community, the Ukraine Defence Contact (or Ramstein) Group — it is unique in the sense that it is one of the few remaining fora where direct dialogue with Russia is not just possible but embedded in the organisation’s founding purpose.

Such dialogue must, however, serve a concrete purpose, and it needs to be based on clear principles. As Chair of the Forum for Security Co-operation in the last trimester of 2026, and as a member of the Forum’s Troika in the preceding and subsequent trimesters, the UK is well positioned to support the Swiss Chairpersonship’s reform agenda and to contribute to restoring the OSCE’s operational effectiveness. This is further enhanced by the fact that the Head of the UK Delegation to the OSCE, Ambassador Neil Holland, will also continue in his role as Chair of the Security Committee, one of the informal subsidiary bodies of the Permanent Council, specifically charged with discussing politico-military issues and supporting the preparation of the Annual Security Review Conference, which provides participating States with an opportunity to discuss regional security issues in plenary form.

The UK’s long-standing experience in multilateral diplomacy, its role as one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and its still pivotal role at the nexus of Euro-Atlantic security create a unique opportunity for making a lasting contribution to making the OSCE relevant again as a forum for dialogue among all its participating States. This will not be easy and success will not be guaranteed, but it will be a worthwhile investment of UK diplomatic resources and capacity.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Foreign Policy Centre on February 20, 2026.

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The inaugural meeting of Donald Trump’s board of peace in Washington on February 19 caps a busy week for US diplomacy — though not necessarily for the country’s professional diplomats, who have been largely excluded from the close-knit circle of the US president’s personal envoys: his former real-estate business partner Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Earlier in the week, Witkoff and Kushner attended two separate sets of negotiations in the Swiss city of Geneva. They first sat down for indirect talks with Iran, before then leading negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, and eventually dashing back to Washington to attend the board of peace meeting.

At best, Witkoff and Kushner have a mixed track record of diplomatic success. Kushner was a key mediator in the Abraham accords during Trump’s first term in office. Designed to normalise ties between Israel and other states across the Middle East, the accords have failed to create sustainable momentum for regional peace and stability.

So far, only the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan have established full diplomatic relations with Israel. Saudi Arabia — the most influential player in the Middle East by most measures — has not followed suit.

Witkoff has been credited with playing a key role in mediating the January 2025 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. He was also involved in the negotiations around the Gaza peace plan later that year, which, with endorsement from the UN security council, gave rise to Trump’s board of peace.

Both men have also been at the centre of efforts to end Russia’s war against Ukraine. Witkoff has been involved from the start of Trump’s second term, with Kushner joining more recently at the end of 2025.

Yet, neither Kushner’s addition to the team, nor a greater focus on a parallel track of negotiations between Washington and Moscow, focused on the mutual economic opportunities that peace between Russia and Ukraine would create, have brought the warring sides closer to a deal.

Taken together, the outsized roles that Witkoff and Kushner are playing in US diplomacy — despite their limited success — expose a fundamental misunderstanding of what peace making involves.

Peace deals are generally complex. To get one across the line requires mediators and support teams that are deeply knowledgeable about the conflict in which they are mediating and have a detailed understanding of how a plethora of issues can be resolved in a technical sense.

Above all, mediators need to be aware of what has driven the parties to conflict and what might induce them to cooperate. While material incentives, such as the promise of economic development in exchange for peace, are important, warring parties often also have symbolic and psychological needs. These also need to be addressed to ensure the parties sign on the dotted line and will commit to peace in the long term.

Having just two people with little prior experience of diplomacy and almost no expertise on either of the two conflicts they are currently mediating simultaneously is a recipe for failure. It is likely to lead to a deal being pushed that is simply unattainable in the short term because at least one party will not sign.

And if a deal, against the odds, is agreed because of high pressure on one or both sides, it is unlikely to be sustainable in the long term because at least one of the parties will probably defect from it, and violence will resume. This is particularly likely if a deal lacks sufficient guarantees and enforcement mechanisms, because this lowers the threshold for defection for parties who are not negotiating in good faith.

It is easy to see how such calculations apply in the context of the war against Ukraine. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has repeatedly made it clear that the Kremlin’s demands — especially Ukrainian withdrawal from territory in the east it has so far successfully defended against Russia’s aggression — are not something he will agree to.

Even if he did, such a deal would almost certainly be rejected in a referendum. It will be psychologically close to impossible for Ukraine and Ukrainians to accept the humiliation of giving up something they have not lost, to reward Moscow’s aggression, and to be sold down the river by Washington in pursuit of an economic side-deal with Russia.

Similarly, it is easy to see that Russia is not negotiating in good faith. Moscow is presenting Kyiv with an ultimatum, while destroying as much as possible of the country — both to weaken Ukraine’s will to resist and to undermine its future recovery. Add to that Russian resistance to credible security guarantees, and the true intent of Russia’s negotiation strategy turns out to be not the achievement of sustainable peace, but preparation for the next war.

If and when negotiations on Iran or Ukraine break down, or if and when the agreements they might achieve collapse, supporting frameworks will need to be in place that can manage the consequences. Trump’s board of peace, which looks like a privatised version of the UN, is unsuitable for such a task.

Not only does it lack the legitimacy the UN has. There is also no indication that its members — be they the countries attending the inaugural meeting or the people serving at Trump’s pleasure in the board’s executive structures — have the intent or capacity to take on any actual peace-making role.

The board’s membership is, numerically at least, far below Trump’s aspirations. Only 24 of the 60 or so invitations sent out have been accepted. Traditional US allies in Europe and the G7 are absent. Among the attendees at the Washington meeting were the likes of Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Egypt, and even Belarus, a country sanctioned by the US and Europe for its support of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

At the end of the day, the inaugural meeting of Trump’s board of peace may be mostly remembered for its chairman-for-life threatening Iran with war. Apart from that, it might be able to establish a free economic zone here or there and generate some real-estate development. But much of that will not be done to achieve peace, but to benefit its members’ wallets or egos — or both.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on February 19, 2026.

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In a surprise announcement on February 10, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said that his administration was preparing to hold presidential elections in Ukraine before the middle of May. Alongside the elections, a referendum on a peace deal with Russia is also likely to be held.

