Stagecraft and Statecraft

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

President Trump once bragged in “The Art of the Deal” about the virtues of “truthful hyperbole” — manipulating perceptions, exaggerating momentum and creating leverage through illusion. In foreign policy, however, the same instinct has evolved into something far more dangerous: diplomacy as ambush.

One defining feature of Trump’s second presidency has been his repeated use of diplomatic negotiations not as pathways to peace or settlement but as instruments of tactical deception. Again and again, diplomatic engagement has coincided with — and appears in some cases to have facilitated — sudden military escalation. The pattern is now too consistent to dismiss as coincidence.

The risk is that if negotiations becomes associated with strategic chicanery, it could destroy the very credibility that gives U.S. diplomacy its power.

Iran offers the clearest example. In June 2025, U.S. nuclear talks with Iran in Oman provided cover for Israel’s devastating aerial assaults that caught Tehran completely off-guard, before Trump himself widened the conflict by ordering U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites.

Months later, as renewed Oman-mediated negotiations between Washington and Tehran appeared to be nearing a breakthrough, the Trump administration on February 28 abruptly launched “Operation Epic Fury” alongside Israel. Iranian negotiators reportedly believed they were moving toward a “nuclear freeze for sanctions ease” framework accord. Instead, Trump launched the war while Iranian forces were operating under reduced alert conditions.

Even after the conflict erupted, Trump repeatedly signaled possible de-escalation while widening the bombing campaign to target Iran’s civilian and economic infrastructure.

Then came the latest example. On May 25, shortly after Trump claimed that a deal with Iran to end the conflict was “largely negotiated,” U.S. forces sank two Iranian mine-laying vessels and bombed missile-launch sites in southern Iran, with the president threatening a full-scale resumption of the “shooting.”

The pattern is unmistakable: Diplomacy and military escalation are not operating on separate tracks. They are fused into a single strategy of confusion, misdirection and surprise.

Nor is Iran unique. In Venezuela, negotiations between U.S. officials and President Nicolas Maduro’s close associates continued almost until the moment Washington launched “Operation Absolute Resolve” in January. Venezuelan negotiators believed discussions over a power transition and immunity deal were making progress, even as U.S. intelligence reportedly used the diplomatic channel itself to gather targeting information and breach Maduro’s compound.

Using the negotiation process as a massive intelligence-gathering exercise enabled American agencies to pinpoint Maduro’s location before the strike order was issued, leading to his swift capture.

The same pattern appeared in Yemen. In March 2025, Omani mediators were in Washington discussing a possible maritime and security deal with the Houthis when the U.S. launched “Operation Rough Rider.” Houthi leaders, apparently expecting a diplomatic breakthrough, had not dispersed key missile assets. The opening barrage destroyed a substantial portion of their long-range strike capability, yet the operation failed to defeat the Houthis decisively.

Nigeria offers an even more jarring example, because the country has been a nominal U.S. partner. Throughout fall 2025, Washington held high-level security consultations with Nigerian authorities and negotiated expanded counterterrorism cooperation. Yet on Christmas Day, the U.S. launched strikes inside Nigeria against alleged ISIS-West Africa targets without informing the Nigerian defense ministry beforehand. Intelligence gathered by U.S. surveillance flights and during joint planning sessions reportedly helped facilitate the strikes.

In Syria, the strategy early this year took a different form — a feigned retreat. U.S. officials used deconfliction channels with Russian and Syrian counterparts to signal a “drawdown” of active patrols in the Badia desert. ISIS remnants moved into what appeared to be a security vacuum, only to find themselves drawn into predesignated kill zones targeted by U.S. loitering munitions.

Viewed individually, each case can be defended as clever statecraft or operational necessity. Together, they reveal a negotiate-to-strike doctrine. Under Trump, negotiations increasingly appear designed not merely to resolve disputes or conflicts but to lull adversaries into complacency, lower defenses, gather intelligence and maximize surprise before kinetic action begins. The diplomatic carrot remains visible until the instant the military stick lands its first blow.

Trump’s defenders argue that such tactics save American lives and that diplomacy is simply another instrument of war. But this logic ignores the long-term strategic cost. Diplomacy ultimately depends less on power than on credibility.

Military power can destroy infrastructure, topple governments and intimidate adversaries. It cannot by itself create legitimacy or durable political settlements. Those require credible diplomacy — diplomacy understood not as theater, bait or manipulation, but as a genuine effort to end conflicts or resolve disputes.

Tactical surprise can produce short-term military gains. But great powers require something deeper to sustain influence: durable trust in their intentions and commitments. Once that trust erodes, coalition-building becomes harder, crisis management becomes more dangerous, and deterrence becomes less stable.

During the Cold War, Washington and Moscow engaged in arms-control talks despite profound mistrust because both sides understood that the negotiating table was not itself a targeting mechanism. Once diplomacy is linked to deception, the incentive to negotiate collapses.

Russian officials now increasingly view U.S. diplomacy on Ukraine through a lens of dual-track manipulation — public engagement coupled with covert escalation.

Even allies are uneasy, with Trump’s Iran adventure deepening perceptions of American unpredictability.

Once adversaries conclude that American negotiations are merely preludes to coercion, they will adapt accordingly. They will become less willing to engage and more inclined to escalate preemptively.

That is the paradox at the heart of Trump’s “diplomacy as ambush” strategy: tactics designed to maximize short-term leverage may ultimately weaken America’s long-term global influence.

A superpower can survive military setbacks. It is far harder to recover once its word loses value.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.“

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

For decades, Washington treated the Gulf monarchies as the immovable pillars of American power in the Middle East. The U.S. military presence there evolved into a vast, interconnected web of bases and infrastructure stretching across Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman.

These states hosted U.S. troops, bought American weapons and aligned themselves with Washington’s regional priorities. In return, they expected the ultimate prize: protection under the American security umbrella.

That bargain is now fraying — and perhaps breaking.

The most important geopolitical shift in the Middle East today is not happening in Tehran, Tel Aviv or Ankara. It is happening quietly inside the royal courts of the Gulf sheikhdoms, which are reassessing whether the U.S. is still a reliable security guarantor or merely a power that uses their territory while leaving them exposed to retaliation.

President Trump’s Iran war has accelerated this reassessment dramatically.

When the U.S., in concert with Israel, launched war on Iran earlier this year, Gulf Arab states cooperated. American warplanes operated from bases on their soil. Trump singled out Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE as “excellent” partners while deriding NATO allies and Indo-Pacific partners for refusing to participate.

But the praise concealed a deeper problem: The Gulf states discovered that supporting American military operations carried potentially catastrophic costs for them, as their energy facilities and desalination plants became targets of Iranian reprisals. Gulf rulers watched as the U.S. deployed enormous military resources (including Aegis-equipped destroyers and advanced interceptors) to shield Israel from Iranian retaliation while Gulf states absorbed the payback for enabling American strikes.

That experience appears to have fundamentally altered their calculations.

Another turning point came recently when Trump announced “Project Freedom,” a U.S. naval initiative to escort commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz after Iran disrupted maritime traffic. Washington viewed the mission as a demonstration of resolve. Tehran viewed it as an escalation. The Gulf monarchies viewed it as a potential disaster.

Saudi Arabia refused to grant the U.S. access to its airspace and bases to support the operation. Kuwait followed suit. Qatar, seeking de-escalation, imposed restrictions on activity from Al-Udeid Air Base, the largest U.S. military installation in the Middle East. Without Gulf cooperation, the mission quickly became logistically and politically unsustainable. Trump abruptly suspended it after just two escorted U.S.-flagged vessels passed through the strait.

In effect, Gulf states vetoed a major American military initiative — something that would have been almost unthinkable only a year ago. Only after Trump paused the operation did Gulf governments restore U.S. access to basing and overflight rights, underscoring that such cooperation is no longer automatic but conditional.

Washington had long operated under the assumption that Gulf bases were essentially available on demand during crises in return for American military protection. Now, however, Gulf states are increasingly asking a different question: Protection for whom?

From their perspective, the current arrangements look dangerously asymmetric. The U.S. can launch operations, rotate forces and eventually withdraw. But the six Gulf states remain geographically trapped beside Iran permanently. In any confrontation between Washington and Tehran, the Gulf monarchies become the frontline targets.

The lesson these states appear to have learned from recent hostilities is stark: They are platforms for American power, not equal partners in American protection. That realization is driving a profound strategic shift.

The Gulf states no longer appear willing to practice automatic alignment with Washington. Instead, they are moving toward what might be called “transactional neutrality.” In effect, they are applying Trump’s own worldview back onto the U.S. itself.

“America First” is increasingly being answered with “the Gulf First.”

That means Gulf monarchs are becoming far more selective about which American operations they support. The shift extends beyond military access. Major Gulf states are diversifying their defense partnerships, purchasing non-American technologies and exploring alternative security arrangements. Some Gulf governments are also intensifying diplomatic outreach to regional rivals, including Iran itself.

For them, de-escalation is no longer simply diplomacy; it is strategic self-preservation.

This should deeply concern Washington. The entire architecture of American regional dominance — air operations, naval deployments, intelligence coordination and energy security — has depended on nearly unconditional Gulf cooperation. That era may be ending.

