Författare: Jonathan Este Senior International Affairs Editor Associate

Depending on what you think of Donald Trump, his administration could fit either of the following two descriptions. Chaotic, vindictive and accident-prone, marked by mendacity, driven by impulse and bent on securing the will of the leader, rather than – as in the US constitution – the will of the people. Or it could be a government masterminded by a man playing 4D chess while all around him are playing chequers. A president whose deal-making skills and focus on outcomes ensure the security and prosperity of America and its allies.

If you base your assessment on the people Trump has chosen as his key national security advisers then, after the recent Signal chat group intelligence debacle, you’d almost certainly opt for chaotic and accident-prone, at the very least.

Looking around the Signal chatroom, who do we have? National security advisor Mike Waltz, Vice-President J.D. Vance, secretary of state Marco Rubio, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA director John Ratcliffe and a supporting cast of other senior Trump staffers. And, unwittingly, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Heads must roll, say Trump’s critics. But who from this hydra-headed beast should take the fall? Should it be Waltz, who invited Goldberg to the chat group? Or Hegseth, who posted operational details of a US attack, including the when, where and how, hours before it was due to take place? Should it be Vance, whose swipe at America’s freeloading European allies has caused considerable angst across the Atlantic?

Or perhaps one or another of Gabbard and Ratcliffe, who sat in front of the Senate select committee on intelligence on Tuesday and maintained that no classified material or “war plans” had been revealed to the group – sworn evidence now revealed to be unreliable at best?

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At present it seems as if none of them are going to pay for their dangerous incompetence. Instead their ire is turned on Goldberg, who has variously been called a “sleazebag” by Trump himself, “loser” and the “bottom scum of journalists” by Waltz and a “deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again” by Hegseth.

Robert Dover of the University of Hull, whose research centres on intelligence and national security, believes this is a “national security blunder almost without parallel”. He points to the hypocrisy of people like Hegseth who savaged Hillary Clinton for using a private email server to conduct official business when she was secretary of state under Barack Obama.

Dover also notes the damage the episode will have done to America’s already shaky relations with its allies in Europe. Being disparaged by the vice-president as freeloaders and dismissed by the defense secretary as “pathetic”, he believes, will be “difficult to unsee”.

Read more:
Signal chat group affair: unprecedented security breach will seriously damage US international relations

But credit where it’s due, it appears that US diplomacy may at least be bearing some – limited – fruit. At least, that is, if the two partial ceasefires recently negotiated between Russia and Ukraine actually materialise. That’s a fairly big if, of course. Despite a pledge by both sides that they could support a deal to avoid targeting each other’s energy infrastructure, there’s no sign yet of a cessation of attacks.

And there has been a degree of scepticism over the recently announced plan for a maritime ceasefire to allow the free passage of shipping on the Black Sea. Critics say this favours Russia far more than Ukraine. Over the course of the war, Ukraine has successfully driven Russia’s Black Sea fleet away from its base in Crimea, giving it the upper hand in the maritime war. But maritime strategy expert, Basil Germond, says the situation is more nuanced, and the deal represents considerable upside for Ukraine as well.

Read more:
Russia has most to gain from Black Sea ceasefire – but it’s marginal, and Ukraine benefits too

Setting aside America’s eventful recent forays into foreign relations, there’s a major domestic fix brewing which many US legal scholars believe could plunge the country into a constitutional crisis.

Anne Richardson Oakes, an expert in US constitutional law at Birmingham City University, anticipates a potential clash between between the executive and the judiciary which could threaten the separation of powers that lies at the heart of American democracy.

Oakes observes there are more than 130 legal challenges to Trump administration policies presently before the courts, some of which will end up in front of America’s highest legal authority, the Supreme Court, which is tasked with assessing the constitutionality of those policies. She warns that we’ve already seen evidence that Trump and his senior officials resent what they consider to be interference from the judiciary into the legitimate executive power of the elected president.

