Författare: Jonathan Este Senior International Affairs Editor Associate

Browse through Donald Trump’s ghostwritten memoir, The Art of the Deal, and you’ll come across an aphorism which will go some way to explaining the US president’s approach to negotiating. Having established that he would do nearly anything within legal bounds to win, Trump adds that: “Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition.”

It’s an idea which makes a lot of sense when you consider Trump’s record. We saw it time and again on the campaign trail, as he sought to seal the deal with the US public by repeatedly denigrating first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris. Which begs the question, in seeking to make a deal to end the war in Ukraine, exactly who he sees as the competition he needs to denigrate: Vladimir Putin or Volodymyr Zelensky?

Trump has certainly gone out of his way to excoriate the Ukrainian president over the past day or two, both in public and on his TruthSocial platform. He has variously blamed Zelensky for starting the war, called him a “dictator without elections” and a “modestly successful comedian … very low in Ukrainian polls” who “has done a terrible job, his country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died”.

Putin, meanwhile, takes a rather different view of how to seal a deal with the US president. Far from denigrating Trump, he has set out to charm the flattery-loving president with a view to driving a wedge between the US and Europe, claiming that EU leaders had “insulted” Trump during his election campaign and insisting that “they are themselves at fault for what is happening”.

Sign up to receive our weekly World Affairs Briefing newsletter from The Conversation UK. Every Thursday we’ll bring you expert analysis of the big stories in international relations.

The Russian president will be well pleased with the events of the past week or so. After three years of increasing isolation under the Biden presidency, he’s now back at the top table with the US president – two powerful men discussing the future of Europe.

For the man who, in 2005, complained that the collapse of the Soviet Union had been “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, to be back deciding the fate of nations is a dream come true, writes James Rodgers of City St George’s, University of London.

Rodgers, a former BBC Moscow correspondent, observes that Putin has fulfilled this mission having “conceded not an inch of occupied Ukrainian territory to get there. Nor has he even undertaken to give back any of what Russian forces have seized since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago.”

Not only that, but Putin also appears to have enlisted US support for one of the key objectives that encouraged him to invade Ukraine in the first place: preventing Ukraine from joining Nato. That much was clear from the US defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s speech to European defence officials last week. The views of Washington’s European allies (and of the Biden administration) – that Ukraine’s membership of Nato is a matter for the alliance members to decide with Ukraine as a sovereign state in control of its own foreign policy – don’t appear to matter to Trump and his team.

Read more:
Ukraine peace talks: Trump is bringing Russia back in from the cold and ticking off items on Putin’s wish list

Meanwhile, Trump’s policy volte-face over Ukraine and, more broadly, European security in general has driven a dangerous wedge between the US and its allies in Europe. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, responded by convening a meeting on Monday of the leaders of what the French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, described as “the main European countries”. This turned out to include Germany, the UK, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark, as well as the Nato secretary-general and the presidents of the European Council and European Commission.

Passing over the question of how the leaders of the Baltic states felt about this, given they all share a border with Russia (as does Finland) and presumably are well aware of the vulnerability of their position, the fact is Europe is deeply divided over its response to the situation.

As Stefan Wolff observes, the Weimar+ group of countries that met in Paris only represent one shade of opinion within the EU. Meanwhile, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is openly scathing about European efforts to support Ukraine, posting on X: “While President @realDonaldTrump and President Putin negotiate on peace, EU officials issue worthless statements.”

Wolff, an expert in international security at the University of Birmingham, notes that disrupting European unity is a stated aim of the Project 2025 initiative which has guided, if not Trump himself, many of his close advisers. The past week, taking into account both Hegseth’s meeting with European defence ministers and the subsequent appearance by the US vice-president, J.D. Vance, at the Munich Security Conference, has gone a fair way down the path towards achieving that disruption.

At the same time, Vance’s lecture to the conference – during which he was heavily critical of Europe as “the enemy within” which was undermining democracy and threatening free speech – will have united most of those present in anger and dismay at his remarks.