Ironically, Trump himself has helped accelerate the process. His transactional approach to alliances convinced Gulf rulers that relationships with Washington are no longer rooted in enduring strategic commitments but in fluctuating cost-benefit calculations.

Once alliances become transactional, partners naturally begin asking whether the transaction remains worthwhile. The Gulf monarchies increasingly seem to believe it is not.

The implications extend far beyond the current Iran crisis. If Gulf states become reluctant hosts for American military operations, Washington’s ability to project power across the Middle East will shrink dramatically. The U.S. may still possess unmatched military hardware, but hardware alone is insufficient without reliable access, basing and political support.

This is the strategic paradox now confronting Washington. In alienating NATO and Indo-Pacific allies while simultaneously alarming Gulf partners, Washington risks discovering that even a superpower cannot operate effectively in isolation.

The Gulf monarchies are not abandoning the U.S., but they are redefining the relationship on narrower terms. The age of blank-check cooperation is over. Gulf allies are no longer willing to be the lightning rods for U.S. military campaigns while relying on uncertain protection when retaliation arrives.

And once allies learn they can say “no” to Washington, they rarely return to automatic obedience.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.“

Beijing no longer behaves like a rising power seeking acceptance into an American-led order. It behaves like a co-owner of the international system. And increasingly, Washington treats China that way.

Brahma Chellaney, USA Today

For years, Washington comforted itself with a reassuring phrase: China was a “near-peer competitor.” Near-peer implied China was close but not equal. It was a challenger still climbing the ladder while America remained securely at the top.

President Donald Trump’s just-concluded summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing shattered that illusion.

The visit showed that the world’s largest autocratic state is no longer America’s near-peer. It is America’s peer.

The symbolism alone was striking. Trump arrived in Beijing not as the triumphant leader of an unchallenged superpower, but as the head of a country increasingly constrained abroad, economically vulnerable at home, and struggling to impose its will even on far weaker adversaries.

When Trump postponed the Beijing trip from March to May, he likely expected to arrive after forcing Iran into submission. Instead, he landed in Beijing with the Iran war still unresolved, America’s military stockpiles depleted, and U.S. credibility bruised.

Xi understood the moment perfectly. The carefully choreographed summit was designed to project parity: two leaders, two superpowers, two equals managing global stability together. Beijing no longer behaves like a rising power seeking acceptance into an American-led order. It behaves like a co-owner of the international system. And increasingly, Washington is treating China that way.

Trump’s tone during the visit reflected the altered realities. The same president who routinely berates allies as freeloaders adopted a strikingly deferential posture toward America’s principal geopolitical rival. He praised Xi lavishly, calling it “an honor” to be his friend.

Equally striking was what Trump did not say. There was no mention of China’s human rights abuses – not of the mass incarceration and surveillance of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, not of the crushing of freedoms in Hong Kong, not of tightening repression in Tibet or Inner Mongolia. A decade ago, such silence from an American president visiting Beijing would have been politically unthinkable.

Today, it reflects a deeper reality: Washington increasingly treats China less as a wayward authoritarian state to be lectured and more as a peer superpower whose cooperation it needs and whose sensitivities it must manage.

In Trump’s first term, Washington still believed it could fundamentally reshape China’s behavior through tariffs, sanctions and technological pressure. The assumption was that America possessed overwhelming leverage. That confidence has eroded.

China today is not the China of 2017. It has built the world’s largest navy. It has dramatically expanded its nuclear arsenal. It has narrowed the technological gap in artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, robotics and quantum computing. In several strategic industries – batteries, drones, rare earth processing and green technologies – China now dominates outright.

Most importantly, Beijing has demonstrated that interdependence cuts both ways.

When Trump last year escalated tariffs, China retaliated by tightening rare-earth exports, exposing America’s deep dependence on Chinese supply chains. Suddenly, the world’s strongest economy looked vulnerable to industrial choke points controlled by Beijing.

That vulnerability hovered over the summit.

The most telling aspect of Trump’s Beijing visit was that both sides emphasized “stability” in their relationship. This is no longer a relationship defined by American primacy. It is one increasingly defined by mutual constraint.

The U.S. still possesses enormous advantages. The dollar remains dominant. America retains unmatched alliance networks, global military reach and world-leading innovation ecosystems. China also faces severe internal problems, including mounting debt, demographic decline and slowing growth.

But peer competition does not require symmetry. The Soviet Union was America’s peer despite being economically weaker. Britain was once Germany’s peer despite Germany’s larger industrial base. The defining characteristic is the ability to resist coercion and shape global outcomes independently.

China can now clearly do both.

Indeed, the summit underscored how much Washington’s ambitions have narrowed. Trump once talked about decoupling from China. Now the goal appears far more modest: managed coexistence, stabilized trade and guardrails against open conflict.

That is what peer rivalry looks like.

The danger for the U.S. lies in refusing to adapt to the new reality. Much of Washington still oscillates between complacency and denial, either dismissing China as fundamentally fragile or assuming America can easily restore uncontested dominance.

Yet China’s message during the summit was unmistakable: It no longer seeks admission into an American-led order. It seeks acknowledgment as an equal center of power.

And despite all the pageantry, Trump’s visit ultimately conveyed something Xi desperately wanted the world to see: The U.S. may still be the world’s strongest country but it no longer stands alone at the apex of global power.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

Effective diplomacy depends on credibility, consistency, and a clear alignment with national interests. The US administration’s personalized, opaque, and venal shadow diplomacy delivers none of that, and it will leave the US less respected, less trusted, and less effective on the world stage.

By Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

In most democracies, a leader outsourcing high-stakes diplomacy to family members and business associates would provoke outrage. But US President Donald Trump has faced little pushback for doing so, with many downplaying his crony diplomacy as mere “heterodoxy.” The long-term consequences will be severe.

Instead of relying on the secretary of state and the professional diplomatic corps, Trump has placed pivotal diplomacy largely in the hands of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his business partner, the Manhattan real-estate mogul Steve Witkoff. Kushner was a senior adviser in Trump’s first administration, responsible for helping to broker the Abraham Accords between Israel and four Arab states, and is now, like Witkoff, a Special Envoy for Peace.

Together, Kushner and Witkoff have spearheaded negotiations on Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran. Yet neither had any diplomatic experience before Trump tasked them with resolving some of the thorniest and highest-stakes foreign-policy challenges of our time, and both have glaring conflicts of interest.

Start with Witkoff. Last year, Pakistan signed a controversial investment deal with World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency firm whose CEO is Witkoff’s son, Zach, and in which the Trump and Witkoff families hold a dominant ownership stake. This past January, a WLF affiliate reached another deal with Pakistan—this time, to introduce the company’s stablecoin for use in cross-border transactions.

But Pakistan has also been the site and, to an extent, the broker of talks between the United States and Iran. When actors are negotiating geopolitical outcomes and pursuing business opportunities in the same arena, diplomacy begins to resemble a marketplace: access, influence, and profit are tightly interwoven.

As for Kushner, after leaving Trump’s first administration, he set up a private-equity firm, Affinity Partners, and took billions of dollars from Gulf monarchies, including about $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. In other words, Kushner is dependent on Saudi capital. Yet he is now expected to negotiate a détente with Iran, even as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly urges Trump to continue the war.

And it is not just Iran. Kushner’s “New Gaza” proposal, unveiled at Davos this past January, has been widely criticized as “real-estate diplomacy,” as it effectively recasts reconstruction as a business venture while ignoring questions of sovereignty and rights.

Kushner and Witkoff’s conflicts of interest, together with their lack of foreign-policy credentials, explain why Trump has not sought to appoint them to official diplomatic positions. Special envoys avoid Senate confirmation hearings, as well as the disclosure requirements, ethics rules, and congressional oversight that bind professional diplomats. Kushner and Witkoff are thus able to exercise influence without transparency, and to negotiate on behalf of the US without accountability.

Of course, Kushner and Witkoff are hardly the only figures capitalizing on their proximity to Trump. Prominent allies and donors, such as Oracle’s Larry Ellison, have won big from their investment in the majority American-owned TikTok venture that Trump effectively forced the Chinese parent company to create, supposedly over national-security concerns.

Moreover, Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald, Jr., recently joined a drone company Powerus, and are attempting to sell drone interceptors to the Gulf states to ward off attacks from Iran as it retaliates for their father’s war. Foundation Future Industries, a robotics startup where Eric is chief strategy adviser, was recently awarded a $24 million Pentagon contract.

Now, reports are emerging of possible insider trading around the Iran war, with large bets being made right before market-moving public statements from Trump. Yet the American public, whether desensitized to Trump’s breaking of norms or simply unable to keep up with the pace and scale of the violations, hardly reacts to such news. Scandals that would have brought any past US administration down—or at least prompted urgent investigation—have become routine under Trump.

With a Republican Party that bows to Trump’s every whim and justifies his every crime—while controlling both houses of Congress—a kind of resignation has taken hold. But as outrage fades, so does the restraining power of political norms. As a result, abuses become increasingly blatant and egregious, and trust is eroded. Even if Trump’s cronies did manage to reach a peace deal, it would warrant suspicion, with every concession raising questions about who really benefits—and who is compromised.