This is a dramatic shift in Zelensky’s stance: the president had long resisted elections under conditions of war despite the fact that his mandate ran out in 2024. One possible explanation for the turn-around is that US pressure on Ukraine is having some real effects now. A few days ago, Zelensky himself indicated as much, saying that his US counterpart, Donald Trump, was pushing for a negotiated end to the war by June.

Trump’s timeline — probably with an eye towards mid-term elections in the US where the White House would like to present a Ukraine deal as another major foreign-policy success — is one thing. The feasibility of elections and even more so of a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine is quite another one.

In fact, there are so many uncertainties about both that whatever plan Trump’s team around Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner has dreamed up will very likely unravel very quickly.

The first problem is all about the logistics of the elections.

Who will be eligible to vote and where, and who might monitor the elections to ensure that they are free and fair? Apart from the hundreds of thousands serving in the trenches defending Ukraine against Russia’s aggression, there are also 3.7 million internally displaced Ukrainians and almost 6 million refugees abroad. And then there are the approximately 5 million Ukrainians currently living under Russian occupation.

Add to this the uncertainty over a Russian ceasefire to facilitate not only the conduct of the elections themselves but also of a free and fair election campaign, and the prospects of organising any vote, let alone one of such consequence for the country and its people, look worse than daunting.

In addition, there is the near-certainty of large-scale Russian election interference, similar to what Moldova experienced during its presidential elections and European integration referendum in 2024, and again during parliamentary elections in 2025. Russian attempts to influence the outcomes of all of these votes in Moldova were shown to have clear limitations, but this will not deter Russia from trying again, and harder, in Ukraine.

A second problem is the feasibility of any peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

At present, it is hard to imagine that the gaps between Russia and Ukraine can be bridged in a meaningful way that does not cross either side’s red lines — especially on territory and on security guarantees.

And even if it were possible to find a form of words to which the Russian and Ukrainian presidents could both sign up, the third problem is the approval of any such deal in a referendum in Ukraine.

Likely to be held on the same day as the presidential elections, a referendum would face all the same logistical pressures. What is more, the question of who would be eligible to cast their vote would be even more acute. How legal and legitimate would the result be if large numbers of eligible people were not able to participate? This will be a particularly challenging question for those Ukrainians who currently live under Russian occupation. Their fate would most likely be determined in a referendum in which they had no say.

Nor is it clear what would happen if a majority of Ukrainians rejected the settlement put to them in the referendum. Would it mean a return to negotiations? Possibly. Or an immediate resumption of the war? Probably.

A third option would be the continuation of a shaky ceasefire and the implementation of parts of any settlement beneficial to both sides, such as prisoner exchanges. As was the case with the ill-fated Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015, a return to all-out war, however, would remain firmly in the cards.

So far, Ukraine’s European partners have mostly been on the sidelines of negotiations. They may not be a direct party to the war, but they clearly have a stake in the peace terms that might now be hammered out between Moscow, Kyiv and Washington.

The mostly European coalition of the willing is expected to play a key role in the implementation of American-backed security guarantees and to do the heavy lifting on Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction.

After more than 12 months of hostility from Washington towards Brussels, there is little trust left in the dependability of US backing for Ukraine.

The fourth problem, therefore, is that European acquiescence to a US-imposed peace deal cannot anymore be taken for granted.

This does not necessarily mean that a deal is impossible, but it will almost certainly be so without Europe having played a part in its negotiation.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, recently dispatched a senior diplomat to Moscow for talks in the Kremlin. And the country’s former permanent representative on the UN Security Council, Nicolas de Rivière, has been appointed as the new French ambassador to Moscow. This clearly signals the importance that Paris assigns to direct contacts with Russia.

The EU, according to its foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, might also appoint a special representative for contacts with Moscow — but of course only after the bloc has agreed on the messages it wants to send, which could take some time. But despite the fact that Brussels holds some powerful cards, including frozen Russian assets and a wide range of sanctions, there is no indication for now that either Washington or Moscow are willing to grant the EU a seat at the table.

The fifth and final problem is whether Russia will accept even the best possible terms in a peace agreement and stick to it.

The US push to seal a deal in the coming months suggests that there is some confidence in the White House that a deal acceptable to the Kremlin can be forged and that Ukraine and its allies can be coerced into going along with it.

There is a lot in what has transpired over the last few days that will be much to the liking of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin: the promise of presidential elections in Ukraine, the US using its support for security guarantees as leverage to push Kyiv towards accepting more and more compromises, and the parallel US-Russia negotiations on an economic deal.

Putin has got to this situation without making any concessions. He has played his US counterpart perfectly so far, and there is no indication that he is done playing him. Trump is almost certain to continue to do Putin’s bidding. If and when his grandiose plan unravels, he is more likely to walk away than to put pressure on the Russian president.

It is not clear what the back-up plan is for Zelensky and his European allies.

Given that there is little to suggest that the current American plan and timeline for a deal will lead to a happy ending, they need to come up with, and act on, credible contingencies very soon.

Offering logistically almost impossible elections and a referendum with a highly uncertain outcome would be a smart way for the Ukrainian president and his European allies to buy themselves the time they need for a new strategy.

Putin may think that he has successfully tricked Trump into doing his bidding. But on this occasion, Zelensky may have outsmarted them both, albeit at the price of the war against his country continuing.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on February 12, 2026.

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Russia, Ukraine and the US have met for a second time in as many weeks to discuss a possible cessation of hostilities. The meeting got off to the same familiar and depressing start as the first one: on February 3, the night before the three sides gathered in Abu Dhabi, Russia launched a massive barrage of 521 drones and cruise missiles, once again targeting critical civilian infrastructure in Ukrainian cities, including the capital, Kyiv. And while the talks were in full swing, Russia followed up on its nighttime strikes by deploying cluster munitions against a market in Druzhkivka, one of the embattled cities in what remains of Ukraine’s fortress belt in the Donetsk region.

This was clearly not the most auspicious start to talks aimed at stopping the fighting that has now lasted almost four years.

Add to that the fact that the basic negotiating positions of Moscow and Kyiv remain as far apart as ever, and any hopes for an imminent breakthrough to peace in Ukraine quickly evaporate.