Will there be a stand-off where the Trump administration simply ignores the Supreme Court’s ruling? It’s happened before, says Oakes. In the mid-20th century, in Little Rock, Arkansas, when the governor used the state’s national guard to prevent the court-ordered desegregation of public schools. On that occasion the then president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, sent in federal troops to enforce the court’s ruling and a constitutional crisis was averted.

Read more:
US stands on the brink of a constitutional crisis as Donald Trump takes on America’s legal system

But what if it’s the serving president who chooses to ignore a Supreme Court ruling? This was the case in the 1830s when greedy cotton farmers in Georgia were bent on forcing the Native American peoples off their lands. The Cherokee actually took the state of Georgia to the Supreme Court, which ruled that as a “dependent nation” within the United States they were entitled to the protection of the federal government and that the state of Georgia had no right to order their removal.

As historian Sean Lang of Anglia Ruskin University recounts, Georgia ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling and sent in troops to expel the Cherokee who were then forced to move to new lands in a journey known as the “Train of Tears”. Lang writes that then US president, Andrew Jackson, a populist advocate of states’ rights and former “Indian fighter”, ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling, “sneering that [Chief Justice John] Marshall had no means of enforcing it”.

Lang concludes: “It’s a history lesson Greenlanders, Mexicans and Canadians – and indeed many Americans who may fall foul of this administration and seek recourse to the law – would do well to study.”

Read more:
Trump’s America is facing an Andrew Jackson moment – and it’s bad news for the constitution

Trump’s chilling effect

The Trump administration’s antipathy towards judges who have opposed its policies have extended towards those law firms who have in some way crossed the US president. But the legal system is not the only sector to feel the chilling effect of Trump’s displeasure, writes Dafydd Townley.

The world of higher education in the US is also apprehensive after the administration went after Columbia University, home to some of the most outspoken protest over US policies towards Israel and Gaza. Columbia has recently had to agree to allow the administration to “review” some of its academic programmes, starting with its Middle Eastern studies, after the administration threatened to cancel US$400 million (£310 million) of government contracts with the university.

The news media is also under heavy pressure. The administration has taken control of the White House press pool from the non-partisan White House Correspondents’ Association and has blackballed Associated Press for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. We’ve also seen Trump himself bring lawsuits against media organisations he judges to have crossed him. And now the president has called for the defunding of America’s two biggest public broadcasters, NPR and PBL, for what he perceives as their liberal bias.

Chilling with the press corps: White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt.
EPA-EFE/Francis Chung/pool

Townley, an expert in US politics at the University of Portsmouth is concerned that this all adds up to a deliberate attempt to cripple institutions which underwrite American democracy.

Read more:
Donald Trump’s ’chilling effect’ on free speech and dissent is threatening US democracy

Popularity falls as prices rise

Trump’s leadership continues to be very polarising, writes Paul Whiteley, a political scientist and polling specialist at the University of Essex, who has spent years studying political trends in the US. Looking at the most recent numbers, Whiteley finds that while Trump’s approval ratings are fairly steady at 48% approval and 49% disapproval, when you dig down you find that only 6% of registered Democrats approve of his performance, while 93% disapprove. For registered Republicans it’s almost exactly the opposite.

Whiteley takes his analysis further, looking at measures such as consumer sentiment, which has fallen sharply since January, with talk of tariffs and the return of inflation affecting people’s confidence in the economy. He points out there tends to be a fairly strong historical correlation between confidence in the economy and popular approval of a president’s performance.

Read more:
Three graphs that show what’s happening with Donald Trump’s popularity

Another factor which will surely affect people’s confidence in the government are the job losses flowing from Elon Musk’s work as “efficiency tsar”. Thomas Gift, the director of the Centre on US Politics at University College London, believes that federal job losses as a result of Musk’s cuts are spread indiscriminately among Democrat and Republican states. As a result there may be some Republican voters who are experiencing what he calls “buyer’s remorse”.

At the same time, rising inflation is flowing into the cost of living, something many people voted for Trump to punish the Democrats for. As Gift points out, both parties are experiencing a dip in support at present as people reject politics for having a generally negative effect on their lives. But from now, it’ll be the Republicans who will feel the sting of popular disapproval more keenly.