This undercuts not only specific agreements, but also US global leadership more broadly. With US foreign policy now guided by personal loyalty, informal networks, and private gain, whatever credibility the US had as a reliable partner, good-faith negotiator, and champion of the rule of law has been decimated. None of this will be easily restored.

In the meantime, if foreign governments want to influence US policy or secure the country’s geopolitical cooperation, they must make it worth Trump’s while. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Trump’s so-called Board of Peace—a putative alternative to the United Nations where a permanent seat carries a billion-dollar price tag. This is less a multilateral institution than a pay-to-play geopolitical franchise, but some countries appear willing to cough up the cash to stay in the US president’s good graces.

Others seeking to shape US policy head to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, which he increasingly uses for official diplomatic engagements. And, of course, there are those who go there to get in on the self-dealing, making business deals with Trump’s inner circle. Meanwhile, wars continue to rage, with far-reaching human and economic consequences.

Trump’s defenders argue that unconventional actors can produce breakthroughs where conventional processes have failed. But diplomacy is not merely deal-making; it depends on credibility, consistency, and a clear alignment with national interests. The personalized, opaque, and venal shadow diplomacy being pursued by Kushner and Witkoff can deliver none of that. What it can and will do is ensure that the US is less respected, less trusted, and less effective on the world stage.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

© Project Syndicate, 2026.

By Brahma Chellaney
The Japan Times

In barely 15 months, U.S. President Donald Trump has generated more global upheaval than most leaders do in a lifetime.

By eroding international norms, unleashing cascading crises and roiling world markets, he has emerged as a principal driver of global instability. And he still has 33 months left.

There is no modern precedent for what is now unfolding. A single leader — at the helm of the superpower that built and sustained the post-World War II international order — is dismantling it at speed, while openly mocking the very rules that once underpinned American power.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has cast aside longstanding legal norms, authorized military strikes across multiple sovereign states and weaponized economic interdependence against allies and adversaries alike. From the slow strangulation of Cuba through blockade-induced deprivation to a war on Iran that has triggered worldwide turmoil, his actions have pushed the international system into uncharted territory.

Trump launched his war on Iran, as he did his military intervention in Venezuela weeks earlier, in the language of dominance. But its consequences unfolded globally in the language of scarcity — of fuel, food and even survival.

Iran and Venezuela account for almost one-third of global proven oil reserves. Bringing both into Washington’s strategic orbit would give the U.S. an unprecedented lever over global energy markets — one that could be used not merely to influence prices and supply, but to discipline rivals and steer the economic and foreign-policy trajectories of partners.

Trump’s vision of America’s global “energy dominance” was on display again at his April 6 news conference, where he pointed to Venezuela as a model for dealing with Iran, citing his seizure of Venezuelan oil. Describing himself as a businessman, Trump said he wants to likewise take Iran’s energy resources once the conflict is over. “To the victor belong the spoils,” he declared.

It was a revealing admission: Control over Iran’s vast energy wealth lies at the heart of his war of aggression.

What began on Feb. 28 as a joint U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran, however, quickly metastasized into the most consequential energy shock in modern history. Unlike the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, driven largely by political embargoes, the current upheaval stems from the physical destruction of energy infrastructure and the breakdown of critical supply routes.

Because energy underpins the global economy, the shock could not be contained. It rippled outward — destabilizing food systems, straining financial markets and hitting the poorest countries the hardest.

In terms of global impact, the Ukraine conflict pales by comparison. What began as a regional war with global implications evolved into a globe-spanning crisis driven by a single regional conflict. That is the enduring lesson of the Iran war.

More fundamentally, Trump’s neoimperial impulse is no longer latent; it is hardening into an expansionist doctrine that echoes the playbook of colonial empires rather than the norms of the post-1945 order. His push to increase already massive U.S. defense spending by over 50%, to $1.5 trillion, underscores the scale of that ambition.

From renewed pressure for U.S. control over Greenland and the Panama Canal to open-ended military interventions in Venezuela and Iran — and even talk of redrawing borders or relocating populations — Trump has revived a logic more familiar to the age of empires. The Monroe Doctrine, once regional, has effectively been globalized.

The question is no longer whether Trump is disrupting the international order. It is whether there is any historical parallel for such systematic disruption from within. There is not.

The U.S. was the principal architect of the current system. The rules governing trade, sovereignty and collective security were largely American designs, forged after World War II to prevent precisely the kind of instability now unfolding.

What makes this moment unique is not simply that these rules are being broken, but that they are being dismantled by an American president.

History offers examples of destructive leaders — such as Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and Moammar Gadhafi  — but they operated on the margins of the international system or in opposition to it. Trump is different. He is tearing down the house from inside.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his weaponization of interdependence. Trade, once treated as a stabilizing force, has been recast as an instrument of coercion. Tariffs are no longer just economic tools; they are strategic weapons.

By linking military protection to trade concessions and tribute-like payments, Trump has transformed alliances into transactional arrangements — security for sale. The postwar idea of collective defense is giving way to something closer to protection racketeering.

This shift signals a profound reordering of international relationships, in which commitments are perpetually subject to renegotiation.

Equally consequential is the erosion of sovereignty. U.S. military strikes have extended across the Middle East, Africa and even into the Caribbean, targeting states without clear legal justification under the U.N. Charter.

Earlier eras did see U.S. expansionist doctrines — from Theodore Roosevelt’s “Big Stick” diplomacy to William McKinley’s imperial ventures. But those belonged to a pre-1945 world, before the current international norms took shape. Today’s actions carry greater weight precisely because they defy a system the U.S. itself helped build.

The war on Iran marked a particularly dangerous gamble. Trump is the first leader to trigger a global energy crisis through direct military action of his own making.

At the same time, his administration is hollowing out multilateralism — the connective tissue of the international system. Just weeks before launching the Iran war, the U.S. withdrew from 66 international organizations in a single stroke, including the World Health Organization, while sanctioning International Criminal Court officials.

Other leaders have challenged international norms, including Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin, but as outsiders. Trump’s approach is more destabilizing because it represents an insider threat. By abandoning agreements like the Paris climate accord, while openly entertaining territorial ambitions from Greenland and Canada to the Panama Canal, his administration has signaled that it no longer considers itself bound by the rules Washington once championed.

If the international system’s principal guarantor no longer believes in it, what remains?

To find even a loose historical analogy, one must look further back. Napoleon reshaped Europe through force; Bismarck discarded alliances in pursuit of advantage. Yet neither operated within a global order they themselves had constructed and sustained. What we are witnessing is something unprecedented: a great power dismantling its own architecture of order.

The consequences are already visible. Alliances are fragmenting. Markets are volatile. Smaller states are hedging, recalibrating or simply absorbing the shocks. The world is moving beyond Pax Americana — but not toward a stable alternative. Instead, it is drifting into uncertainty.

Today, the greatest threat to international peace and security is not a rising challenger. It is the transformation of the international system’s central pillar — the U.S. — into its principal destabilizer.

From rising fuel and food prices in Africa to fiscal stress across Asia and Latin America, the costs of Trump’s ambitions are being borne far from the corridors of power where they were conceived.

Brahma Chellaney, a longtime contributor to The Japan Times, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

By Brahma Chellaney, The Globe and Mail

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit to India is intended to close one of the most acrimonious diplomatic chapters between two major democracies in recent memory and inaugurate a more pragmatic, interest-driven partnership for an age of geopolitical uncertainty. 

Rarely have Canada and India found themselves so publicly at odds as they did in 2023-24, when the relationship sank to its lowest point ever. Then-prime minister Justin Trudeau’s allegation of a potential link between the Indian government and the killing of a Sikh-Canadian on Canadian soil triggered a spiral of recriminations, expulsions, visa suspensions and nationalist outrage. 

The dispute also exposed a deeper structural fault line: Canada’s permissive approach toward Sikh separatist activism versus India’s zero-tolerance view of Khalistan militancy. For New Delhi, the issue has not been merely diaspora politics but national security, shaped by the memory of the deadly 1985 Air India bombing by Canada-based Sikh terrorists. For Ottawa, the challenge has been to balance civil liberties with public safety in a diverse democracy. 

Mr. Carney’s visit signals that both governments have decided the costs of continued estrangement are too high. 

The visit’s strategic logic is rooted in a shared reassessment of the global order. Both Canada and India are hedging against the volatility of great-power rivalry. Mr. Carney’s emerging “middle-power” doctrine emphasizes building networks of trusted relationships beyond Washington’s orbit. India, for its part, has long sought diversified partnerships to avoid overdependence on any single pole. 

In this sense, the visit is not just a bilateral reset but part of a broader pattern: a quiet consolidation among middle powers seeking resilience in a fragmenting world. Both Canada and India, though, are walking a tightrope. They want to diversify away from an unpredictable U.S. without triggering further retaliation from Washington. 

At the heart of the visit lies a concrete economic agenda. The most eye-catching initiative is a 10-year, US$2.8-billion uranium supply agreement, which could be signed during Mr. Carney’s visit. For India, Canadian fuel offers a pathway to reduce reliance on both Russian imports and coal. For Canada, it secures a long-term market at a moment when Western demand is uncertain. 