Read more:
Europe left scrambling in face of wavering US security guarantees

Constitutional matters

Trump has declared that Zelensky is a “dictator” because he cancelled last year’s election in Ukraine. In fact, Ukraine’s constitution provides that elections are prohibited during periods of martial law. And martial law has been in force since the day of the invasion on February 24 2022.

Bleak prospects: Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky.
EPA-EFE/presidential press service

Lena Surzhko Harned, a professor of political science at Penn State University, writes that the delegitimisation of Zelensky is a tactic Putin has been striving for from the very start. The Kremlin has pushed the narrative that there is no legitimate authority with which to negotiate a peace deal, and that Zelensky’s government is “illegitimate”.

“What Putin needs for this plan to work is a willing partner to help get the message out that Zelensky and the current Ukraine government are not legitimate representatives of their country,” writes Harned. “And into this gap the new US administration appears to have stepped.”

Despite Zelensky still enjoying relatively strong support in recent opinion polls, an election campaign in the middle of this conflict would be a needlessly divisive exercise. And that’s before you consider the potential for Russian interference, which would be seriously debilitating for a country fighting for its survival.

Putin knows all this – and he also knows by framing the issue in a way that suggests Ukraine is dragging its feet over peace, he will enjoy a propaganda coup. And that’s what he is doing, with the apparent support of the US president.

Read more:
In pushing for Ukraine elections, Trump is falling into Putin-laid trap to delegitimize Zelenskyy

Another way Putin hopes to discredit the Ukrainian leadership is by deliberately excluding it from the talks – at least for the present. Zelensky has said, with the support of his European allies, that there can be no deal without Ukrainian participation.

It’s easy to see why Zelensky and his allies are so adamant that they should be involved, writes Matt Fitzpatrick, a professor of international history at Flinders University. History is littered with examples of large powers getting together to decide the fate of smaller nations that have no agency in the division.

Three such shameful debacles determined the history of much of the 20th century – and not in a good way. The Sykes-Picot agreement divided the Middle East between British and French spheres of influence, and sowed the seed for discord which continues to this day. The Munich conference of 1938, at which the fate of Czechoslovakia was decided without any Czech input, showed Adolf Hitler that naked aggression really does pay. And having failed to learn from either of these, in 1945 the Big Three (Russia, the US and Britain) got together at Yalta to carve up Germany, thereby setting the scene for the cold war.

Read more:
Ukraine isn’t invited to its own peace talks. History is full of such examples – and the results are devastating

Deal or no deal

One of Trump’s assertions this week has been that Zelensky had his chance to strike a deal and avoid all the bloodshed and much of the territorial loss suffered by Ukraine in the three years of war. Reacting to questions about why Zelensky or any Ukrainian diplomats hadn’t been involved in the talks, he scoffed: “Today I heard: ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years … You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

Stephen Hall, who specialises in Russian and post-Soviet politics at the University of Bath, recalls the early talks in the spring of 2022. He says that the idea – also floated in the press by several commentators – that Ukraine should have concluded a peace deal in March or April of 2022 after talks in Istanbul is absurd.

While there was momentum for peace, particularly on Kyiv’s part, the two sides were a long way apart on issues such as the size of Ukraine’s military and the fate of territories such as Crimea. “Had Ukraine done a deal based on the Istanbul communique, it would have essentially led to the country becoming a virtual province of Russia – led by a pro-Russian government and banned from seeking alliances with western countries,” Hall writes.

Read more:
Ukraine war: the idea that Kyiv should have signed a peace deal in 2022 is flawed – here’s why

And in any case, back then there was scant support among Ukraine’s allies in Europe and the Biden White House for appeasing Putin by offering him concessions in return for aggression. But that’s now history. Trump and his team appear to have already granted the Russian president some of his dearest wishes before the negotiations proper have even started.