Read more:
Trump’s job cuts are causing Republican angst as all parties face backlash

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Donald Trump likes to use the phone. In his (ghostwritten) bestseller, The Art of the Deal, he talks of making between 50 and 100 calls during the average working day and then going home and picking up where he left off. He found his predecessors in the White House puzzling because, apparently, they didn’t tend to use the telephone: “If you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls. A lot of them didn’t make calls. I like to call when it’s appropriate,” he told reporters in 2017.

So it is that the US president has engaged in two phone calls this week which could prove to be of great consequence. On Tuesday he spoke with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, for about two hours in what the pro-Putin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda referred to as “a diplomatic victory” for the Russian president (more about which a little later).

The following day he had a call with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, which Trump described in a post on his Truth Social site as “very good and productive”. It’s a major step forward from “ungrateful” and “disrespectful”, adjectives employed by the US president following the February 28 meeting at the White House that seemed so disastrous for Zelensky.

It appears, from the press briefing delivered after the call by the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, that the Ukrainian president took great pains to assure his US counterpart of both his gratitude and his respect. Indeed it looks like he broke almost all known records for the number of ways in which he could praise America’s – and Trump’s – “leadership”.

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It was, writes Natasha Lindstaedt, a very successful bit of diplomacy on the Ukrainian president’s part, which has put the pressure very much back on Vladimir Putin.

Trump sees the prospect of a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia resulting from the recent talks between US and Ukrainian officials in Saudi Arabia as his personal triumph. This obviously hasn’t been lost on Zelensky, writes Lindstaedt, a professor in the department of government at the University of Essex. She notes the pains taken by Zelensky to stress that while he remains committed to Trump’s peace plan, in the meantime he is very happy with whatever (small) concessions Trump managed to wring out of Putin during their call the previous day.

Agreeing to the partial ceasefire when it comes to energy infrastructure and power plants, the two leaders also discussed the prospect of the US taking control of Ukraine’s nuclear power facilities. This included Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which is at present occupied by Russia (although this appears to have since been ruled out by the Ukrainian president).

But the upshot of the call between the two leaders is that now it’s Putin who is getting in the way of Trump’s big deal. Linstaedt believes that while Trump clearly has a great deal of respect for Putin, the US president also has a notoriously short attention span and may get tired of Putin playing for time.

Read more:
Ukraine war: how Zelensky rebuilt his relationship with Trump to turn the tables on Putin

Playing for time is clearly what Putin is doing at present, write Stefan Wolff and Tetyana Malyarenko, experts in international security at the University of Birmingham and National University Odesa Law Academy, respectively. Reacting to Trump’s phone call with the Russian president on Tuesday, Wolff notes how Putin successfully avoided making any concessions at all to bring Trump’s dream deal closer to reality. Meanwhile, each day that passes brings further death and destruction to Ukraine.

About the only concession Putin would agree to is the agreement not to target power and energy infrastructure. And there’s talk of a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, although as many commentators have noted (and as has been covered in detail here on The Conversation), the Black Sea is one area of the conflict where Ukraine has had the upper hand.

Tellingly, there was also talk of an ice hockey match between Russia and the US, something of a distraction from the incredibly high stakes involved.

Like Lindstaedt, Wolff and Malyarenko believe Putin’s stalling is a high-risk strategy. They note Trump’s short attention span but also have one eye on Europe, where leaders continue to discuss their plans to increase their assistance to Ukraine’s war effort and ramp up sanctions against Russia. They conclude:

Undoubtedly, these measures would be more effective if they had Washington’s full buy-in – but they send a strong signal to both the Kremlin and the White House that Ukraine is not alone in its fight against Russia’s continuing aggression.

Read more:
Trump’s phone call with Putin fails to deliver a full ceasefire – here’s what could happen next

One of Putin’s key demands in response to Trump’s 30-day ceasefire proposal was that all military aid and intelligence to Ukraine be halted. He also stipulated that Kyiv would have to refrain from reequipping its military or conscripting any new recruits during any pause in the fighting. This would leave Ukraine dangerously exposed in case Putin decided not to hold to his side of the bargain.

