“We are the watchmen on the walls of world freedom.” So reads the concluding paragraph of the speech President John F. Kennedy intended to give on Nov. 22, 1963.
Unfortunately, JFK never had a chance to deliver that speech at the Dallas Trade Mart because he was assassinated on his way there by an ex-Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union.
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However, the firm bipartisan consensus that it represented predated JFK by two decades, and continued through many administrations, Democrat and Republican alike, for the next six.
Under its guidance, the evil empire of captive nations imprisoned under the iron heel of the Kremlin tyranny was dismantled, and with the deterrent and commercial power of the Free World united by American leadership, humanity enjoyed an unprecedented 80 years of spectacular material progress without a general war or a depression.
But now, with the release of its new National Security Strategy, the Trump administration has proclaimed its intention to put an end to that. As self-described “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth declared, explaining the new policy in a speech ironically given at the Ronald Reagan Center in December, “out with utopian idealism, in with hardnosed realism.”
Some optimistic observers refuse to see Trump’s new strategy as representing a betrayal of all of America’s allies.
So, forget all that stuff about being the watchers on the walls of world freedom. Trump’s worldview does not acknowledge the existence of the categories of right and wrong. He only believes in advantage and disadvantage. Therefore, in alignment with the president’s moral nihilism, America will no longer seek to do what is right. We will only do what is advantageous. Be that as it may, the Trump policy is neither.
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Specifically, under the new policy, the Trump administration no longer sees a community of interest with other nations supporting universal ideals of human freedom and dignity. Instead, it has embraced the concept of the “multi-polar world” long advocated by the Putin regime.
This amounts to a deal by which the world will be divided by the three major powers, or “poles,” into spheres of influence, with the United States getting the Western Hemisphere, Russia getting Europe, and China getting East and South Asia.
As might be expected, Russia’s leaders responded to the administration’s new direction with glee. “This matches our vision,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Some optimistic observers refuse to see Trump’s new strategy as representing a betrayal of all of America’s allies. Europe may be being left to its fate, they say, but this is because the Americans are simply “pivoting to Asia.”
Such an interpretation, however, is belied by Trump’s actions. Specifically, within a few days of the release of the new strategy document, the administration announced that it was lifting America’s embargo on sending advanced NVIDIA artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China.
Given the critical importance of AI technology to enabling the new generation of autonomous military drones that are now revolutionizing warfare, Trump just as well might have announced that he was shipping the US nuclear arsenal to Beijing and transferring control of America’s satellite systems as well.
Essentially, Trump just threw the security of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and in fact, all of its far eastern allies, right into the trash can.
But indeed, it is in the European theater that the Trump team has moved most aggressively to betray the Free World alliance to the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea (CRINK) axis of tyrannies.
Trump’s blitzkrieg on behalf of the CRINKs began on Nov. 20, when Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, a long-time friend of Vice President J.D. Vance, arrived in Kyiv to deliver an ultimatum giving the Ukrainians until Thanksgiving to agree to a putative “peace plan” containing the following terms.
These terms were clearly dictated by the Kremlin, as the very grammar used in Driscoll’s document made it obvious that it was originally written in Russian and then translated, poorly, into nominal English.
The Putrumplan also closely resembles the Munich Pact in its betrayal of the democracies’ own strategic interests.
Moreover, while all of the above points in the Putin-Trump plan (or Putrumplan, to use a traditional Kremlin mode of abbreviation) were bad for Ukraine, the final four made it utterly unacceptable, as they would render Ukraine helpless. Were Ukraine to disarm in accord with those terms, all other points would be moot, as there would be nothing to stop Russia from occupying the entire country.
In this respect, the Putrumplan to annihilate Ukraine precisely mirrors the method by which the governments of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French President Edouard Daladier worked with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler to coerce Czechoslovakia into suicide in 1938.
According to the Munich Pact, foisted upon Czechoslovakia by Chamberlain, Daladier, and Hitler, peace could only be achieved if the Czechs surrendered their highly fortified Sudetenland border region to Germany.
However, once the Czechs agreed to this, they were defenseless. Within five months, Hitler invaded and occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia, ignoring, as did Chamberlain and Daladier, the solemn territorial guarantees they all had offered to the Czechs as bait for their acceptance of the Munich Pact.
The Putrumplan also closely resembles the Munich Pact in its betrayal of the democracies’ own strategic interests.