World Affairs Briefing from The Conversation UK is available as a weekly email newsletter. Click here to get updates directly in your inbox. Läs mer…

Annalena Baerbock, the German foreign minister, spoke for much of the European diplomatic community when she reacted to news of Donald Trump’s phone chat with Vladimir Putin: “This is the way the Trump administration operates,” she declared. “This is not how others do foreign policy, but this is now the reality.”

The resigned tone of Baerbock’s words was not matched by her colleague, defence minister Boris Pistorius, whose criticism that “the Trump administration has already made public concessions to Putin before negotiations have even begun” was rather more direct.

Their sentiments were echoed, not only by European leaders, but in the US itself: “Putin Scores a Big Victory, and Not on the Battlefield” read a headline in the New York Times. The newspaper opined that Trump’s call had succeeded in bringing Putin back in from the cold after three years in which Russia had become increasingly isolated both politically and economically.

This was not lost on the Russian media, where commentators boasted that the phone call “broke the west’s blockade”. The stock market gained 5% and the rouble strengthened against the dollar as a result.

Reflecting on the call, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, continued with operation flatter Donald Trump by comparing his attitude favourably with that of his predecessor in the White House, Joe Biden. “The previous US administration held the view that everything needed to be done to keep the war going. The current administration, as far as we understand, adheres to the point of view that everything must be done to stop the war and for peace to prevail.

”We are more impressed with the position of the current administration, and we are open to dialogue.”

Trump’s conversation with Putin roughly coincided with a meeting of senior European defence officials in Brussels which heard the new US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, outline America’s radical new outlook when it comes to European security. Namely that it’s not really America’s problem any more.

Hegseth also told the meeting in Brussels yesterday that the Trump administration’s position is that Nato membership for Ukraine has been taken off the table, that the idea it would get its 2014 borders back was unrealistic and that if Europe wanted to guarantee Ukraine’s security as part of any peace deal, that would be its business. Any peacekeeping force would not involve American troops and would not be a Nato operation, so it would not involve collective defence.

Sign up to receive our weekly World Affairs Briefing newsletter from The Conversation UK. Every Thursday we’ll bring you expert analysis of the big stories in international relations.

International security expert David Dunn believes that the fact that Trump considers himself a consummate deal maker makes the fact that his administration is willing to concede so much ground before negotiations proper have even got underway is remarkable. And not in a good way.

Dunn, who specialises in US foreign and security policy at the University of Birmingham, finds it significant that Trump spoke with Putin first and then called Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky to fill him in on the call. This order of priority, says Dunn, is a sign of the subordination of Ukraine’s role in the talks.

He concludes that “for the present at least, it appears that negotiations will be less about pressuring Putin to bring a just end to the war he started than forcing Ukraine to give in to the Russian leader’s demands”.

Read more:
Trump phone call with Putin leaves Ukraine reeling and European leaders stunned

Hegseth’s briefing to European defence officials, meanwhile, came as little surprise to David Galbreath. Writing here, Galbreath – who specialises in defence and security at the University of Bath – says the US pivot away from a focus on Europe has been years in the making – “since the very end of the cold war”.

There has long been a feeling in Washington that the US has borne too much of the financial burden for European security. This is not just a Donald Trump thing, he believes, but an attitude percolating in US security circles for some decades. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated, the focus for Nato become not so much collective defence as collective security, where “conflict would be managed on Nato’s borders”.

But it was then the US which invoked article 5 of the Nato treaty, which establishes that “an armed attack against one or more [member states] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”. The Bush government invoked Article 5 the day after the 9/11 attacks and Nato responded by patrolling US skies to provide security.

Pete Hegseth dashes Ukraine’s hopes of a future guaranteed by Nato.

Galbreath notes that many European countries, particularly the newer ones such as Estonia and Latvia, sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. “The persistent justification I heard in the Baltic states was ”we need to be there when the US needs us so that they will be there when we need them”.

That looks set to change.

Read more:
US says European security no longer its primary focus – the shift has been years in the making

The prospect of a profound shift in the world order are daunting after 80 years in which security – in Europe certainly – was guaranteed by successive US administrations and underpinned, not just by Nato but by a whole set of international agreements.

