A strongman president, self-styled redeemer of national glory, is trapped in a conflict he can’t win but doesn’t know how to end without looking like a loser. A cult of infallibility prevents the leader admitting a strategic blunder even to himself. It could be Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin; Iran or Ukraine.
The conflicts and the regimes involved are also dissimilar in important ways. Russia’s campaign to eradicate a neighbouring democracy is nastier in conception and bloodier in execution than the bungled US effort to dislodge a dictatorship in Tehran. It has also gone on much longer. The first world war was shorter than a “special military operation” that was supposed to capture Kyiv within weeks. The Soviet Red Army repelled Nazi invasion and marched on Berlin in less time than it has taken Putin’s forces to occupy a tranche of eastern Ukraine, and they are not making any significant advances. The war has burned trillions of roubles and sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives for no discernible dividend in national greatness.
The failure is too big for the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery to hide. Civilians hundreds of miles from the frontline see the plumes of black smoke from the oil refineries struck by long-range Ukrainian drones. They feel the depletion of their wages by inflation. They noticed how last month’s Victory Day parade, the high holy day of Russian militarism, was strangely modest. The traditional convoy of tanks and missiles couldn’t go ahead when the skies above Red Square were vulnerable to Ukrainian aerial mischief.
Official opinion polls have shown a drop in support for Putin, albeit from impossible heights to improbable ones. Since the data-collecting agencies are under state control, the blip is best interpreted as a symptom of factional jostling for influence within the regime. Pragmatists in the civilian administration might have flashed a glimpse of presidential vulnerability as a warning to hardliners in the security apparatus that their approach isn’t working. Polls tracked back towards the adulatory norm after a pause for “methodological” revision.
Any internal Russian lobby for ending the war runs into the problem that Putin sees the conflict as an existential struggle to avenge national honour against the perfidious west. He casts himself as the incarnation of national destiny, reaffirming Russian civilisational supremacy over borderlands to which it is historically entitled. Such a man doesn’t easily accept the prospect of dealing with Volodymyr Zelenskyy on equal terms as legitimate president of an independent country.
Trump’s worldview is less cluttered with antique mythology, more pumped with celebrity narcissism, but the effect is the same. He shares Putin’s concept of alpha powers whose interests override any sovereignty claims of lesser nations in their neighbourhoods. He was easily persuaded that Ukraine’s cause was hopeless and that Putin held all “the cards” because it would have offended his own sense of majesty to believe that someone in Zelenskyy’s geopolitical class could be a winner.
If the US president had been interested in the reality of Ukraine’s defensive campaign he might have observed the levelling effect of drones, allowing a smaller force to thwart an apparently overwhelming onslaught. He might even have considered the relevance of that asymmetry when judging whether Iran could be bombed into unconditional surrender. He might then have taken advice from people in the state department and CIA who had war-gamed an all-out campaign against the Islamic Republic under previous administrations. They concluded that regime change couldn’t be achieved from the air and that closure of the strait of Hormuz was a viable Iranian countermeasure with devastating economic consequences.
That would have required a capacity for strategic analysis that recognised practical constraints on what the US can achieve. Since Trump sees no boundary between himself and his country’s power, and treats every interaction in zero-sum terms, factoring Iranian advantages into the military equation would be like admitting limits to his personal potency. Intolerable.
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Like Putin, Trump is marooned on an island of autocratic delusion, surrounded by advisers and ministers who are too cowardly or too blinded by ideology to survey the distant shore of reality and suggest a way back. For the Russian president there might be some compensation in seeing the US humbled in the Middle East, but the gains are fewer than they appeared at the start of the war. The revenue boost from higher oil prices has been largely cancelled out by the costs and logistical impediment of Ukrainian drones landing on industrial infrastructure.
Meanwhile, a Trump administration bogged down in negotiations with Tehran has no bandwidth for Ukraine. That shifts the odds against Putin in his bet that Zelenskyy can be bullied by the White House into conceding territory that Russian soldiers haven’t been able to seize on the ground. It also creates a space for more proactive involvement of Ukraine’s European allies. They feel the need to check Kremlin aggression more urgently than anyone in Washington.
That agenda has become easier to pursue since Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungarian elections earlier this year. The removal of Putin’s favourite spanner from the European works led to a prompt unblocking of aid to Kyiv. There are signs of momentum behind a Europe-led peace initiative. At a recent meeting of EU foreign ministers there was discussion of candidates to lead negotiations with Moscow. This week, Keir Starmer hosted Zelenskyy, along with Germany’s Friedrich Merz and France’s Emmanuel Macron for a summit in Downing Street.
These displays of solidarity gloss over the gap between what Ukraine needs in terms of military hardware and what Europeans are ready to provide. It still isn’t clear what a “coalition of the willing” would really be willing to do to keep the peace in Ukraine without the US. But Putin’s confidence that the decadent west would not stay the course when confronted with Russia’s inexhaustible supply of manly valour has also not been vindicated.
This is something else he has in common with Trump, or that Russian ultranationalism shares with Maga mania. Both movements view Europe as a decrepit civilisation in the death throes of cultural suicide by overdose of immigration and liberal degeneracy. It is a diagnosis repeated by many nationalists and mainstream conservatives across Europe, assisted on their ideological journey by campaigns of overt and covert online influence originating in Russia and the US.
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It is also an underestimation of liberal democracy’s defining strength, which is the resilience afforded by pluralism and institutional acceptance of legitimate opposition. The authoritarian strongman, seeing no difference between his will and the nation’s destiny, treats dissent as an assault on his authority, tending towards treason. He sits atop an edifice of power that promotes loyalty at the expense of truth, until reality itself is banished from his court.
In the US that process can still be corrected by constitutional checks and balances, fair elections, a free press and independent courts. Not in Russia. That is why European democracies must prove that their system of government is not only better in principle, but stronger in practice. And the way they do it is by embracing Ukraine’s struggle as their own.