Canada, which sees more than 90 per cent of its energy exports go to the U.S., is seeking to become a major oil and liquefied natural gas supplier to India, the world’s fastest-growing major energy consumer, with demand expected to double by 2045. India is already the world’s third-largestenergy consumer. 

Alongside energy, the two sides are accelerating negotiations on a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), with a target of doubling bilateral trade to $70-billion in four years. The scope extends well beyond tariffs: services trade, digital commerce, labour mobility, agriculture and critical minerals are all on the table. A CEPA would anchor a supply-chain corridor linking Canada’s resource base with India’s manufacturing and technological capacity. 

This economic agenda reflects a shared desire to “derisk” from China-centric supply chains without embracing full decoupling, and to hedge against shifting currents of U.S. policy. 

Yet the economic reset cannot stand without a parallel security understanding. Both governments recognize that another crisis over extremism or sovereignty could derail the entire project. 

In Canada, Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, would, if passed, criminalize the public display of terrorist symbols. It could signal to New Delhi that Canada is taking more seriously the issue of Sikh militancy. 

At the same time, both countries are expected to revive and upgrade their Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism, shifting toward real-time intelligence sharing and more streamlined extradition processes. India, for its part, is reaffirming respect for Canadian sovereignty after the controversies of 2023-24. 

The aim is to create institutional “guardrails”: mechanisms that allow co-operation to continue even when sensitive issues arise. 

Mr. Carney’s challenge, however, is as much domestic as diplomatic. Bill C-9 faces strong resistance from civil-liberties advocates, and parliamentary delays have already stalled its progress. Mr. Carney thus faces a delicate balancing act – demonstrating to India that Ottawa will act against extremist activity, while convincing Canadians he will not dilute constitutional freedoms or bow to external pressure. 

More fundamentally, Mr. Carney’s India visit marks a transition from an emotionally charged relationship to a transactional one. The bitterness of the Trudeau era is being set aside in favour of a sober recognition of mutual interests. 

If the uranium and hydrocarbon deals advance and CEPA negotiations stay on track, February, 2026, may be remembered as the moment Canada-India ties matured into a modern strategic partnership. For two pluralistic democracies navigating an uncertain century, this may prove to be the most sustainable foundation of all.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

The election marks the arrival of a Japan that will be more assertive, more strategically self-confident and less inclined to subordinate its interests to shifting currents of U.S. policy. 

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

Japan’s Feb. 8 election was not merely an electoral landslide. It was a geopolitical turning point.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party secured a two-thirds supermajority — an outcome that finally gives Tokyo something it has lacked for decades: a political mandate to redefine its postwar identity and act as a proactive security power.

For Washington, this is both a gift and a challenge. The U.S. can now deepen collaboration with its most important and capable ally in Asia. Japan hosts the largest concentration of U.S. forces anywhere in the world. Its geographic position is uniquely strategic, and its naval and air capabilities are the most sophisticated among U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, with interoperability unmatched by any regional partner.

But the election also signals Japan’s strategic reawakening. It marks the arrival of a Japan that will be more assertive, more strategically self-confident and less inclined to subordinate its interests to shifting currents of U.S. policy. Tokyo is no longer content to be a U.S.-protected power. It intends to be a shaping power.

For almost eight decades, Japan operated within self-imposed limits — constitutional pacifism, restrained defense budgets and a preference for economic statecraft over hard power. Takaichi’s mandate alters that trajectory. With a supermajority, she can pursue constitutional revision, formalize the status of the Self-Defense Forces and accelerate defense spending to 2 percent of gross domestic product.

Japan is set to shift from merely reacting to Chinese military pressure to imposing costs for it. Nowhere is this clearer than in the southwestern island chain stretching toward Taiwan. Tokyo is building the capacity to deny access, complicate Chinese planning and ensure that no “fait accompli” seizure of territory or coercive maritime gambit goes unanswered.

For American strategists concerned about U.S. overreach, this is a structural upgrade to the regional balance. A Japan capable of defending its southwestern approaches will reduce the burden on U.S. forces while disrupting Chinese war-planning.

Beijing’s pressure campaign was meant to deter Japan’s rightward drift. Instead, it helped bring about Takaichi’s landslide. Chinese economic restrictions, maritime incursions and thinly veiled threats did not fracture Japanese politics; they consolidated it. Voters concluded that dependence invites coercion and that resilience requires strength.

Japan’s push to rewire supply chains toward India, Southeast Asia and trusted partners is not just industrial policy — it is counter-coercion doctrine.

Takaichi has described a Taiwan contingency as an “existential threat” to Japan. That language would once have been politically radioactive. Now it carries electoral legitimacy and, if sustained, will alter the military geometry of the Taiwan Strait. In a crisis, Japanese bases, surveillance networks and maritime forces would become integral to a U.S. response.

For the U.S., this reinforces a broader trend: Chinese pressure is accelerating, not halting, the formation of balancing coalitions. A stronger Japan becomes the anchor of that process in East Asia.

Takaichi’s strategy also involves alliance diversification. She is building stronger economic and defense links with Australia, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines and especially India, alongside the U.S. treaty alliance — insurance against volatility in American politics.

Japanese policymakers have drawn a sober conclusion: that resilience requires options. Fluctuating U.S. trade policy, tariff threats, periodic talk of retrenchment and transactional approaches to alliances have convinced many in Tokyo that Japan must insure itself against strategic volatility in Washington.

For the U.S., this is not a loss of influence but a redistribution of responsibility. A Japan that leads within the Quad, shapes regional trade architecture and invests in defense industrial cooperation strengthens a stable Indo-Pacific order — provided Washington treats Tokyo as a strategic partner rather than a junior ally.

Takaichi’s economic program — “Sanaenomics” — fuses industrial policy with national defense. Supply-chain resilience, semiconductor co-development, critical-mineral stockpiles and shipyard revitalization are designed to reduce Japan’s vulnerability to “weaponized interdependence.”

This aligns with Washington’s emphasis on economic security but also introduces potential friction. A more nationalist “Japan First” posture could collide with U.S. tariff policies or technology controls if not coordinated. The opportunity lies in building a shared defense-industrial ecosystem.

For years, American policymakers urged Japan to do more for its own defense. Takaichi’s victory answers that call.

But greater capability brings greater autonomy. Tokyo will expect a more important voice in alliance strategy — from Taiwan contingencies to regional trade architecture — and will not accept policies that expose it to coercion without consultation.

Alliances endure not because one side dominates, but because both sides see them as vehicles for advancing national strategy. A stronger Japan will strengthen the alliance if Washington treats Tokyo as a co-architect rather than a subordinate.

The most consequential implication of Japan’s election is regional. Across the Indo-Pacific, middle powers increasingly see a stronger Japan as a stabilizing “strategic ballast” amid uncertainty about both China’s trajectory and America’s staying power. Japan is reentering history as a security actor, not merely an economic one.

Washington should recognize what just happened. Japan did not simply elect a new government. It chose strategic normalization — deterrence over hesitation — and signaled that the era of passive alliance management is over.

For Washington, the message is clear: The most important geopolitical shift in Asia is not China’s rise alone, but Japan’s return. The alliance must evolve accordingly.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

Trump might have done India a favor. By exposing the raw transactionalism at the core of his foreign policy, he has left no doubt that, under his leadership, the US is not a reliable strategic partner.

By Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

For over two decades, the United States has regarded India as a “natural partner” – a rising power whose geography, military capabilities, and democratic credentials made it indispensable to America’s strategy in the Indo-Pacific. Five successive US administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, invested heavily in strengthening that partnership, treating India not just as a market, but as a long-term strategic bet.

But the goodwill that the US built up with India over that period has been rapidly eroded since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency last year. Trump’s second presidency has brought repeated public insults and a bruising trade war, with the US using tariffs as tools of geopolitical coercion. The interim trade deal announced on February 2 may have halted the economic confrontation, but trust – the essential currency of any strategic partnership – is unlikely to be restored any time soon.

By reducing the effective US tariff burden on Indian goods from 50% to 18%, the newly announced deal will deliver short-term relief for India. But it comes with plenty of strings attached, including the requirement that India move toward near-zero tariffs on US industrial products and a wide range of agricultural goods. India’s decision to open its sensitive agricultural sector – the country’s largest employer – to a flood of imports from the US is already sparking a domestic backlash.

But that is not all. India has also agreed to purchase a whopping $500 billion worth of American goods over the next five years, and to replace discounted Russian oil with US energy at market prices, which also implies additional transport costs. Meanwhile, the US offered no binding commitments to India. This lopsided bargain looks nothing like a stable, reciprocal, rules-based trade partnership, and underscores how far US trade policy has drifted from World Trade Organization norms. It is probably best understood as a tactical de-escalation, not a strategic reconciliation.

The way the deal was announced reinforces this interpretation. Typically, bilateral agreements or joint statements are announced simultaneously in both capitals to signal equal partnership. The free-trade agreement India recently concluded with the European Union, which created a trade corridor encompassing roughly 25% of global GDP and one-third of world trade, was touted by both sides as the “mother of all deals.”