Now, instead of the US acting as the “world’s policeman”, we have a president talking seriously about taking control of Greenland, one way or another, who won’t rule out using force to seize the Panama Canal and who dreams of turning Gaza into a coastal “riviera” development.

Meanwhile Russia is engaged in a brutal war of conquest in Ukraine and is actively meddling in the affairs of several other countries. And in China, Xi Jinping regularly talks up the idea of reunifying with Taiwan, by force if necessary, and is fortifying islands in the South China Sea with a view to aggressively pursuing territorial claims there as well.

And we thought the age of empires was in the rear view mirror, writes historian Eric Storm of Leiden University. Storm, whose speciality is the rise of nation states, has discerned a resurgence of imperial tendencies around the world and fears that the rules-based order that has dominated the decades since the second world war now appears increasingly tenuous.

Read more:
How Putin, Xi and now Trump are ushering in a new imperial age

Gaza: the horror continues

In any given week, you’d expect the imminent prospect of the collapse of the Gaza ceasefire to be the big international story. And certainly, while Trump and Putin were “flooding the zone” (see last week’s round-up for the origins of this phrase) the prospects of the deal lasting beyond its first phase have become more and more uncertain.

Hamas has recently pulled back from its threat not to release any more hostages. Earlier in the week it threatened to call a halt to the hostage-prisoner exchange, claiming that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had breached the terms of the ceasefire deal. Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, responded – with Trump’s backing – saying that unless all hostages were released on Saturday, all bets were off and the IDF would resume its military operations in the Gaza Strip. Trump added that “all hell is going to break out”.

Tents and makeshift shelters for families returning to north Gaza, February 13.
EPA-EFE/Mohammed Saber

The US president has also doubled down on his idea for a redeveloped Gaza and has continued to pressure Jordan and Egypt to accept millions of Palestinian refugees. This, as you would expect, has not made the population of Gaza feel any more secure.

Nils Mallock and Jeremy Ginges, behavioural psychologists at the London School of Economics, were in the region last month and conducted a survey of Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza to get a feel for how the two populations regard each other. It makes for depressing reading.

The number of Israelis who reject the idea of a two-state solution has risen sharply since the October 7 2023 attacks by Hamas, from 46% to 62%. And roughly the same proportion of people in Gaza can now no longer envisage living side by side with Israelis. Both sides think that the other side is motivated by hatred, something which is known to make any diplomatic solution less feasible.

Read more:
We interviewed hundreds of Israelis and Gazans – here’s why we fear for the ceasefire

We also asked Scott Lucas, a Middle East specialist at University College Dublin, to assess the likelihood of the ceasefire lasting into phase two, which is when the IDF is supposed to pull out of Gaza, allowing the people there room to being to rebuild, both physically and in terms of governance.

He responded with a hollow laugh and a shake of the head, before sending us this digest of the key developments in the Middle East crisis this week.

Read more:
Will the Gaza ceasefire hold? Where does Trump’s takeover proposal stand? Expert Q&A

We’ve become very used to seeing apocalyptic photos of the devastation of Gaza: the pulverised streets, choked with rubble, that make the idea of rebuilding seem so remote. But the people of Gaza also cultivated a huge amount of crops – about half the food they ate was grown there. Gazan farmers grew tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and strawberries in open fields as well as cultivating olive and citrus trees.

Satellite images show destruction of trees (top) and greenhouses (bottom) in north Gaza.
Yin et al (2025)

Geographers Lina Eklund, He Yin and Jamon Van Den Hoek have analysed satellite images across the Gaza Strip over the past 17 months to work out the scale of agricultural destruction. It makes for terrifying reading.