The more technical discussions on military issues, including specifics of a ceasefire and how it would be monitored, appear to be generally more constructive. Apart from a prisoner exchange, however, no further agreement was reached. But even such small confidence-building steps are useful. And even where no deal is feasible for now, identifying likely issues and mapping solutions that are potentially acceptable to both Moscow and Kyiv is important preparatory work for a future settlement.

Without a breakthrough on political issues, however, it does not get the conflict parties closer to a peace deal. These political issues remain centred on the question of territory. The Kremlin insists on the so-called “Anchorage formula” according to which Ukraine withdraws from those areas of Donetsk it still controls and Russia agrees to freezing the frontlines elsewhere.

Kyiv has repeatedly made clear that this is unacceptable. US mediation efforts, to date, have been unable to break the resulting deadlock.

The political impasse, however, clearly extends beyond territory.

Without naming any specific blockages to a deal, Yury Ushakov, a key advisor to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, recently noted that there were other contested issues holding up agreement. Very likely among them are the security guarantees that Ukraine has been demanding to make sure that Russia will not renege on a settlement.

These future security guarantees appear to have been agreed between Kyiv and its European and American partners. They involve a gradually escalating response to Russian ceasefire violations, ultimately leading to direct European and US military involvement.

The Kremlin’s opposition to such an arrangement is hardly surprising. But it casts further doubt on how sincere Putin is about a durable peace agreement with Ukraine. In turn, it explains Kyiv’s reluctance to make any concessions, let alone those on the current scale of Russian demands.

What complicates these discussions further is the fact that the US is linking the provision of security guarantees for Kyiv to Ukrainian concessions on territory along the lines of the Moscow-endorsed Anchorage formula.

This might seem a sensible and fair compromise, but there are some obvious problems with it. First, it relies on the dependability of the US as an ultimate security backstop. But confidence, especially in Kyiv and other European capitals, in how dependable US pledges actually are, has been severely eroded during the first 12 months of Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.

Second, Europe is moving painfully slowly to fill this confidence gap and the additional void left by the US decision to halt funding to Ukraine. The details of a €90 billion loan agreed in principle by EU leaders in December, have only just been finalised. It will take yet more time for money to be available and to be used, including for essential arms purchases for Kyiv.

Doubts — as voiced by Nato secretary-general, Mark Rutte — also persist about whether, even in the long term, Europe will be able to develop sufficient and sufficiently independent military capabilities outside the transatlantic alliance.

As a result, there are few incentives for Kyiv to bow to US pressure and give up more territory to Russia in exchange for security guarantees that may not be as ironclad in reality as they appear on paper. Likewise, it makes little sense for Moscow to agree even to a hypothetical western security guarantee for Ukraine, which could thwart future Russian expansionism, in exchange for territory that the Kremlin remains confident it can take by force if necessary.

Russia will feel further reassured in its assumption that it can outlast Ukraine on the battlefield and at the negotiation table by developments in both Washington and Beijing.

In the US capital, there is still no progress on a new sanctions bill which has been languishing in the US senate since last spring, and which was allegedly “greenlit” by the White House four weeks ago. In addition, Trump’s top Ukraine negotiators — Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — are now also engaged in negotiations with Iran. This further diminishes already sparse American diplomatic capacity and the ability to devote the time, resources and dogged determination likely required to pull off a deal between Russia and Ukraine.

Following Xi Jinping’s public affirmation of Chinese support for Russia in a video call between the two countries’ presidents on the anniversary of the declaration of their “no-limits partnership” in February 2022, Putin is unlikely to feel any real pressure to change his position from Beijing either.

With Russia’s intransigence thus reinforced and Ukrainian fears to be sold down the river by one of its key allies further entrenched, any claims of progress in the negotiations in Abu Dhabi are therefore at best over-optimistic and at worst self-deluding.

Given that such claims currently come prominently from Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev, this once more underscores that US mediation between Russia and Ukraine serves the primary purpose of restoring economic relations between Moscow and Washington. Like Kushner and Witkoff, and ultimately Trump himself, Dmitriev is first and foremost a businessman.

This parallel track of Russia-US economic talks explains Trump’s reluctance to put any meaningful pressure on Moscow. More importantly, however, it also betrays the deep irony of the US approach to ending the war. As Europe painfully learned over more than two decades of engagement with Putin’s Russia, economic integration does not curb the Kremlin’s expansionism. It enables it.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on February 5, 2026.

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The first official and direct three-way talks between the United States, Russia and Ukraine since the beginning of Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 had been a rare sign of progress in an otherwise bleak start to the new year. But they ended without a breakthrough on January 24, with follow-up discussions before too long likely, but not certain.

It is hardly surprising that a peace agreement continues to elude the negotiators and mediators.

The fundamental disagreement between Moscow and Kyiv over the status of territory remains. Russia formally annexed four regions of Ukraine in September 2022 — in addition to the Crimean peninsula which it has occupied illegally since 2014 — but still does not fully control them after nearly four years of fighting.

Russian President Vladimir Putin appears convinced that his troops will eventually be able to capture the remaining Kyiv-controlled parts of the Donetsk region — some 5,000 square kilometres — just as they have done with almost all of the neighbouring region of Luhansk. At the current rate of Russia’s military progress, this could easily take another year; so Mr Putin would likely prefer to get his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to withdraw his forces.

Mr Zelenskyy rejects the idea of giving up any territory that Russia has not been able to take by force — not least because there is no guarantee that the Kremlin would stop there. Ukrainian public opinion is largely behind him on this. In addition, the Ukrainian president cannot simply give away territory on his own. The Ukrainian constitution requires that any such deal be approved in a referendum.

More important still are strategic considerations. Those areas in the Donbas that Ukrainian forces still hold are part of the country’s best developed defensive lines, including several so-called fortress cities. Handing these over would leave Kyiv much more exposed in the future and give Moscow an improved staging ground for renewed offensives.

This makes an agreement on post-war security guarantees all the more crucial for Ukraine. After meeting with his American counterpart, Donald Trump, at the World Economic Forum in Davos just a day before the talks in Abu Dhabi, Mr Zelenskyy said that an agreement on security guarantees from the United States had been finalised. That may be so, but it has not been officially signed as yet, making any Ukrainian concessions even more risky.