Ukraine conflict: who controls what territory, March 19 2025.

Natalya Chernyshova believes that Trump and his team should heed the lessons of the Minsk accords. These were agreements brokered in 2014 and 2015 with the help of France and Germany that aimed to end the violence in eastern Ukraine after Russian-backed separatists took control of large parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Chernyshova, a professor of modern European history at Queen Mary University of London, walks us through the background to the agreements, neither of which held for more than a few days.

She says the deals were doomed from the start. Quite apart from Moscow’s utter lack of commitment to a peaceful settlement, the agreements were worded in such as way as to effectively bar Kyiv from seeking membership of Nato. This was high on Putin’s wishlist but something that Ukraine was never going to be happy to accept. As she says, the accords “failed to recognise that Russian war aims were irreconcilable with Ukrainian sovereignty”.

It was a bitter lesson. In the five years after the signing of the Minsk accords, more than 14,000 people were killed and 1.5 million Ukrainians were displaced. She also believes the failed peace deals gave Putin the impetus for the subsequent war as it showed that Russia could reap benefits from its aggression.

Read more:
Ukraine deal: Europe has learned from the failed 2015 Minsk accords with Putin. Trump has not

“Historically, Russia has responded to strength, not appeasement,” writes Christo Atanasov Kostov, an expert in the cold war and Russian propaganda at Spain’s IE University. Kostov believes that Trump’s transactional style plays to Putin’s strengths. It has offered him rewards in return for a deal to end the war, rather than insisting, as Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden did (and as most of Ukraine’s European allies still agree), that allowing Russia to benefit from its aggression is simply storing up trouble for the future.

Time and time again, the recent approach to mediation from Truump’s team has favoured Russia. Trump and his team have, in public statements, appeared to have echoed numerous Kremlin talking points and made concession after concession, including ruling out Ukraine’s membership of Nato or its hope of regaining territory occupied by Russian troops. It even – bizarrely – prompted the US to recently vote against its closest friends and allies in the United Nations general assembly, choosing instead to vote alongside Russia, North Korea and Belarus against a resolution condemning Moscow’s invasion and supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

Ominously, Kostov warns: “China will also be watching closely. If Trump hands Putin a win, Beijing may feel emboldened to escalate its military efforts in Taiwan and the South China Sea.”

Read more:
Being soft on Russia has never worked, and history proves it

Meanwhile in Gaza…

While the world’s attention has largely been focused on the possibility of halting fighting between Russia and Ukraine, Israel drove a nail into the coffin of the already moribund Gaza ceasefire deal. On the night of March 17, it recommenced massive aerial bombardment of the Strip, killing more than 400 people in a single night of bombing.

The fragile Gaza ceasefire is now finished after massive Israeli airstrikes.
EPA-EFE/Mohammed Saber

We put a series of key questions to Scott Lucas, a Middle East expert at University College Dublin. Lucas predicted weeks ago that the ceasefire would collapse, given domestic Israeli politics which have incentivised the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to continue his assault on the Gaza Strip.

He also predicted that the bombing was a prelude to further ground assaults. His forecast has since proved correct. The Israel Defense Forces launched a “limited ground operation” this morning to retake the Netzarim corridor, which divides the Strip in two and possession of which will give Israel effective control of much of the territory.

He also warns that the renewed assault on Gaza should not detract attention from the escalating violence in the West Bank, where the UN special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, has reported this week on the likelihood of mass ethnic cleansing to make way for the establishment of Israeli settlements.

Read more:
Why has the Gaza ceasefire collapsed? Why has the US launched aistrikes in Yemen? Middle East expert Q&A

The airstrikes came days after an independent report commissioned by the UN found that Israel’s military is “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians as a group”. Rachel Rosen of University College London and Mai Abu Moghli of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies have taken a deep dive into this aspect of the conflict. They believe that targeting children is a deliberate strategy on the part of Israel to destroy the Palestinian people’s hopes for future self-determination.