Read more:
Gaza: we analysed a year of satellite images to map the scale of agricultural destruction

World Affairs Briefing from The Conversation UK is available as a weekly email newsletter. Click here to get our updates directly in your inbox. Läs mer…

Annalena Baerbock, the German foreign minister, spoke for much of the European diplomatic community when she reacted to news of Donald Trump’s phone chat with Vladimir Putin: “This is the way the Trump administration operates,” she declared. “This is not how others do foreign policy, but this is now the reality.”

The resigned tone of Baerbock’s words was not matched by her colleague, defence minister Boris Pistorius, whose criticism that “the Trump administration has already made public concessions to Putin before negotiations have even begun” was rather more direct.

Their sentiments were echoed, not only by European leaders, but in the US itself: “Putin Scores a Big Victory, and Not on the Battlefield” read a headline in the New York Times. The newspaper opined that Trump’s call had succeeded in bringing Putin back in from the cold after three years in which Russia had become increasingly isolated both politically and economically.

This was not lost on the Russian media, where commentators boasted that the phone call “broke the west’s blockade”. The stock market gained 5% and the rouble strengthened against the dollar as a result.

Reflecting on the call, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, continued with operation flatter Donald Trump by comparing his attitude favourably with that of his predecessor in the White House, Joe Biden. “The previous US administration held the view that everything needed to be done to keep the war going. The current administration, as far as we understand, adheres to the point of view that everything must be done to stop the war and for peace to prevail.

”We are more impressed with the position of the current administration, and we are open to dialogue.”

Trump’s conversation with Putin roughly coincided with a meeting of senior European defence officials in Brussels which heard the new US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, outline America’s radical new outlook when it comes to European security. Namely that it’s not really America’s problem any more.

Hegseth also told the meeting in Brussels yesterday that the Trump administration’s position is that Nato membership for Ukraine has been taken off the table, that the idea it would get its 2014 borders back was unrealistic and that if Europe wanted to guarantee Ukraine’s security as part of any peace deal, that would be its business. Any peacekeeping force would not involve American troops and would not be a Nato operation, so it would not involve collective defence.

Sign up to receive our weekly World Affairs Briefing newsletter from The Conversation UK. Every Thursday we’ll bring you expert analysis of the big stories in international relations.

International security expert David Dunn believes that the fact that Trump considers himself a consummate deal maker makes the fact that his administration is willing to concede so much ground before negotiations proper have even got underway is remarkable. And not in a good way.

Dunn, who specialises in US foreign and security policy at the University of Birmingham, finds it significant that Trump spoke with Putin first and then called Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky to fill him in on the call. This order of priority, says Dunn, is a sign of the subordination of Ukraine’s role in the talks.

He concludes that “for the present at least, it appears that negotiations will be less about pressuring Putin to bring a just end to the war he started than forcing Ukraine to give in to the Russian leader’s demands”.

Read more:
Trump phone call with Putin leaves Ukraine reeling and European leaders stunned

Hegseth’s briefing to European defence officials, meanwhile, came as little surprise to David Galbreath. Writing here, Galbreath – who specialises in defence and security at the University of Bath – says the US pivot away from a focus on Europe has been years in the making – “since the very end of the cold war”.

There has long been a feeling in Washington that the US has borne too much of the financial burden for European security. This is not just a Donald Trump thing, he believes, but an attitude percolating in US security circles for some decades. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated, the focus for Nato become not so much collective defence as collective security, where “conflict would be managed on Nato’s borders”.

But it was then the US which invoked article 5 of the Nato treaty, which establishes that “an armed attack against one or more [member states] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”. The Bush government invoked Article 5 the day after the 9/11 attacks and Nato responded by patrolling US skies to provide security.

Pete Hegseth dashes Ukraine’s hopes of a future guaranteed by Nato.

Galbreath notes that many European countries, particularly the newer ones such as Estonia and Latvia, sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. “The persistent justification I heard in the Baltic states was ”we need to be there when the US needs us so that they will be there when we need them”.

That looks set to change.

Read more:
US says European security no longer its primary focus – the shift has been years in the making

The prospect of a profound shift in the world order are daunting after 80 years in which security – in Europe certainly – was guaranteed by successive US administrations and underpinned, not just by Nato but by a whole set of international agreements.