The US-India agreement, by contrast, was announced first by Trump, who portrayed it on his social-media platform as a favor to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose “request” for an agreement Trump had granted “out of friendship and respect.” Days later, the White House released a “joint statement” outlining the terms of the agreement at 5:00 a.m. Indian Standard Time.

The Trump administration then added injury to insult, announcing a presidential executive order authorizing reimposition of punitive tariffs if the US deems India to have violated its commitment to halt all direct and indirect imports of Russian oil. By framing Indian energy imports as a US national-security issue, the administration has turned economic engagement into a compliance test. The message to India is unmistakable: autonomy will be tolerated only within US-approved limits.

India’s leaders have framed the agreement as a win, noting that India now faces lower tariffs than China or Vietnam. But this is a low bar for a relationship that successive US administrations described as “defining.” And they are probably well aware that Trump could still pull the rug out from under them. The arrangement’s details have not yet been finalized, and Trump has a long history of changing his mind, scrapping deals, and layering on new demands.

Whatever happens next, India will not quickly forget Trump’s past betrayals. Nor will it overlook his slights, such as branding India, whose GDP growth outpaces all other major economies, as a “dead economy” last July.

In a sense, Trump might have done India a favor. By exposing the raw transactionalism at the core of his foreign policy, he has left no doubt that, under his leadership, the US is not a reliable strategic partner. As a result, India’s government is committed to diversifying India’s economic relationships away from the US, as underscored by its FTAs with the EU and the United Kingdom – an effort that will likely continue, regardless of the new trade agreement with the US.

Markets, too, are unlikely to put too much faith in the US. News of the trade deal did trigger a stock-market rally in India, but the gains are likely to be short-lived.

Strategic partnerships are sustained not by tariffs and threats, but by predictability, mutual respect, and restraint – qualities that have been conspicuously absent from Trump’s presidency. The US should beware. Whatever short-term concessions Trump secures through bullying and coercion will be dwarfed by the long-term costs of destabilizing a partnership that, as previous administrations recognized, is vital to American interests in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

© Project Syndicate, 2026.

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

The “rules-based international order” was never a set of neutral rules. It was a story the U.S. told — about itself, its power and its right to bend norms when convenient.

In January, that story finally collapsed when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called that order what many governments have long known it to be: a useful “fiction,” sustained less by universal law than by American power and selective enforcement.

For decades, when U.S. officials invoked a “rules-based international order,” they were not describing universal principles, but defending a flexible set of rules largely devised in Washington and adjusted whenever American interests required it. Now, as President Trump openly revives territorial expansion and economic coercion as tools of U.S. statecraft, that phrase no longer commands belief, even among America’s closest allies.

Carney, speaking in Davos, did what no major Western leader had previously dared to do: He called the bluff. The “rules-based order,” Carney said, was a convenient illusion — one the West itself knew was only partially true, tolerated for as long as U.S. hegemony delivered enough public goods to make the hypocrisy worthwhile. That bargain, he concluded, no longer works.

Carney’s candor marks a watershed. By naming the fiction out loud, he validated a critique long voiced by the Global South and quietly acknowledged across Western capitals. More importantly, he signaled that the era of polite silence surrounding American exceptionalism has ended.

Any international order must, by definition, rest on rules. Modern global life — trade, finance, aviation, maritime navigation — cannot function without shared norms and procedures. The real question has never been whether rules matter, but which rules matter most, and to whom they apply.

For many Western governments, the core norm underpinning the international order is the prohibition on territorial conquest. That is why Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was framed as a civilizational rupture. As then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it, the war challenged the principle that borders cannot be changed by force.

International law is indeed clear on this point: the U.N. Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity of states, and the Geneva Conventions forbid the demographic transformation of occupied territories.

Yet the selective invocation of this norm has gradually eroded its credibility. The U.S. has repeatedly violated the territorial integrity of other states — not by annexing land, but by overthrowing governments and installing new ones that remain formally sovereign while substantively dependent on Washington. This maneuver allows Washington to deny conquest while achieving many of its effects.

Nor is Ukraine’s defense best understood as a pure defense of the norm against conquest. Great powers rarely act primarily to uphold norms. They intervene to prevent adverse shifts in the balance of power. The rallying of NATO behind Ukraine may have aligned with international law, but it was driven at least as much by strategic calculation as by legal fidelity.

The fiction of moral clarity was further strained by the rhetoric that cast the conflict as a battle between democracy and autocracy. Under Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine has lurched toward authoritarianism. As in past U.S. interventions, “fighting for freedom” has remained a narrative convenience rather than a consistent standard.

If the Biden administration strained the fiction, Trump has shattered it. Trump has openly re-embraced territorial expansion as a legitimate tool of statecraft. His second term has featured military intervention in Venezuela, renewed demands for U.S. control over Greenland and the Panama Canal, and an unapologetic revival of “Manifest Destiny.” Unlike his predecessors, Trump does not bother cloaking ambition in the language of universalism. He says the quiet part out loud.

Trump is not unique in expanding American power; because of his predecessors’ global expansion, there are about 750 U.S. military bases today in at least 80 countries. What is new is the abandonment of euphemism. By openly praising 19th-century imperial precedents and refusing to rule out coercion even against allies, Trump has made it impossible to pretend that the U.S. is merely the custodian of a rules-based order.

Norms survive not on consistency alone but on credibility. When enforcement is asymmetric, rules become tools rather than constraints. The same applies to the norm of non-interference, which has never prevented cyber operations, sanctions, covert actions or targeted killings. No major power — whether the U.S., Russia or China — fully abides by it. What differs is how honestly that reality is acknowledged.

Carney’s comments matter precisely because they strip away the last vestiges of moral theater. By admitting that Western allies knowingly participated in a ritualized fiction, he reframed the present moment not as a transition, but as a “rupture.” The old bargain — accept U.S. primacy in exchange for stability and public goods — is unraveling. What replaces it will be messier and more transactional.

The “rules-based order” endured not because it was universally respected, but because it was useful — and because American power made it impolite to ask questions. With that politeness gone, what remains is not the collapse of order, but the collapse of pretense. This may allow for a more honest reckoning with power, interest and responsibility.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

How Trump Is Remaking the World

Brahma Chellaney, OPEN magazine

When Donald Trump returned to the White House, many foreign governments assumed his second term would simply mirror the first—more noise, more tariffs, more brash moves, but no fundamental break. They misjudged him. In its first year itself, Trump’s second presidency has redefined the norms, institutions and expectations that have governed international politics since the end of the Cold War.

What once looked like impulsive theatre has hardened into a governing philosophy. Unpredictability is no longer a quirk of Trump’s personality; it is a strategic tool he deploys openly. Norm violations are no longer tactical deviations; they have become a defining feature of American policy.

The result is a more transactional, coercive and personalized global order. In this order, power is asserted directly, institutions are circumvented or stripped of authority, and stability is offered only in exchange for submission.

More fundamentally, Trump is not simply eroding the international order. He is attempting to construct an alternative in its place.

From disruption to doctrine

During Trump’s first term, allies and adversaries alike learned to discount much of what he said. Tweets contradicted policy. Threats were issued and withdrawn. In his second term, however, the pattern has changed. Disruption itself has become US doctrine. His administration now treats uncertainty not as a risk to be managed, but as leverage to be exploited.

This shift is visible across domains. Trade policy is no longer governed primarily by economic logic but wielded as an instrument of political coercion. Diplomacy is no longer mediated through institutions but centralized in the president himself—his whims and fancies, and his efforts to expand an already-sprawling personal business empire. Military power is no longer restrained by concerns of legitimacy but openly deployed to assert control over other states’ resources and territory. Soft power—the quiet, accumulative influence of norms, culture and credibility—has been dismissed as weakness.

The pattern is unmistakable. Trump no longer seeks to lead the international system; he seeks to dominate it, transaction by transaction, deal by deal.

Nowhere is this shift clearer than in trade. By weaponizing tariffs, Trump has ushered in an era of what Western executives now call “tariff roulette.”

Tariffs have been moved from the margins of economic policy to the centre of American statecraft. On April 2, 2025—branded by the White House as “Liberation Day”—he invoked America’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose a universal 10% tariff on all imports. This was not a negotiating tactic aimed at reforming rules; it was a unilateral assertion of power.

Targeted tariffs have gone even further. These measures are not calibrated responses to unfair trade practices but punitive tools meant to force capitulation. Worse still, they are unpredictable. Announcements are frequently made with little warning, often through social media, leaving governments and firms scrambling to respond.

Months after concluding a trade agreement with South Korea, Trump abruptly raised US tariffs on South Korean goods from 15% to 25%. His tariffs on India now exceed even those imposed on China, America’s principal strategic rival. Agreements offer no insulation; strategic partnerships provide no security.

The economic effects are already evident in the US. Business confidence has been shaken by the inability to plan investment or supply chains amid sudden policy reversals. Inflationary pressures have intensified, with US personal consumption expenditures projected to rise by more than three per cent. Confronted with policy-driven volatility, the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates on hold to avoid amplifying uncertainty.