As a result of their respective calculations, neither side appears to be willing to budge.

All of this should be fairly obvious to any mediator, and it is hard to see how the American team, led by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, can be blind to these facts.

If they were hoping to apply pressure on either or both sides to make concessions, their strategy has not, for now, worked.

Even in the chaotic foreign policy process of the current administration in the White House, it seems clear that American pressure on Russia is unlikely to be forthcoming in any meaningful way — and the Kremlin appears acutely aware of this.

Mr Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, made it very plain before the start of the trilateral discussions in Abu Dhabi on Friday that Russia’s demand for full control of the Donbas remained in place. Overnight, Russia then carried out another devastating strike against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which is already teetering on the brink of collapse.

In addition, Russia continues to frame its current ‘offer’ to freeze the frontlines in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in exchange for full control of Donetsk as the “Anchorage formula”, a term the Kremlin uses to refer to the agreement that Mr Putin and Mr Trump apparently struck at their summit in Alaska last August.

By couching its territorial demands in terms of the “Anchorage formula”, Moscow tries to establish a fait accompli that gives the impression of a properly negotiated deal, and crucially one agreed by the American president. It flatters the dealmaker in Mr Trump, presents a potentially significant win for Mr Putin, and casts Mr Zelenskyy in the light of the unreasonable spoiler if he rejects an ‘agreement’ he had no part in negotiating.

These are not the signals of good-faith negotiations.

After more than a year of so far fruitless efforts, Mr Trump’s team also still does not seem to understand that pressure on Kyiv alone is not going to get them, or anyone else, closer to a deal. US support remains important for Ukraine and gives Washington leverage over Mr Zelenskyy, but it is no longer the only game in town.

Mr Zelenskyy’s European partners remain steadfast in their backing and are picking up their game, albeit only slowly. The fact that Europe stayed united and faced Mr Trump down over his threats to annex Greenland — if need be, by force — will also weigh positively in Mr Zelenskyy’s calculations. With an even deeper rupture in the transatlantic alliance avoided for now, Europe will be both less distracted by threats from America and more focused on becoming strategically independent from its erstwhile senior partner in Washington.

It is also not entirely clear that American mediators would be ready for an actual deal between Russia and Ukraine.

The agreement on American security guarantees Mr Zelenskyy spoke of after meeting Mr Trump in Davos still requires the leaders to sign on the dotted line. Given the way in which Mr Trump has treated America’s hitherto closest allies just over the past few weeks, one might wonder how much American security guarantees can really still be relied upon.

A deal on rebuilding Ukraine in the event of a peace agreement is also nowhere near in sight. Moscow balks at the idea of paying reparations to Kyiv and instead suggested that some US$5 billion worth of its assets that are currently frozen in the United States should be used for the reconstruction of the Ukrainian territories that the Kremlin has illegally occupied. This is clearly a non-starter for Kyiv and Brussels alike.

The fact that all sides agreed in Abu Dhabi that they will continue their discussions is undoubtedly positive. But whether this implies that an actual negotiation process will now get under way and what its format and direction will be, no one knows. And thus, as Ukrainians continue to suffer through a very harsh winter, a ceasefire, let alone a peace agreement, seem as out of reach as ever.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by Channel News Asia on January 27, 2026.

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The week that marked the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s return to the White House for a second term as US president was particularly turbulent, even by his standards and especially for the transatlantic alliance. If there was even a hint of Trump being capable of self-reflection, one could add that it was a rather embarrassing week for him — on at least three counts.

First, after much bluster about Greenland, including hints that if push came to shove he would authorise a military operation to get his hands on territory of long-standing Nato ally Denmark, Trump made a first climb-down and ruled out the use of force in his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday. He also dropped the threat of imposing tariffs on the eight European Nato members who dispatched a small number of military personnel to Greenland in a highly symbolic show of support.

Second, and contrary to earlier pronouncements that the American security guarantee for Europe was conditional on allies’ financial contributions to Nato, he insisted that the US would always be there for its Nato allies. But, as is usually the case with Trump, it was one step forward, two steps back as he cast doubt on them reciprocating in an American hour of need.

Worse still, in a subsequent interview with Fox News, he denigrated the sacrifices of allied servicemen and women in Afghanistan, prompting a chorus of justified outrage from across the alliance. After a phone call with the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, on Saturday, and an expression of concern in a message conveyed “through backchannels” from King Charles III, Trump changed his tune. He did not exactly apologise, but he used his TruthSocial platform to praise the bravery and sacrifices of British soldiers in Afghanistan. No other Nato ally has received even that acknowledgement yet.

Third, by the end of the week we were also reminded that progress on one of Trump’s flagship projects — making peace between Russia and Ukraine — is as elusive as ever. The US president appeared to have had a constructive meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, in Davos. But a much-touted agreement on US security guarantees has not been officially signed yet. And no progress has been made either on a deal for Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction.

Two rounds of talks between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in Abu Dhabi over the weekend failed to produce any concrete results apart from an agreement to meet again the following weekend. While Trump’s mediators tried, unsuccessfully, to push Moscow and Kyiv to compromise over the future of Ukrainian territory claimed but not controlled by Russia, the Kremlin’s relentless air and ground campaigns continued unabated — to bomb Ukraine into submission now and increase the costs for its post-war reconstruction later.

Contrary to how swiftly he threatened the imposition of tariffs on supposed allies for sending a few dozen soldiers to Greenland, Trump failed, yet again, to get tough on Putin. There is still no sign of a vote on a bipartisan sanctions bill which Trump allegedly greenlit in early January. The bill, in the making since the spring, aims to cripple Russia’s ability to finance its war against Ukraine and “to provide sustainable levels of security assistance to Ukraine to provide a credible defensive and deterrent capability.”

One could, therefore, argue that it was a bad week for Trump and a much better week for the rest of the western alliance. After all, Nato is still intact. Europe seems to have discovered more of a backbone and, perhaps more importantly, that pushing back against Trump is not futile. The US president has neither abandoned Zelensky nor walked away from mediating between Russia and Ukraine. And Trump might soon get distracted by plans for regime change in Cuba or Iran, preventing him from wreaking any more havoc in Europe.