Read more:
Israel’s war on Gaza is deliberately targeting children – new UN report

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While Donald Trump’s special envoy was en route to Moscow to talk about a possible ceasefire deal with his opposite numbers in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin enjoyed a meet-up with his old friend Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, and the atmosphere was reportedly congenial.

According to the Guardian’s contemporaneous report, the pair even shared a macabre joke at a press conference after their meeting about Europe being “done for”. Putin hastened to clarify that when Lukashenko said if the US and Russia came to an agreement, Europe would be “done for” he had of course been enjoying a pun. Apparently, said Putin, “pipeline in Russian means also being done for, so this will be to Europe’s benefit, because they will get cheap Russian gas. So they will have a pipeline.”

“That’s what I meant,” said Lukashenko. “Yes, that’s what I thought you did,” Putin replied. Smiles all round from the Russian media audience.

Putin explained that while he’s technically in favour of a ceasefire, there were a few things that needed to be cleared up and that he and Donald Trump would have a phone call to do just that. Top of the list was “removing the root causes of this crisis”, which most observers are translating as Putin maintaining his demand for all four provinces Ukraine that Russian troops currently occupy and an undertaking by Kyiv never to join Nato.

It’s unlikely to meet with the approval of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky has said he thinks that Putin will do “everything he can to drag out the war” – and Putin’s approach appears to bear this out. This accords with what Stefan Wolff and Tetyana Malyarenko wrote in reaction to the news that the US and Ukraine were at last seeing eye to eye, at least on the need for a halt to the killing.

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Wolff and Malyarenko, professors of international security at the University of Birmingham and National University Odesa Law Academy respectively, believe Putin will want to keep hostilities going as long as he can while still keeping in with the US president. They see Russia following a “two-pronged approach” – engaging with the White House over the ceasefire proposal while also pushing for further battlefield gains. They write:

The peculiar set-up of the negotiations also plays into the Kremlin’s hands here. Short of direct talks between Kyiv and Moscow, Washington has to shuttle between them, trying to close gaps between their positions with a mixture of diplomacy and pressure. This has worked reasonably well with Ukraine so far, but it is far less certain that this approach will bear similar fruit with Russia.

Read more:
US and Ukraine sign 30-day ceasefire proposal – now the ball is in Putin’s court

In all this shuttle diplomacy, one question that you hear more rarely is what the Ukrainian public will be prepared to accept. Over the past three years Gerard Toal of Virginia Tech University, John O’Loughlin of the University of Colorado and Kristin M. Bakke of UCL have provided us with some valuable insights based on polling of the Ukrainian public. They believe that while the majority of Ukrainians are war-weary and willing to make concessions, even ceding territory in return for peace, they are not willing to compromise their country’s political independence. They also don’t trust Putin and see the war in existential terms.

And, contrary to what Trump might have the world believe, Zelensky remains a popular leader. In fact the latest poll finds his support up ten points on the previous survey at 67%. (Incidentally, Trump posted on his TruthSocial website recently that Zelensky’s approval rating was 4%.) They conclude:

It will be in large part down to ordinary Ukrainians to shape what happens afterwards. An ugly peace may be accepted by a war-weary population. But if it has little local legitimacy and acceptance, peace is likely to be unsustainable in the long run.

Read more:
Are Ukrainians ready for ceasefire and concessions? Here’s what the polls say

Russia, meanwhile, has weathered the conflict remarkably well, certainly better than the analysts who forecast in the summer of 2022. It that stage, when Ukraine’s counter-offensive was pushing the invaders out of occupied territory, inflicting major casualties and destroying huge amounts of equipment, some observers thought that Russia’s economy would collapse under the weight of defeat and western sanctions.

Not so, writes Alexander Hill of the University of Calgary. Hill, a military historian, observes the ways in which the Russian war machine has adapted to conditions over the past two years, ditching the recklessness which saw it suffer such grievous losses in 2022 and using more conservative tactics coupled with smart adoption of new technology to give it an edge on the battlefield. He concludes: “While the Russian army remains a relatively blunt instrument, it is not as blunt as it was in late 2022 and early 2023.”