The deeper damage, however, is systemic. The global trading system depends less on low tariffs than on credible commitments. Trump has shattered the expectation that the US will adhere to predictable, norms-based processes. In its place, he has delivered a stark message: stability is available only through direct, bilateral concessions to Washington. Multilateral rules no longer protect; they merely delay punishment.

Rules give way to raw power

If weaponized trade represents the economic pillar of Trump’s new order, the creation of the “Board for Peace” is its institutional centrepiece. Launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, the Board is presented as a bold alternative to what Trump calls the United Nations’ “permanent failure” to resolve modern conflicts.

The contrast could not be sharper. The UN, for all its flaws, derives legitimacy from process: universal membership, formal rules and a (sometimes paralyzing) commitment to sovereignty and law. The Board for Peace rejects this model entirely. Membership is selective, reportedly contingent on substantial financial contributions. Decision-making authority is centralized. Trump himself holds absolute veto power over its agenda, decisions and membership—and even the designation of his successor. In other words, the Board is effectively a one-man show.

What is being set up is privatized global governance. Conflict resolution becomes a pay-to-play enterprise, overseen by personal authority. Trump has said the Board will “work with” the UN. Yet he has also openly suggested that it could replace it. In practice, the Board is already a mechanism to bypass international law rather than enforce it.

Actions speak louder than words.When Trump arbitrarily rescinded Canada’s invitation to join the Board soon after its launch, he revealed its true nature: not a forum governed by rules, but a court governed by favour. The message to the world is that peace is no longer a collective good. It is a commodity, dispensed at the discretion of Washington.

Another dramatic shift in Trump’s second term has occurred in the Western Hemisphere. Long portrayed as an isolationist, Trump has in fact embraced a form of aggressive expansionism. The US is no longer merely asserting influence in the Americas; it is asserting ownership.

On January 3, American forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by carrying out the first bombing of a South American capital in modern history. Trump subsequently declared that the US would “run the country and take its oil.” The statement was not a gaffe. It was a declaration of intent that is now being implemented. Proceeds from selling stolen oil are being deposited in a US bank account in Qatar, to be spent without US congressional approval. Venezuelan oil worth $500 million has already been sold, according to the White House.

The military action against Venezuela followed America’s large-scale naval deployments in the Caribbean, its unilateral renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” and renewed discussions about annexing Greenland and reasserting direct control over the Panama Canal. These moves reflect a coherent worldview of the Trump administration: North and South Americas constitute a privileged zone of US control.

Trump has revived the Monroe Doctrine not as a warning to external powers, but as a license for military intervention or political interference in other nations’ domestic affairs. Sovereignty, in this framework, belongs not to states but to those strong enough to enforce it. The language of partnership has been replaced by the language of possession.

As hard power has been elevated, US soft power has been systematically dismantled. Funding for USAID has been slashed. Voice of America has been effectively shuttered. Cultural diplomacy has withered.

Soft power does not coerce, but it shapes preferences. It reduces the cost of leadership by making influence appear legitimate. The Trump administration, however, does not regard soft power as an asset.

The US withdrawal from the World Health Organization in January is emblematic. For decades, global health was one domain in which US leadership was uncontested. That leadership is now gone, surrendered not after debate, but by presidential decree.

America’s relations with Europe have also deteriorated sharply. The 2025 US National Security Strategy describes Europe as a victim of “civilizational erasure” and calls for alignment with “patriotic” movements there rather than mainstream governments. Such ideological interference signals that, even in the Western bloc, shared values no longer bind. What matters is ideological affinity and transactional utility.

A world remade

Taken together, these shifts amount to more than a change in tone. They represent a transformation in how power is exercised and justified. Trump’s second term has accelerated the erosion of an international system built on norms, institutions and predictability. In fact, he has stepped up efforts to replace it with one organized around coercion, personal authority and short-term gain.

In effect, Trump has not merely taken the world by storm; he is reshaping the environment in which global politics operates. And unlike the social-media posts that signal these changes, the consequences of his reshaping of international relations will endure.

It is against this backdrop that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney became the star at this year’s World Economic Forum at Davos with his remarkable candour in exposing longstanding Western hypocrisy and describing what a Trump-reshaped world meant.

Delivering a prepared speech, Carney declared, “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful. And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”

The plain fact is that the new, Trump-driven order is not stable. It invites emulation by other strongmen. It encourages pre-emptive defiance by smaller states. It fragments global cooperation into spheres of influence governed by fear rather than trust. Yet it is coherent. And that coherence is precisely what makes it dangerous.

The most consequential legacy of Trump’s second term may not be the policies he enacts, but the precedents he sets. Even if a future US administration seeks to restore the old order, it will confront a world that has already adapted to its absence. Once credibility is lost, it cannot simply be reclaimed by presidential proclamation.

India as the pivotal swing state

No country is more exposed to—or more consequential for—the world Trump is remaking than India. As the world’s largest democracy, its fastest-growing major economy, and a central node in Indo-Pacific strategy, India now finds itself cast not as a partner in a US-led order, but as a swing state in a coercive, transactional system.

Trump’s second term presents India with a paradox. On one hand, Washington sees New Delhi as indispensable to balancing China. On the other, it treats India less as a strategic partner than as a negotiable asset—subject to tariffs, pressures and episodic favours. The result is a relationship marked by simultaneous courtship and coercion.

Trade policy illustrates the dilemma starkly. India has sought deeper economic integration with the US but instead it has faced some of the steepest tariffs imposed by the Trump administration—higher even than those levied on China. Market access is dangled not through long-term accords, but through ad hoc bargaining. Stability in the bilateral relationship is conditional.

Strategically, India is being pulled into a vision of order that sits uneasily with its own traditions. Trump’s disdain for multilateral institutions and his open embrace of unilateral force clash with India’s longstanding emphasis on strategic autonomy and international law. The creation of new international bodies such as the “Board for Peace,” governed by personal veto rather than collective legitimacy, places India in an awkward position: participation may offer influence, but at the cost of endorsing a precedent that weakens the very norms India has relied upon as a post-colonial power.

There is also a deeper reputational risk. As Trump reframes global politics as a contest among civilizational strongmen, democracies are valued less for their institutions than for their utility. India is courted not as a democracy, but as a counterweight. This instrumentalization erodes the moral capital that once distinguished democratic alignment from mere alliance.

Trump’s second term is also reshaping the triangular dynamic among China, India and the US—a strategic triangle that is central to Indian interests. Washington now frames its India policy almost exclusively through the prism of countering Beijing, while simultaneously undermining the norms and institutions that once sought to constrain Chinese power. The contradiction is stark: the US asks India to assist American strategy in Asia even as it legitimizes unilateral pressures on New Delhi to compel shifts in trade, energy and strategic policies.

For China, Trump’s unilateralism is an opportunity to step up its own coercive and expansionist policies, especially against its neighbours, including India. It is also an opportunity for China to quietly expand its influence in institutions the US has vacated.

For India, the triangle is more perilous. It faces sustained pressures from China along the Himalayas and via surrogate Pakistan, yet it is being asked by Washington to align with an American strategy that normalizes spheres of influence and transactional dominance. In such a world, today’s partner can become tomorrow’s pressure point.

The erosion of a norms-based order challenges all middle powers like India that rely on predictability to balance asymmetry. As China’s immediate neighbour, India’s challenge is also to navigate this triangle without becoming locked into a logic where raw power becomes the only currency that matters.

India is not without agency. Precisely because Trump’s world is transactional, India’s choices carry outsized weight. Accommodation would signal that even the world’s largest democracy and most-populous country sees no alternative to coercive bilateralism. Resistance—through diversification of partnerships, renewed investment in multilateral forums, and strategic patience—would suggest that the erosion of the old order is not yet complete.

More broadly, Trump has made one reality unmistakably clear: the post-World War II international order is no longer being quietly eroded; it is being openly displaced. Norms are giving way to deals. Institutions are yielding to personalities. Predictability is being replaced by leverage. This is a structural shift, which could gain permanence.

In this emerging order, the world’s future direction will not be determined solely by Washington or Beijing. It will also be shaped by the choices of key states that still retain strategic autonomy. Among them, none matters more than India.

India’s response to Trump’s world will signal whether the country that is home to 18% of the global population believes that power without restraint is inevitable—or whether it still sees value in preserving norms that protect the weak from the strong. Alignment driven purely by fear or expediency would accelerate the very transformation that leaves all democracies more vulnerable. Strategic patience, diversification and selective resistance are likely to slow it.

Whether the 21st century tilts decisively toward coercion or retains space for constraint and norms may well depend on middle powers like India. India is no longer merely rising. It is deciding—by its economic and strategic partnerships and policy choices alike—what kind of world will rise with it.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of two award-winning books.

New Delhi should recognize the reality, be flexible and think strategically

Brahma Chellaney

Nikkei Asia

India has long prided itself on charting an independent course in world affairs — cultivating friendships without dependence and partnerships without formal alliances. For years, that posture seemed not only principled but effective.

A nonaligned India enjoyed unusually warm ties across rival power centers. Some American strategists even described India as the ultimate “swing state” in an emerging multipolar order, capable of tilting the global balance through its choices.