But such a view underestimates both the damage already done to relations with the US and that yet to come. Consider the issue of Greenland. Trump’s concession to renounce the use of force was, at best, only a partial climb-down. Throughout his speech, Trump reiterated several times that he still wants “right, title and ownership” of Greenland. And as it’s not at all clear what his framework deal actually entails, his closing comments on Greenland included an unambiguous warning to other Nato members that they can “say ‘yes‘ and we will be very appreciative, or ... ‘no’ and we will remember.”

There is already, it seems, some advance remembering happening in Trump’s renamed Department of War, which released its new national defence strategy on Friday night. According to the document, the Pentagon will provide Trump “with credible options to guarantee U.S. military and commercial access to key terrain from the Arctic to South America, especially Greenland, the Gulf of America, and the Panama Canal.”

On Nato, Trump’s ambivalence towards the alliance goes deeper than his most recent comments. Critically, it is the casual nature with which Trump treats this core pillar of international security that has fundamentally undermined the trustworthiness of the US as a dependable partner. Combined with the efforts to set up his board of peace as an alternative to the UN, there can be little doubt left that the US president has his sights trained on the very institutions that Washington spent decades building.

When it comes to Ukraine, meanwhile, it seems that Trump uses the promise of signing the agreement on security guarantees to get Zelensky to make concessions on territory that Russia’s president Putin can bank — before balking at any security guarantees. Trump, judging by past performance, is then likely to water down what he apparently agreed now in order not to jeopardise a deal with Putin and Zelensky is, yet again, left in the cold.

For Trump, ending the war more and more seems primarily as a way to enable future business deals with Russia, even if it means sacrificing 20% of Ukrainian territory and the long-term security of European allies in the process.

The conclusion for European capitals to draw from a week high drama should not be that Trump and the relationship with the US can be managed with a new approach that adds a dose of push-back to the usual flattery and supplication. After one year of Trump 2.0, America-first has become America-only, and Europe and its few scattered allies elsewhere need to start acting as if they were alone in a hostile world. Because they are.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on January 26, 2026.

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Even before marking the first anniversary of his return to the White House, United States President Donald Trump doubled down on his controversial and highly damaging bid to take over Greenland, warning on January 19 that being snubbed for the Nobel peace prize last year has made him no longer obliged to think “purely of peace”.

Three days later, during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mr Trump backed down — somewhat — and ruled out the use of force in his pursuit of the world’s largest island. It was a climbdown of sorts, even perhaps mildly embarrassing for the US president, and not the first time that a combination of push-back from Congress and NATO allies together with an adverse market reaction made him change course.

So, how did we get there and is this the end of the Greenland saga?

Buoyed by what he clearly saw as a successful military operation in Venezuela and the subsequent apprehension of a Russian-flagged oil tanker in the North Atlantic, the US president seemed determined to annex Greenland — a move he has claimed is essential to US national security — no matter the consequences.

And these consequences were beginning to look more serious than ever.

A meeting of officials from the US, Denmark and Greenland on January 14 had failed to reach any breakthrough. The following day, several European countries deployed small contingents of their armed forces to Greenland, an autonomous territory of NATO and EU member Denmark.

The public message attached to this was that the Europeans were serious about their commitment to Arctic security — allegedly one of Mr Trump’s key concerns. But combined with combative rhetoric about Danish sovereignty and Greenlandic self-determination, Europe also sent a message to Mr Trump that he had crossed a line that could and would no longer be ignored.

Europe’s tougher stance on Greenland’s future did not mean that war between the US and its erstwhile European NATO allies was imminent or that the end of the transatlantic alliance was nearing, although the latter suddenly seemed a much more realistic possibility.

Trump’s initial response to this European escalation — as he must have perceived it —was threatening to impose an additional 10 per cent levy on all goods imported from the eight European countries that he saw as the main obstacle between him and his ambitions in Greenland. These new tariffs were to take effect on February 1, before an increase to 25 per cent in June.

The European response, at least rhetorically, was swift and clear: Europe will not be blackmailed. Even Italy’s leader, Giorgia Meloni, who is relatively close to Mr Trump, said the tariffs “would be a mistake”.

What it lacks in military heft, the European Union makes up in economic leverage, and in a potential trade war, the EU would definitely be a more formidable opponent for Mr Trump.

It still has some €93 billion worth of tariffs on US goods at the ready which Brussels drew up in response to Mr Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs last April.

The EU took a pause on the implementation of these retaliatory tariffs when it managed to iron out a trade deal with the US last August. That six-month pause is running out on February 7. Unless there is a vote to extend the moratorium on their implementation, they will automatically come into force. This is an important consideration for both Brussels and Washington: it removes the threat of Mr Trump’s European allies, like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, blocking their extension.

An EU retaliation could quickly lead to an escalating tariff war. Given European dependence on the US for exports and imports of US-made weapons, Mr Trump, in all likelihood, has escalation dominance in a transatlantic trade war. This could then force the EU to deploy its ultimate trade weapon or the “big bazooka” — the so-called anti-coercion instrument.

Initially devised to deal with China, the powerful but never-before-used instrument gives the European Commission powers in various areas, including restricting US access to EU public contracts, investment and even trade in services, one of the few areas where the US runs a surplus.

Brussels might have had stronger cards in an economic war with the US, but if push came to shove, it would probably still have lost. But a win for Washington would also have come at a high cost for the US, never mind the irreparable damage to the West as we know it.

So, given these likely and unpleasant outcomes, why was Europe pushing back so hard, and why now?

First, it seemed clear that the strategy of flattering and placating Mr Trump had reached its use-by date. Europe is unlikely to be able to prevent a determined American president from taking Greenland, but it clearly also no longer wanted to pretend that these were just cultural misunderstandings among friends that could be magically fixed.

Second, part of the European strategy was playing for time. Mr Trump is keen on Greenland now, but who is to say that he might not think of an easier win elsewhere that would be less controversial domestically, say taking on cartels in Colombia or Mexico, or pushing for regime change in Cuba or Iran?

