The act of Trump calling Putin directly is the important event here. Regardless of how this plays out going forward, Europeans have been told in plain terms that their interests will not be represented in the negotiations. The whole nature of the relationship between US and Europe will be very different going forward.
There are two ways this can play out now. Either Trump agrees to Russian terms, which seems to be the way things are currently headed, or he just pulls funding from the project and walks away. Both scenarios mean that the war is going to be over quickly and on Russian terms.
I strongly suspect it will be the former because I think that the US will want to restore relations with Russia in an attempt to arrest the alternate economic bloc forming around BRICS from gaining further momentum. I expect that Trump will try to bring Russia back into the SWIFT system and convince them to trade in dollars. I expect that Russia won’t shut the door on that entirely. Trump is also frantically trying to improve relations with India getting them to buy F35s, and demanding that the US become their main energy supplier. It seems like Trump admin sees BRICS as the biggest threat, which is a correct view from US perspective incidentally.
The act of Trump calling Putin directly is the important event here. Regardless of how this plays out going forward, Europeans have been told in plain terms that their interests will not be represented in the negotiations. The whole nature of the relationship between US and Europe will be very different going forward.
There are two ways this can play out now. Either Trump agrees to Russian terms, which seems to be the way things are currently headed, or he just pulls funding from the project and walks away. Both scenarios mean that the war is going to be over quickly and on Russian terms.
I strongly suspect it will be the former because I think that the US will want to restore relations with Russia in an attempt to arrest the alternate economic bloc forming around BRICS from gaining further momentum. I expect that Trump will try to bring Russia back into the SWIFT system and convince them to trade in dollars. I expect that Russia won’t shut the door on that entirely. Trump is also frantically trying to improve relations with India getting them to buy F35s, and demanding that the US become their main energy supplier. It seems like Trump admin sees BRICS as the biggest threat, which is a correct view from US perspective incidentally.