Yet 2025 will be remembered as the year that exposed the fragility of these assumptions. A succession of external shocks revealed structural weaknesses in Indian foreign policy and forced New Delhi into increasingly uncomfortable strategic corners. The cumulative effect was not a single diplomatic failure but a broader loss of strategic room for maneuver.

The most jarring shock came from Washington. Under President Donald Trump’s second-term administration, U.S. policy toward a rising India turned overtly punitive. The imposition of 50% tariffs on Indian exports was more than a trade dispute; it was a political signal that the world’s largest democracy was now viewed less as a strategic partner and more as an economic rival to be squeezed.

This shift was underscored by the newly released U.S. National Security Strategy, which — unlike its 2017 predecessor — barely mentions India or the Quad and frames the relationship in narrowly transactional terms of “improving commercial relations.”

More galling for New Delhi was the document’s claim that Washington had “mediated” the May 2025 India-Pakistan ceasefire — an assertion India has vehemently rejected. For a country that has invested years in projecting itself as a net security provider and responsible regional power, the implication that it required American mediation was diplomatically humiliating.

The chill in ties was also visible at the personal level. Prime Minister Narendra Modi skipped the United Nations General Assembly and ASEAN summits, reportedly to avoid an awkward encounter with Trump, symbolizing how thoroughly the bonhomie between the two had evaporated. While the Trump administration has shown similar brusqueness toward America’s traditional allies, from Germany to Japan, the sting was sharper for India, which had grown accustomed to steadily deepening strategic ties with Washington.

If relations with the U.S. froze, India’s immediate neighborhood grew markedly colder.

For decades, New Delhi assumed that its surrounding region, though perpetually turbulent, could be managed through sustained engagement and economic outreach. In 2025, that assumption collapsed.

The most dramatic blow came with the announcement of a Saudi-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defense Pact declaring that “aggression against one is aggression against both.” For over a decade, Modi had invested heavily in cultivating Saudi Arabia as a strategic partner. The pact revealed the limits of that courtship and underscored Riyadh’s enduring security affinity with Islamabad.

At the same time, India’s own retaliatory military response to the Pahalgam terror attack ended in a ceasefire after merely three days, just as Indian forces appeared to have gained the upper hand. The abrupt halt highlighted how India’s escalation dominance is now constrained by shifting great-power calculations, narrowing its options in a crisis.

The sense of encirclement was compounded by its lingering border tensions with China, political turbulence in Nepal and Bangladesh’s slide into Islamist chaos. Rather than projecting confidence as a regional stabilizer, India in 2025 often appeared reactive, struggling to keep pace with fast-moving developments in its own backyard.

Adding to these pressures was the reemergence of a familiar and uncomfortable pattern: the U.S.-Pakistan security relationship. After two decades of Indian diplomatic efforts to isolate Pakistan internationally over its nexus with terrorist groups, New Delhi watched as Trump hosted Pakistan’s army chief and revived a transactional partnership with Islamabad — highlighted by the Trump family’s lucrative cryptocurrency deal.

Perhaps most troubling was not any single diplomatic setback, but the muted domestic response to this cascade of reverses. A year marked by serious foreign-policy shocks generated surprisingly little introspection within India’s strategic community or political class.

Indian President Droupadi Murmu walks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi on Dec. 5.   © Reuters

Part of the explanation lay in New Delhi’s tendency to reframe setbacks as strategy. India’s renewed outreach to Russia and tentative engagement with its principal rival, China, were presented as evidence of successful “multi-alignment.” In reality, the effort to mend fences with China was less a strategic choice than a compelled response to Western pressure. The rhetoric of strategic autonomy thus obscured a year in which India exercised less agency, not more.

A measure of hubris compounded the problem. Growing instability in India’s neighborhood exposed an inflated sense of New Delhi’s ability to shape political outcomes beyond its borders. Influence was assumed to be enduring when, in fact, it proved fragile.

If 2025 was the year of shocks, 2026 will be the year of hard decisions. India can no longer afford reactive diplomacy cloaked in reassuring slogans.

The relationship with the U.S., despite its deterioration, remains vital to India’s interests. A limited trade deal is likely, even as Indian officials insist they will not negotiate “with a gun to our head.” In reality, New Delhi already finds itself doing precisely that.

The danger is that U.S. economic coercion will extract significant concessions from India without delivering genuine strategic reassurance in return. India has now opened up its commercial nuclear power sector to private companies, including from abroad, and raised foreign direct investment in the insurance sector to 100% from 74%.

The era of lofty talk about U.S.-Indian strategic convergence has given way to cold commercial bargaining, a reality India must confront with clear-eyed pragmatism rather than wounded indignation.

India’s assumption of the BRICS presidency in 2026 will further test its diplomatic agility. Leading a grouping increasingly viewed by the Trump team as hostile will require high-wire diplomacy. New Delhi will seek to champion the Global South without endorsing the overtly anti-Western rhetoric of fellow-members China and Russia — a balance that will be difficult to sustain amid intensifying great-power rivalry.

The strategic landscape facing India has shifted decisively. The world has changed faster than India’s foreign-policy machinery has adapted.

The 2025 shocks serve as a warning to India that, in 2026, it should abandon complacency, question its own assumptions, and return to the principles that once underpinned its diplomatic success: realism over rhetoric, flexibility over dogma, and strategy grounded in hard choices rather than comforting narratives.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

The Quad — the U.S., Japan, India and Australia — was conceived as a strategic coalition to uphold a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” a concept articulated by the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2016 and later elevated to a centerpiece of U.S. strategy. At stake was nothing less than preserving a rules-based order in the world’s most consequential region, which will shape the next global order.

Yet today, at the very moment when China’s coercive power is expanding, the Quad is sliding toward strategic irrelevance — undermined less by external pressure than by Washington’s own drift.

The irony is striking. It was President Trump who, in his first term, revived the Quad after a decade of dormancy and embedded it firmly in U.S. strategy. He replaced the Obama administration’s largely symbolic “pivot to Asia” with a hard-edged “free and open Indo-Pacific” framework, while decisively overturning four decades of U.S. policy toward Beijing by reclassifying China from partner to strategic rival. The Quad emerged as a central pillar of that shift.

Trump’s second term initially appeared to reinforce this trajectory. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on his first day in office, held a Quad foreign ministers’ meeting.

Successive administrations have acknowledged the reality that the Indo-Pacific is now the world’s economic and geopolitical center of gravity, and China — not Russia — poses the defining long-term challenge to U.S. power.  

Barack Obama announced a pivot to Asia in 2011 but failed to resource it adequately. Trump’s first term supplied strategic clarity. Joe Biden preserved the Trump-era framework, keeping the Quad intact and openly identifying China as America’s principal challenger. Yet Biden’s deep entanglement in the Ukraine and Middle East conflicts consumed attention, resources and political capital, leaving little room for a genuine Indo-Pacific pivot.

Trump returned to office pledging to resolve these conflicts and free up American bandwidth for the Indo-Pacific. But now the gap between rhetoric and policy has become glaring. His attempt to end the Ukraine war has stalled amid resistance from both Kyiv and Moscow, delaying any meaningful reallocation of U.S. military resources.

More damaging still, Trump has subordinated long-term strategy to short-term economic extraction, wielding tariffs and trade coercion as blunt instruments — even against allies critical to Indo-Pacific power equilibrium.

This approach is actively hollowing out the Quad. India today faces higher U.S. tariffs than China — an extraordinary outcome for a country Washington routinely describes as a key counterweight to the communist behemoth.

Japan, meanwhile, has been pressured into committing $550 billion in U.S. investments under terms that allow Washington to dictate how the funds are deployed and to claim the lion’s share of profits from the Japanese-financed projects. As Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick conceded, Tokyo may have to strain its own balance sheet simply to comply.

Treating allies as revenue sources may generate short-term gains, but it corrodes trust and undermines collective strategy.

That self-inflicted damage is especially puzzling because stronger ties with India and Japan are not optional but indispensable. Strategically located on China’s opposite flanks, Japan and India represent Beijing’s most consequential regional counterweights.

Trump understood this in his first term, according India pride of place in U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy as the only Asian power with the demographic weight, geographic position, military capability and geopolitical heft to help balance China over the long run. That imperative has only grown with the consolidation of the China-Russia partnership.

Yet Trump’s second-term policies have instead alienated New Delhi. India was slated to host the Quad leaders’ summit in 2025. That prospect collapsed under the weight of Washington’s punitive trade measures. The result is a Quad that is adrift and increasingly marginal to U.S. strategy.

The warning signs are unmistakable. The Quad merits just a single, passing mention in the newly released U.S. National Security Strategy — buried in a brief reference to India. For a grouping once advertised as a cornerstone of the Indo-Pacific strategy, this near-expurgation is telling.

The Quad was never meant to be a talk shop or a disposable bargaining chip in U.S.-China relations. Its core purpose has always been to serve as a strategic bulwark against Chinese expansionism and to uphold a stable Indo-Pacific balance of power.