Now, instead of the US acting as the “world’s policeman”, we have a president talking seriously about taking control of Greenland, one way or another, who won’t rule out using force to seize the Panama Canal and who dreams of turning Gaza into a coastal “riviera” development.

Meanwhile Russia is engaged in a brutal war of conquest in Ukraine and is actively meddling in the affairs of several other countries. And in China, Xi Jinping regularly talks up the idea of reunifying with Taiwan, by force if necessary, and is fortifying islands in the South China Sea with a view to aggressively pursuing territorial claims there as well.

And we thought the age of empires was in the rear view mirror, writes historian Eric Storm of Leiden University. Storm, whose speciality is the rise of nation states, has discerned a resurgence of imperial tendencies around the world and fears that the rules-based order that has dominated the decades since the second world war now appears increasingly tenuous.

Read more:
How Putin, Xi and now Trump are ushering in a new imperial age

Gaza: the horror continues

In any given week, you’d expect the imminent prospect of the collapse of the Gaza ceasefire to be the big international story. And certainly, while Trump and Putin were “flooding the zone” (see last week’s round-up for the origins of this phrase) the prospects of the deal lasting beyond its first phase have become more and more uncertain.

Hamas has recently pulled back from its threat not to release any more hostages. Earlier in the week it threatened to call a halt to the hostage-prisoner exchange, claiming that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had breached the terms of the ceasefire deal. Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, responded – with Trump’s backing – saying that unless all hostages were released on Saturday, all bets were off and the IDF would resume its military operations in the Gaza Strip. Trump added that “all hell is going to break out”.

Tents and makeshift shelters for families returning to north Gaza, February 13.
EPA-EFE/Mohammed Saber

The US president has also doubled down on his idea for a redeveloped Gaza and has continued to pressure Jordan and Egypt to accept millions of Palestinian refugees. This, as you would expect, has not made the population of Gaza feel any more secure.

Nils Mallock and Jeremy Ginges, behavioural psychologists at the London School of Economics, were in the region last month and conducted a survey of Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza to get a feel for how the two populations regard each other. It makes for depressing reading.

The number of Israelis who reject the idea of a two-state solution has risen sharply since the October 7 2023 attacks by Hamas, from 46% to 62%. And roughly the same proportion of people in Gaza can now no longer envisage living side by side with Israelis. Both sides think that the other side is motivated by hatred, something which is known to make any diplomatic solution less feasible.

Read more:
We interviewed hundreds of Israelis and Gazans – here’s why we fear for the ceasefire

We also asked Scott Lucas, a Middle East specialist at University College Dublin, to assess the likelihood of the ceasefire lasting into phase two, which is when the IDF is supposed to pull out of Gaza, allowing the people there room to being to rebuild, both physically and in terms of governance.

He responded with a hollow laugh and a shake of the head, before sending us this digest of the key developments in the Middle East crisis this week.

Read more:
Will the Gaza ceasefire hold? Where does Trump’s takeover proposal stand? Expert Q&A

We’ve become very used to seeing apocalyptic photos of the devastation of Gaza: the pulverised streets, choked with rubble, that make the idea of rebuilding seem so remote. But the people of Gaza also cultivated a huge amount of crops – about half the food they ate was grown there. Gazan farmers grew tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and strawberries in open fields as well as cultivating olive and citrus trees.

Satellite images show destruction of trees (top) and greenhouses (bottom) in north Gaza.
Yin et al (2025)

Geographers Lina Eklund, He Yin and Jamon Van Den Hoek have analysed satellite images across the Gaza Strip over the past 17 months to work out the scale of agricultural destruction. It makes for terrifying reading.

Read more:
Gaza: we analysed a year of satellite images to map the scale of agricultural destruction

World Affairs Briefing from The Conversation UK is available as a weekly email newsletter. Click here to get our updates directly in your inbox. Läs mer…