The closer the US gets to the mid-term elections in November, the more Mr Trump, and key parts of the MAGA establishment, will want to avoid debates that are difficult to sell as “America First”.

Third, still with at least half an eye on the US mid-term elections, the thinking in Brussels very likely also was that time that Europe buys itself and Greenland now is also time that will help already obvious bipartisan opposition to Mr Trump’s annexation plans in the US Congress to become more effective.

Ultimately, it seemed likely that a case could be made that any security concerns regarding Greenland are best dealt with through NATO, while the consequences for the US for going it alone — including paralysis, if not the outright dismantling of the transatlantic alliance — would harm America in its competition with China and severely limit its ability to project power outside the Western Hemisphere.

These calculations appear to have borne fruit. By the end of Mr Trump’s anniversary week, the threat of a military operation to take over Greenland was off the table and the idea of imposing tariffs on European NATO allies had been abandoned.

But what has crucially not been abandoned is Mr Trump’s desire to get his way on Greenland. He still wants “right, title and ownership” of Greenland, warning NATO members in his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos that they can “say ‘yes‘ and we will be very appreciative, or ... ‘no’ and we will remember.”

Europeans should also take note that the new national defence strategy of the US, released late on Friday night, commits the Pentagon to provide Mr Trump “with credible options to guarantee U.S. military and commercial access to key terrain from the Arctic to South America, especially Greenland, the Gulf of America, and the Panama Canal.”

European pushback against Mr Trump’s obsession with Greenland has produced some positive results for now.

It is not clear how long they will last, let alone whether Europe has done enough to persuade Mr Trump to change course permanently and look for other ways to deal with a shared north Atlantic security concern.

If nothing else, having discovered some spine in dealing with Mr Trump pushes Europe further down the line of learning to stand — and walk — on its own feet. And a more formidable European ally might suddenly look more alluring again to Mr Trump or whoever succeeds him in the White House in 2029.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by Channel News Asia on January 21, 2026.

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It is hard to believe that Donald Trump has only been back in the White House for a year. His accomplishments are many — but most of them are of questionable durability or benefit, including for the United States.

Even his UN-endorsed 20-point ceasefire and transition plan for Gaza released on September 29, 2025, is now in danger of being subsumed in yet another grandiose fantasy of the American president: the so-called “board of peace” to be chaired by Trump.

This group of international dignitaries was originally intended to oversee the work of a more technical committee, comprising technocrats responsible for the day-to-day recovery and rebuilding of Gaza. But the board of peace’s charter makes no mention of Gaza at all.

Instead, its opening sentence declares that “durable peace requires pragmatic judgment, common-sense solutions, and the courage to depart from approaches and institutions that have too often failed”.

To make this break with such an unseemly past, the board of peace proclaims itself to be “an international organization” to “secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict” and commits to conducting its operations “in accordance with international law”.

To which the immediate reaction is that unilateralism is increasingly the hallmark of Trump’s second administration. Settling conflicts is the prerogative of the UN. And, over the past year, the US has shown itself to be unconcerned about international law.

Membership of the board is by invitation from the chairman: Donald Trump — who has broad and flexible discretion on how long he will serve for and who will replace him when he does decide to go. Those invited can join for free for three years and buy themselves a permanent seat at the table for US$1 billion (£740 million) — in cash, payable in the first year.

With Trump retaining significant power over the direction of the board and many of its decisions it is not clear what US$1 billion would exactly buy the permanent members of the board — except perhaps a chance to ingratiate themselves with Trump.

There is no question that established institutions have often failed to achieve durable peace. Among such institutions, the UN has been a favourite target for Trump’s criticism and disdain, as evident in a recent directive to cease participating in and funding 31 UN organisations. Among them were the peace-building commission and the peace-building fund, as well as the office of the special representative for children in armed conflict.

The deeper and more tragic irony in this is threefold. First, there is strong evidence that the UN is effective as peace builder, especially after civil war, and that UN peacekeeping does work to keep the peace.

Second, there is no question that the UN does not always succeed in its efforts to achieve peace. But this is as much, if not more often, the fault of its member states. There’s a long history of UN member states blocking security council resolutions, providing only weak mandates or cutting short the duration of UN missions. They have also obstructed operations on the ground, as is evident in the protracted crisis in Sudan, where the UN endlessly debates human suffering but lacks most of the funds to alleviate it.

Third, even though he is unlikely to ever admit it publicly, Trump by now has surely found out for himself that making peace is neither easy nor straightforward despite his claim to have solved eight conflicts.

And the more so if the “pragmatic judgement” and “common-sense solutions” that the charter to his board of peace subscribe to end up being, as seems likely, little more than a thin disguise for highly transactional deals designed to prioritise profitable returns for an America-first agenda.

Part of the reason why the UN has success as a peacemaker and peacebuilder is the fact that it is still seen as relatively legitimate. This is something that is unlikely to be immediately associated with Trump or his board of peace if it ever takes off.

Such scepticism appears well founded, particularly considering that among the invitees to join the board is the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who is not particularly well known for his love of peace. Even Trump, on rare occasions, admittedly, seems to have come to this realisation. But it did not stop him from inviting Putin to join the board of peace.

So, what to make of it all? Is it just another of Trump’s controversial initiatives that he hopes might eventually earn him the Nobel peace prize after all? Is it merely a money-making opportunity for Trump personally? Or is it designed for his political and corporate allies, who might benefit from projects implemented by his board of peace? Ultimately, it might be any of these.

The real question needs to be about the consequences for the current system. What Trump is effectively proposing is to set up a corporate version of the UN, controlled and run by him. That he is capable of such a proposal should not come as a shock after 12 months of Trump 2.0.

More surprising is the notion that other political leaders will support it. This is one of the few opportunities they have to stop him in his tracks. It would not be a cost-free response, as the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has found when he did not appear sufficiently enthusiastic and Trump threatened the immediate imposition of 200% tariffs on French wine.

But more leaders should consider whether they really want to be Trump’s willing executioners when it comes to the UN and instead imagine, to paraphrase a well-known anti-war slogan, what would happen if Trump “gave a board of peace and no one came?”

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on January 21, 2026.