Allowing it to wither through neglect and allies’ alienation risks vindicating Beijing’s long-standing contempt. When the Quad was first established, China’s foreign minister dismissed it as a fleeting, “headline-grabbing idea” that would dissipate like sea foam. Washington’s current trajectory threatens to prove him right.

It is not too late to avert that outcome. But doing so will require Washington to align economic policy with geopolitical priorities, treat allies as partners rather than profit centers, and restore the Quad to the center of its Indo-Pacific vision. Without such a course correction, the Quad’s existential crisis will deepen, eroding America’s own capacity to sustain a favorable balance of power in the defining region of the 21st century.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to New Delhi should be a wake-up call for the United States: attempting to coerce India into actions that compromise its national interest is a recipe for estrangement. Given that India remains crucial to balance China’s aggressive rise, such an outcome would carry high costs for the US.

Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

At a time when US policy toward India has become distinctly punitive, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s warm reception of Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi last week could not have been more pointed. Modi’s message was clear: India is a sovereign power that will not be dragooned into choosing sides in a widening rift between “the West and the rest.” Instead, it will continue to chart its own course in international affairs.

No major power is more vital to America’s long-term strategic interests than India. It is, after all, the only country with the population size, geographical position, and military might (including nuclear weapons) necessary to challenge China’s efforts to dominate Asia and ultimately supplant the United States as a global hegemon.

Ever since George W. Bush’s presidency, senior US officials have recognized the partnership with India as crucial to maintaining a stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. This has never been mere rhetoric: over the last decade, US-India security ties have deepened rapidly, particularly in terms of military interoperability, intelligence cooperation, and technology exchanges.

Part of this progress occurred during US President Donald Trump’s first administration. As he ramped up pressure on China and cut security aid to Pakistan, Trump expanded cooperation with India, which stood at the center of his administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy. The result is evident today: India now conducts more military exercises with the US than with any other country, and the US has emerged as India’s largest trading partner.

But even as this process unfolded, the US gave India plenty of reason to be wary. Its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan – which took place under President Joe Biden, but resulted from a deal cut earlier by Trump – raised serious doubts about the judgment and reliability of America’s leaders, as it effectively handed that country back to Taliban terrorists.

Concerns heightened in 2022, when the Biden administration helped Pakistan secure an International Monetary Fund bailout and then approved a $450 million deal to modernize the country’s US-supplied F-16 fleet, reviving in India bitter memories of America’s arming of Pakistan during the Cold War. Trump has intensified this embrace of Pakistan, not least in the interest of personal enrichment – highlighted by a lucrative cryptocurrency deal signed in April.

Although the US often disregarded India’s own interests, it nonetheless expected total loyalty when it came to enforcing sanctions on Russia over its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But India – like other US allies such as Israel and Turkey – refused to comply, instead increasing purchases of discounted Russian oil. India saw no reason to sacrifice its national interests for a distant conflict, especially when the chief beneficiary of Western pressure on Russia was China.

India has seen this dynamic unfold before. When Trump reimposed harsh sanctions on Iran in 2019, India was deprived of one of its cheapest and most reliable energy sources, while China seized the opportunity to import Iranian crude at steep discounts and expand its security footprint there.

A similar pattern emerged after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By isolating Russia from Western markets, sanctions effectively turned China into Russia’s economic lifeline, giving it leverage to strengthen its overland energy-supply routes from Russia. China now knows that, even if it moves against Taiwan, it will not lose access to Russian energy. While this trend undoubtedly undermines India’s strategic interests, at least this time India also took advantage of discounts on Russian oil.

The Trump administration, however, was not having it. It imposed an extra 25% tariff on US imports from India – raising total duties to 50% – and threatened secondary sanctions, claiming that India was undermining US efforts to counter “Russia’s harmful activities.” Yet Trump spared other major importers of Russian energy and even granted a sanctions exemption to Hungary, whose autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is a close Trump ally. US tariffs on Indian goods now exceed those applied to Chinese exports. This is nothing short of a US economic war on India.

The US calls India indispensable, but treats its interests as peripheral. It wants India to serve as a pillar of America’s Indo-Pacific strategy, but adopts policies that directly undercut India’s economic strength, regional security, and strategic autonomy. Trump’s foreign policy may be particularly erratic but the underlying pattern has spanned multiple administrations. The result is an increasingly embittered and mistrustful India that sees no choice but to hedge its bets by accelerating self-reliance and strengthening ties with alternative partners, beginning with Russia.

Putin’s visit to New Delhi should serve as a wake-up call for the US: coercion and inconsistency are a sure path to estrangement. A flexible, interest-driven “soft alliance” with India remains one of America’s few credible means of balancing China’s aggressive rise. In this sense, the US needs India more than India needs the US. Instead of trying to force India to “fall in line,” the US must rebuild the relationship by treating India as an equal partner. This means engaging with India as it is, not as American policymakers want it to be.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

© Project Syndicate, 2025.

The U.S. increasingly views China, not Russia, as this century’s defining challenge

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has mounted a renewed push to end the war in Ukraine — this time with greater preparation, clearer resolve and a heightened sense of urgency. By exploiting the winter lull in major ground offensives, it aims to force negotiated compromises and lock in a deal before the conflict enters its fifth year in February.

Part of the push reflects Trump’s vanity project as a self-styled global peacemaker. Addressing the United Nations in September, he boasted, “Everyone says that I should get a Nobel Peace Prize.”

But the deeper driver is strategic: a calculation that America’s long-term interests are better served by closing out a proxy war with Russia that no longer sits at the center of U.S. priorities. Trump’s Alaska summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin was the first sign of an emerging strategic recalibration in U.S. policy.

With U.S. policymakers increasingly focused on countering an ascendant China, the administration sees Russia as a declining economic power whose war in Ukraine has become a costly distraction for Washington, siphoning American attention and resources away from the far more consequential contest with Beijing. Ending the war on terms that stabilize Europe and strengthen America’s economic position is therefore a central objective.

This objective has led to dual-track pressure — compelling Kyiv to negotiate while forcing Moscow to bankroll both U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine and broader joint ventures. The result is a peace framework designed not only to stop a grinding war, but to make the postwar landscape financially rewarding for Washington.

Presently, America’s preoccupation with Ukraine hands China a strategic dividend: it dilutes U.S. deterrence in Asia, complicates alliance coordination and stretches a finite U.S. military-industrial capacity. Washington is already struggling to refill its own weapons stockpiles even as it arms both Ukraine and Israel.

Meanwhile, the brutal arithmetic of the battlefield is becoming impossible to gloss over. Ukraine’s manpower crunch in the military is deepening, its air defenses are fraying, it is still losing ground, and Western production lines cannot match Russia’s surging output. As a senior U.S. official has warned, Russia is now producing missiles faster than it can fire them — creating a rapidly expanding arsenal of long-range weapons that could, at some point, deliver a knockout blow to Ukraine.

For the U.S., whose defense resources are already overstretched, continuing to underwrite Ukraine’s war effort risks compromising its ability to counter China — a far larger, more capable and more ideologically driven challenger than Russia. A protracted war in Ukraine will erode America’s capacity to surge forces and sustain a high-intensity fight in the western Pacific, or even credibly signal to Beijing that it is fully prepared to defend Taiwan.

The implication is clear: a settlement needs to be reached soon, before the war’s trajectory tilts decisively against an already-bleeding Ukraine.

Critics of Trump’s peace push should heed the warning from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s former spokesperson, Iuliia Mendel: “Every subsequent deal for Ukraine will only be worse — because we are losing.” It bears recalling that Ukraine and Russia nearly reached a settlement in Istanbul in April 2022 — a deal far more favorable to Kyiv than anything remotely attainable today. Yet, as U.S. Vice President JD Vance has noted, “There is a fantasy that if we just give more money, more weapons, or more sanctions, victory is at hand.”

America has seen this movie before. It spent 20 years waging war against the Taliban — and lost — because it refused to make difficult compromises when it still had leverage. The eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan was not only belated but humiliating.

Those now deriding efforts to end the Ukraine war should answer a simple question: What realistic alternative do they propose that Moscow could conceivably accept? If they cannot articulate one, then their objections amount to little more than wishful thinking dressed up as resolve.

The Trump administration’s peace plan is a hard-nosed attempt to realign Western strategy with long-term geopolitical realities — above all, the need to shift focus to the Indo-Pacific region, the world’s strategic center of gravity. The proposed course may be unsettling, but it reflects a basic truth: The era of limitless American bandwidth is over. And Washington’s underlying calculation is unmistakable — China, not Russia, is the defining challenge of the 21st century.

Whether the plan succeeds, however, depends on factors far beyond Kyiv’s control. Its viability hinges on Moscow’s willingness to accept a settlement at a moment when it holds the battlefield advantage. Putin may well decide that time favors Russia: that pressing the military offensive and intensifying the pressure on Ukraine could extract even larger concessions down the road.

Whatever its eventual fate, the peace plan sends a clear signal to allies and adversaries alike: American strategy is entering a new phase. For Europe, this may feel like an unwelcome jolt of reality. For China, it is a warning that Washington intends to reclaim the initiative in the Indo-Pacific. And for Ukraine, it is a sobering reminder that even the most committed patron ultimately reshapes its commitments to serve its own core interests.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.