Read more:
Why Russia’s armed forces have proven resilient in the war in Ukraine

Turning off US aid

Of course, when the US suspended its intelligence-sharing for a few days last week it was a major boost for the Russians. Without data from US satellite coverage and other intelligence traffic, Ukraine’s defenders were left virtually deaf and blind at a crucial time. It gave Russia the space to push its advantage even further as it races to take more territory ahead of a possible peace deal.

The state of the conflict in Ukraine, March 10 2025.
Institute for the Study of War

It’s a bitter lesson for Ukraine to have to learn at this stage in the conflict, write Dafydd Townley and Matthew Powell, experts in international security and strategy at the University of Portsmouth. They believe relying too heavily on one ally for so much was never going to be a good idea and has been exposed as risky since Donald Trump returned to the White House. Perhaps even more risky, given the personality involved, is Ukraine’s dependence on data from ELon Musk’s Starlink satellite system. Musk himself has boasted that: “My Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army. Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.”

Egotistical self-promotion aside, Musk is probably right about this, but less so when he says there’s no alternative. Townley and Powell believe that it’s in Ukraine’s best interests to look into other satellite systems available to them and note that shares in French-owned satellite company Eutelsat, a European rival to Starlink have recently climbed by almost 400%.

Read more:
The US has lifted its intelligence sharing pause with Ukraine. But the damage may already be done

Many of us who are watching this conflict closely cringed when Trump announced he would cut off military assistance to Ukraine after his (one-sided, it has to be said) shouting match with Volodymyr Zelensky at the end of February. And the announcement that the Pentagon was halting intelligence-sharing as noted above simply made matters worse.

It felt like a spiteful move. Psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones of Trinity College, Dublin, has written a book about spite which delves into, among other things, exhibitions of spitefulness in the public arena. It’s a fascinating read. A spiteful approach to foreign policy, he writes, is when we abandon what he calls “humanity’s superpower” – cooperation.

Trump’s approach, as exemplified by his treatment of Zelensky and also by his baffling decision to impose tariffs even on his friends and allies, “embraces selfishness, treating international relations as a zero-sum game where there can only be one winner”.

Read more:
Donald Trump’s foreign policy might be driven by simple spite – here’s what to do about it

One of the sticking points between the US and Ukraine has been the question of security guarantees in case of a ceasefire or even a longer-term peace deal. It seems increasingly far-fetched that Ukraine will be allowed to join Nato any time soon, so Nato article 5 protections, which would mean that all other member states would be obliged to come to its defence, will not be an issue.

Trump’s vice-president, J.D. Vance, has suggested that if Ukraine allows US companies access to its mineral resources this would in itself be a security guarantee feels equally improbable. And, in any case, how valuable have US security guarantees been in the past, asks historian Ian Horwood, of York St John University. Horwood pints to the Paris Peace accords of 1973 in which the Nixon administration promised to underwrite South Vietnam’s continued security, while withdrawing US combat troops. Within two years, North Vietnamese tanks were rolling into Saigon.

More recently the Doha agreement between the first Trump administration and the Taliban was made without involving the Afghan government and didn’t even last long enough for US and Nato troops to get out of Kabul. This sorry history will no doubt have given Zelensky food for thought.

Read more:
What is the value of US security guarantees? Here’s what history shows

Ukraine’s mineral wealth

All the while many of us have been asking what’s so special about Ukraine’s minerals. We’ve long known about the country as the “bread basket of Europe”, but what is not as widely understood is Ukraine’s mineral wealth. Geologist Munira Raji of the University of Plymouth, says Ukraine has deposits containing 22 of 34 critical minerals identified by the European Union as essential for energy security. This, she says, positions Ukraine among the world’s most resource-rich nations.

Where Ukraine’s minerals are and how much is in areas occupied by Russia.
Conflict and Environment Observatory: www.ceobs.org

Much of this cornucopia of geological booty is contained in what is known as the “Ukrainian shield” which sits underneath much of the country, writes Raji. Here she walks us through the riches beneath Ukraine’s soil and why America is so keen to get its hands on them.

Read more:
What’s so special about Ukraine’s minerals? A geologist explains

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