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Russia’s so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine passed a significant milestone on January 13. It has now outlasted the 1,418 days it took Vladimir Putin’s notorious predecessor, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, to bring his war against Nazi Germany to a successful conclusion.

The two wars are hard to compare in any reasonable way. But there are nonetheless some important parallels worth pointing out.

The most wishful parallel is that aggression never pays.

After some initial setbacks, Stalin’s Soviet Union turned things around on the battlefield and drove the German aggressors and their allies out of the country. This was possible because of the heroism of many ordinary Soviet citizens and because of the massive support the US gave to the Soviet war effort.

Ukrainian heroism is unquestionably key to understanding why Russia has not prevailed in its aggression against Ukraine. Support from western allies is, of course, also part of this explanation. But the inconsistent, often hesitant and at times lacklustre nature of this support also explains why Kyiv is increasingly on the back foot.

It would be easy to put most of the blame for recent Ukrainian setbacks on the US president, Donald Trump, and his approach to ending the war.

Back in the second world war, there were several German attempts to cut a deal with the western allies in order to be able to focus the entire war effort against the Soviet Union. Such efforts were consistently rebuffed and the anti-Nazi coalition remained intact until Germany’s surrender.

Now, by contrast, a deal is more likely than not to be made between Trump and Putin. Emboldening rather than weakening Russia, such a deal would come at the steep price of Ukrainian territorial concessions and the continuing threat of further Russian adventurism in Europe.

But it is also important to remember that Trump has only been back in the White House for a year, and that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine started almost four years ago.

During the first three of these years, the western coalition supporting Ukraine firmly stood its ground against any concessions to Russia in the same way as the allies of the second world war rejected a deal with Germany.

What they did not do, however, is offer the unconditional and unlimited support that would have put Ukraine in a position to defeat the aggressor. Endless debates over what weapons systems should be delivered, in which quantities, how fast and with what conditions attached have rightly frustrated Ukrainians and their war effort. This may have become worse under Trump, but it did not start with him.

Nor can all the blame for the dire situation in which Ukraine now finds itself be attributed only to the imperfections of the support it received. Lest we forget, Russia committed the unprovoked crime of aggression against its neighbour and is violating key norms of international humanitarian law on a daily basis with its relentless campaign against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure.

Yet several major corruption scandals in Ukraine, including one that left key energy installations insufficiently protected against Russian air raids, have hampered Kyiv’s overall war effort as well. They have undermined the country’s resilience, weakened public and military morale and have made it easier for Ukraine’s detractors in the west to question whether defending the country is worth taxpayers’ money.

The parallel to the second world war is again interesting here. There is now much hand wringing in the west over corruption in Ukraine – a problem as old as the country has been independent – and the democratic legitimacy of its president, government and parliament.

Volodymyr Zelensky, the democratically elected, and still widely supported, leader of a country defending itself against an existential threat, has to justify constantly why he will not violate his country’s constitution and sign over territory to its aggressive neighbour.

Back in the 1940s, western allies had few qualms to back Stalin in the fight against Hitler.

They supported Stalin despite him being a murderous dictator who had used starvation as a tactic to commit acts of genocide against Ukrainian farmers, killed almost the entire officer corps of the Polish army in a series of mass executions and was about to carry out brutal mass deportations of tens of millions of people.

The choices the western allies made in the 1940s when they threw their support behind Stalin may have been morally questionable. But they were driven by a keen sense of priorities and a singular focus on defeating what was at the time the gravest threat.

That too is missing today, especially in Trump’s White House. Not only does Trump seem to find it hard to make up his mind whether it is Putin or Zelensky who is to blame for the war and the lack of a peace deal, he also lacks the sense of urgency to give this war his undivided attention.

Worse than that, some of the distractions Trump is pursuing are actively undermining efforts to achieve peace. Threatening to take over Greenland, an autonomous part of staunch US and Nato ally Denmark, hardly sends the message of western unity that Putin needs to hear to bring him to the negotiating table.

Other distractions, like the military operation against Venezuela and the threats of renewed strikes against Iran, create yet more uncertainty and instability in an already volatile world. They stretch American resources and highlight the hypocrisy and double standards that underpin Trump’s America-first approach to foreign policy.

Putin is neither Hitler nor Stalin. But Trump is not comparable to American wartime leaders Roosevelt or Truman either, and there is no strong leader like Churchill in sight in Europe. The war in Ukraine, therefore, is likely to mark a few more milestones of questionable achievement before there might be another opportunity to prove again that aggression never pays.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on January 15, 2026.

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The US military operation in Venezuela in the early hours of January 3, rang the new year in with a bang — even by the current standards of American foreign policy. After months of military build-up and planning, US president Donald Trump gave the go-ahead for the apprehension of the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro.

Operation Absolute Resolve — the codename for this successful effort to capture and abduct a sitting head of state — has no recent precedent other than the US under President George H. W. Bush snatching Panama’s strongman Manuel Noriega some 36 years ago.

This latest blatant and unashamed violation of international law confirms even for the last doubter that Trump cares little about rules and norms.

As such, it also signals the continuing erosion of what is left of the rules-based international order.

For all of the US president’s triumphalism at his post-operation press conference, he cannot be certain that the undoubted tactical success of capturing Maduro will equate to an enduring success of moulding the western hemisphere in his own image. As his predecessors have found in Afghanistan and Iraq, regime change is a fraught and costly business. It is also one that is deeply unpopular among Trump’s Maga base.

The temptation for the White House, therefore, is to declare victory after the weekend’s operation against Maduro and quickly move on to other targets while the world is still stunned by the audacity of kidnapping a sitting foreign leader.

But any expectations that other countries in the western hemisphere will fall like the proverbial dominoes that Trump’s neo-con predecessors envisioned in the Middle East after the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 are deeply misplaced. And yet the people and leaders of Cuba (long an obsession for Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio), Colombia (the largest supplier of cocaine to the US) and Mexico (the key route through which fentanyl gets into the US) will be deeply worried about their future prospects in a Trumpian world after they got name-checked at Trump’s press conference.