By surrendering Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain and Daladier eliminated 35 well-equipped Czech divisions from the West’s order of battle, added the excellent Czech armaments industry to the Nazis’ defense industrial base, and extended the border of the Third Reich around the south of Poland, thereby rendering that Western ally defenseless.
It is a fallacy to say that Russia can be no threat to the West because it has had such a hard time handling Ukraine.
Then, when Hitler predictably took advantage of these gains to invade Poland, Britain and France declared war but did nothing, allowing Poland and its 50 divisions to be wiped off the map. So, when the next spring Hitler turned his greatly enhanced war machine West to destroy France, 85 divisions, or almost half the armed forces that could have resisted him (the British and French together had 94 divisions) had been eliminated before the battle for France had even begun. The result was a catastrophe.
In the same way, forcing the destruction of Ukraine invites total disaster for the Western democracies today.
It is a fallacy to say that Russia can be no threat to the West because it has had such a hard time handling Ukraine. Ukraine has stopped the Russian advance by deploying hundreds of thousands of men into combat and taking tens of thousands of casualties, paying a price in blood that is far higher than the United States or any of our Western European allies are likely to be willing to bear.
It is only because of the existence, courage, and endurance of the Ukrainian army that the front lines have been made static, and the war reduced to a contest of technological virtuosity.
This is a fight that the West can now readily win if it were to provide Ukraine with the benefits of airpower, satellite communications, and scientific excellence. With such means, Ukraine could eradicate the Kremlin’s oil industry, a feat which, if realized, would collapse Russia by driving its economy into hyperinflation.
Indeed, with Ukraine holding the front, the Western powers could defeat Russia right now simply using their control of the Skagerrak and the Bosphorus to stop and confiscate as contraband all tankers exporting Russian oil.
It boils down to this. NATO needs an army. Ukraine has one.
But take the Ukrainian army out of the equation (and add Ukraine’s massive drone production capability to that of Russia) and everything changes.
With the Ukrainian army gone, NATO would have no countermove if Russia should decide to invade the Baltic States.
But the situation is much worse than that.
Take a look at a map. There are two countries barring Russia’s path into Europe: Poland and Ukraine. Poland has a small but fierce army and would undoubtedly defend itself if attacked by Russia. But take away Ukraine, and there are no serious armed forces blocking the Russian army moving southward of Poland, to Budapest, Vienna, and Belgrade, and taking Moldova, Romania and Bulgaria as well.
Would the Trump administration be willing to send half a million American soldiers to Europe to stop such an advance? Certainly not.
It boils down to this. NATO needs an army. Ukraine has one. With it, Europe can be defended at minimal cost. Without it, Europe would be completely open to invasion or domination by Russia, and the overall policy of deterrence that has prevented another world war for the past 80 years would be fatally shattered.
In this respect, the Trump-Putin Pact resembles another historic deal, even more infamous than that made at Munich. I am referring to the Hitler-Stalin (or Molotov-Ribbentrop) Pact of August 1939, by which the two rival totalitarian powers decided to temporarily put aside their differences and divide the spoils of Eastern Europe between them.
Despite the fact that it led directly to a world war in which over 25 million Soviet subjects were slaughtered, the Kremlin has been seeking to replicate an updated version of such an accord. In this “multipolar world,” America would be allotted a sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere while allowing Russia and China to create their own empires dominating the rest.
For this deal to be realized, Europe must fall to Russia. Such an outcome is therefore not a bug, but a feature of Trump’s Ukraine policy. This is laid bare in the NSS itself, which demands that European governments open themselves up to takeover by anti-NATO parties sponsored by the Kremlin.
The predatory gang surrounding Trump claims, in chorus with the Kremlin line, that America would gain much by such an arrangement. But this is total nonsense. The Free World alliance, joining America with Europe and other democracies, does indeed have vastly superior economic strength to the China-Russia Axis.
Abandoning such allies would be the equivalent of ripping our eyes and ears out.
But if it deserts its allies, America alone could and would be crushed economically in a new world order dictated by its enemies.
Table 1 reports the breakdown of global GDP, normalized to the purchasing power in each country.