The same goes for Greenlanders. Trump has, since his first term in office, repeatedly claimed that the US needs Greenland, which is legally part of EU and Nato member Denmark. And he did so again in the aftermath of the operation against Venezuela, stating over the weekend that the US “need[s] Greenland from the standpoint of national security”. Equally unsettling was the ominous tweet by Maga influencer Katie Miller — the wife of Trump’s influential deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller — showing a map of Greenland in the colours of the US flag, with the caption “SOON”.

Much to the dismay of Greenlanders, the US president certainly won’t be discouraged by the meek response from many European officials to the intervention in Venezuela.

This, too, is deeply disconcerting, signalling that many of the erstwhile most ardent defenders of international law have given up pretending it matters any more.

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, was first out of the block, with a post that started by pointing out Maduro’s lack of legitimacy as president and ended with an expression of concern for European citizens in Venezuela. She just about managed to squeeze in that “the principles of international law and the UN charter must be respected”. But this sounded like — and almost certainly was — an afterthought. A subsequent joint statement by the EU26 (that is, all member states except Hungary) was similarly equivocal and did not explicitly condemn Washington’s breach of international law.

The British prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, focused his statement on the fact that “the UK has long supported a transition of power in Venezuela”, that he “regarded Maduro as an illegitimate President” and would “shed no tears about the end of his regime”. Before closing with his desire for a “safe and peaceful transition to a legitimate government that reflects the will of the Venezuelan people”, the former human rights lawyer briefly reiterated his “support for international law”.

The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, however, wins the prize for prevarication. Not only did he make almost identical comments about Maduro’s lack of legitimacy and the importance of a transition in Venezuela, he also noted that a legal assessment of the US operation is complicated and that Germany will “take its time” to do so.

While there was a mixture of enthusiasm and worry across Latin America, the strongest condemnations came from Moscow and Beijing.

Russian President Vladimir Putin had signalled his support for Maduro early on in the escalating crisis at the beginning of December. A statement by the Russian foreign ministry initially merely offered support for efforts to resolve the crisis “through dialogue”. In subsequent press releases, Russia took a stronger line, demanding that Washington “release the legitimately elected president of a sovereign country and his spouse.”

China similarly expressed concern about the US operation as a “clear violation of international law” and urged Washington to “ensure the personal safety of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, release them at once, stop toppling the government of Venezuela, and resolve issues through dialogue and negotiation.”

The Russian position in particular is, of course, deeply ironic, but hardly surprising. To condemn the US operation as an “unacceptable violation of the sovereignty of an independent state” may be correct but it is hardly credible in light of Moscow’s war against Ukraine that has been ongoing for over a decade and involved the illegal occupation and annexation of nearly 20% of Ukraine’s territory.

China, on the other hand, can now have its cake and eat it. Taiwan is not widely recognised as a sovereign and independent state, and with regime change now back on the international agenda as a seemingly legitimate endeavour, little is left, from Beijing’s point of view, of the case against reunification, if necessary by force. Trump’s actions against Venezuela may not have accelerated Chinese plans for forceful reunification, but they will have done little to curb them. And for all of China’s righteous indignation about US violations of international law, Beijing will certainly feel emboldened to push territorial claims against its neighbours in the South China Sea even harder.

Yet China and Russia also will be acutely aware of their inability to do much about the US operation against Venezuela beyond condemning it publicly.

All this points, yet again, to a gradual conversion of American, Chinese and Russian geopolitical interests — to have their own recognised spheres of influence in which they can do as they please. Yet without an obvious or straightforward way to delineate where one sphere of influence begins and another one ends, more instability is likely in areas where the boundaries between different spheres are contested, be that in eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, Central Asia, the Arctic, the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East or Africa.

The expectation of a protracted and destabilising carve-up of the world between Washington, Moscow and Beijing also explains the lack of European outrage over Trump’s operation against Venezuela. It signals a European realisation that the days of the liberal international order are well and truly over. Europe will not take a futile stand that would only heighten yet further the risk of being abandoned by Trump and assigned to Putin’s sphere.

On the contrary, European leaders will continue to do their utmost to gloss over differences with the US and try to capitalise on an almost throw-away remark by Trump at the end of his press conference on Saturday that he is “not thrilled” with Putin.

What matters for Europe now are no longer the niceties of international norms but keeping the US and its mercurial president on side in defending Ukraine and deterring Russia.

But such efforts to accommodate the US president are only going to work to some extent. That Trump restated his ambition to annex Greenland for reasons of American security and access to the island’s vast critical minerals resources is bad enough. That he did so in late December between launching his new national security strategy (NSS) and the operation to capture Maduro is an indication that his vision of absolute dominance in the western hemisphere does not end with regime change in Venezuela.

The public rebuke of Trump’s claims by the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, and her Greenlandic counterpart, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, correctly pointed out that annexing Greenland would be neither necessary — Greenland is covered by Nato’s Article 5 — nor legal. But in light of the EU’s general reluctance to condemn Trump’s actions in Venezuela, the Danish pleas sound helpless and smack of double standards.

Trump’s latest and, so far, most egregious breach of international law further accelerates the re-ordering of the world. The Trump corollary to the Monroe doctrine, as articulated in the NSS, may have a certain logic to it. But the wider repercussions of US military action against Venezuela illustrate that this operation is unlikely to go down in history as a shining example of the “common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests” that the drafters of the NSS envisaged.

And beyond the western hemisphere, if the Venezuela operation, as is likely, further encourages Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea and possibly a move on Taiwan, it will not achieve the NSS aim of preventing military confrontation with America’s most significant geopolitical rival. Nor will further destabilising the transatlantic alliance by threatening the territorial integrity of Denmark over Greenland and possibly abandoning Europe and Ukraine to the Kremlin’s imperial designs “reestablish conditions of strategic stability across the Eurasian landmass” or “mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states.”

Like other US regime change efforts since the end of the cold war, US action in Venezuela is likely a self-isolating and self-defeating move. It signals the return of the law of the jungle. For that, the US, and much of the rest of the world, will ultimately pay a heavy price.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on January 5, 2026.

We hope you’ll share Navigating the Vortex with anyone you think might find it of interest. Also, you can listen to our podcast editions via the website and on all major podcast platforms, including:

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