Table 1 GDP Normalized to Purchasing Power (PPP), 2025
Country or Block Amount
USA: $30.62 trillion, 14.73%
Other Democracies: $60.55 trillion, 29.14%
China: $41.61 trillion, 20.03%
Other CRINKS: $9.43 trillion, 4.54%
All Others: $65.55 trillion, 31.55%
Total: $207.75 trillion, 100%
Examining the data in Table 1, we can see that, normalized to purchasing power, the Free World, collectively comprising the United States and its European, Asian, and Australian democratic allies, outproduces the Chinese-led CRINK block by $91 trillion to $51 trillion, or 78 percent. But without our friends, China plus its CRINK allies (Russia, Iran, North Korea, and their satellites) could outproduce the United States by a hefty $51 trillion to $30.6 trillion, or nearly 67 percent.
But even worse, should the United States retreat from the world and allow the Chinese-led CRINK Axis to intimidate those we abandon into joining its bloc, their combined economic resources could potentially overpower America’s by as much as six hundred percent!
Together with her allies, America has the material and technological resources needed to deal with the enormous challenge we face. Without them, she does not.
Furthermore, not only would an isolated America be outnumbered, outproduced, and impoverished by adversaries able to dictate the terms of world trade, but we would be rendered blind by the loss of human intelligence provided by our allies.
If we want to be able to have any advanced idea of what North Korea, Russia, or China might be cooking up against us, we need to have South Korea, Ukraine and Taiwan in our corner. To be able to promptly detect adversarial movements once they are actually underway, we need to have bases, radar systems, and electronic listening posts in many other countries all around the world.
Abandoning such allies would be the equivalent of ripping our eyes and ears out. We can readily contain Russia now, because we have European allies whose geographical position allows them to easily dominate the Baltic and Aegean seas, through which all ships leaving European Russia’s warm-water ports must pass to access the world.
But sacrifice those European allies, and all bets are off.
The Putrumplan anticipates that, once abandoned by the US and exposed by Ukraine’s fall to invasion, or potential invasion, by the Russian army, Europe will simply fall to Kremlin domination.
This is indeed possible, and would be a catastrophe for America’s prosperity and security. That is why Putin has pulled out all the stops, mobilizing an unprecedented array of puppet political parties, agitators, social media trolls, and bots to applaud and encourage any belief that might lead to such a fatal decision.
There are two other possible outcomes, however.
The most likely outcome is that the Europeans would cut a deal with China. After all, it would be much better to pay protection money to Beijing than be turned into meat in Putin’s butcher shop. In this case, the Kremlin would be cut out of the deal, and with Europe as its purse and satrap, China would obtain world dominance.
Wait till they see what the costs become when China is the world’s policeman.
The other, less likely, but admittedly possible outcome, is that in shock over America’s betrayal, Europe rapidly rearms and becomes a new German-led military superpower rivalling the other three poles. The Trumpists claim this is what they want. If they really do, they should be careful what they wish for.
As for the rest of the world’s nations, what might they do while Trump, Putin, and Xi plot the division of the spoils of the globe? Those who wish to remain sovereign will have only one option. They will rush to acquire nuclear weapons, vastly increasing the risk of nuclear war.
In return for inviting this global catastrophe, the United States would obtain a “sphere of influence” in the Western Hemisphere. But what exactly does that mean? Trump wants to annex Canada. But prior to the Trump administration, America’s relations with Canada were so close that we might just as well have been one country.
We already have military bases in Greenland, courtesy of Denmark, until recently our loyal ally. Why make an enemy by stealing something from a friend who will let us use it for free? As for Latin America, what does Trump expect to get from it that we don’t already have? He certainly doesn’t want to make Mexico a part of the United States. Sure, we would be able to overthrow distasteful nearby governments like those in Cuba or Venezuela. But we can do that now, if we really want to, by using a naval blockade to impose pressure.
So, what would America really get out of abandoning world leadership?
The Trumpists answer that we would be freed from the cost of being the world’s policeman. Wait till they see what the costs become when China is the world’s policeman. Or even worse, what it costs us to live in a world where there is no policeman at all.
I was born in 1952. My father and all my uncles served in the US Army during World War II. One of my uncles landed on Normandy Beach a few weeks after D-Day, fought his way across France, and was killed in action recovering his platoon’s light machine gun from a fallen BAR man following a German ambush during the crossing of the Moselle.
At enormous sacrifice, millions of men and women like them in all the armies, navies, merchant marines and resistance forces of the democratic nations defeated fascism and created a new world, a free world, a better world than had ever existed before. We have enjoyed the fruits of that tremendous accomplishment ever since.
Are we really going to let a gang of corrupt, treasonous punks throw it all away?
Dr. Robert Zubrin @robert_zubrin is an American aerospace engineer and author of 12 books, including most recently “The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet.”
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
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