Photo: Reuters
On Feb. 5, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) — arguably the last functioning strategically significant Russian-American agreement in the field of international security — ceased to be in force. The system of international law, already weak in a de facto sense, is now visibly collapsing de jure as well. The Kremlin is pleased: throughout his rule, Putin has fought what he described as a liberal world order led by Washington. With Donald Trump’s return to the White House, he seems to have gotten his way — the current U.S. president himself promotes the concept of a multipolar world in which great powers act freely within what they consider their spheres of influence, without regard for liberal conventions. Yet the outcome of these developments may not please Putin: having already lost Maduro, the Kremlin risks losing Iran as an ally as well, while U.S. recognition of Russia’s claims to Ukraine depends solely on Trump’s unpredictable moods. Russia’s position in this new world — where might makes right — faces far more serious challenges than under the previous rules-based system, argues Seva Gunitsky, associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto.
In the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More’s son-in-law William Roper declares he would cut down every law in England to get after the Devil. More replies with one of the great warnings of political drama: “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? …D’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”
Vladimir Putin has spent two decades raging against the devil of the liberal international order. Now, thanks to Trump’s foreign policy, he is getting his wish: the dismantling of the U.S.-led system and its replacement with a multipolar world, where powerful states act freely in their so-called peripheries with no regard for liberal pieties. It is a Concert of Europe applied on a global scale: cuius regio, eius imperium.
But the same rules that constrained Putin’s ambitions also deterred France from boarding Russian oil tankers, prevented the U.S. from kidnapping Putin’s foreign clients, constrained the potential ambitions of a rising China, kept various regional powers in check, and gave Russia the predictability it needed to navigate the world as a middling power that rattled its nukes and fiddled with gas switches without being able to actually do much else. Now that the liberal order is being cut down, the hard task for Putin will be to stand upright in the winds that blow.
Putin’s Faustian bargain
Russian media reported America’s failed Greenschluss with glee. Though Trump ultimately backed off, the confrontation has put permanent strains on the transatlantic alliance. “Europe’s at a total loss. It’s a pleasure to watch,” declared one newspaper. A commentator on the popular state TV show 60 Minutes put it plainly: “We are seeing the unmasking of the new world. And this is a world in which it is quite good for Russia to be.” If the U.S. takes the Western Hemisphere, said the host, “there is a consensus that everything else goes to us.” Another commentator summed it up: “Everything is simple in this world: whoever has the strength is right.”
But there are also traces of wariness under the gloating. Pro-Kremlin military blogger Aleksander Kots warned that by taking Greenland, Trump would “seize the Russian Arctic” and access the natural resources Moscow desires there. Kots went so far as to call Greenland “an icy noose around Russia’s throat” which Trump has “already begun to tighten.” Putin himself has been notably restrained, offering only a terse dismissal: “It doesn’t concern us at all. I think they’ll figure it out among themselves.”
Russian media reported America’s failed Greenschluss with glee
This ambivalence makes sense if we think about the sort of international order Putin has been demanding. A multipolar world of spheres allows great powers to dominate their region, but that division of realpolitik labor only works if other great powers agree to stay out. Putin wants freedom of action without constraint, but a world where might makes right belongs to America and China more than to Russia.
Since his often-cited 2007 Munich speech, Putin has loudly pushed for a multipolar world in which great powers do what they wish in their own imperial peripheries without fear of incurring sanctions, interference, or sanctimonious lecturing. He criticized the United States as a lawless hegemon and predicted that the economic rise of new powers would “inevitably be converted into political influence and will strengthen multipolarity.”
In that sense, Trump’s foreign policy is a gift to Putin’s vision. In his abandonment of Europe, Trump’s accommodation of Russia and China — and his revival of the Monroe Doctrine — reinforces the multipolar world Putin has demanded. If mutual non-interference keeps the U.S. out of Ukraine at the expense of losing clients like Maduro, so be it. And if Trump’s threats break NATO or distract America from Europe altogether, better still. This approach legitimizes Putin’s treatment of the so-called Near Abroad as a playground for Kremlin sabotage, interference, and manipulation. And it signals an implicit bargain: you do what you want in your back yard, I do what I want in mine. As Russia scholar Sam Greene wrote, “My worry is that it may be part of a tacit agreement, by which Washington, Moscow, and Beijing agree not to deter one another against interventions in their putative spheres of influence.”
The intellectual foundation of this worldview, if we can call it that, was best expressed by Trump advisor Stephen Miller while defending the Venezuela operation on CNN: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” As Julia Ioffe pointed out, Russia’s chief Ukraine negotiator Kirill Dmitriev approvingly quoted Miller’s words to buttress Russia’s position: might makes right. This is the permission structure Trump is creating for Putin. The White House’s ideological architect articulates a vision of international relations that rejects international niceties in favor of raw power, and Russia’s negotiators immediately pounce on it to legitimize their own war.
The new U.S. National Security Strategy suggests that the shift is not accidental. The NSS has already been dissected to death, but it is still worth recalling a Brookings analysis that notes the document “does not expressly reference major power competition once.” This is in huge contrast to previous iterations. Instead the current version “adopts a notably more conciliatory tone toward competitors,” suggesting the U.S. “is less intent on strategic competition and more open to spheres of influence.”
The new U.S. National Security Strategy suggests the U.S. “is more open to spheres of influence”
Trump as usual has no problem saying the quiet part out loud. When asked about China’s intentions in Taiwan, he told the New York Times: that Xi Jinping “considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing.” (Trump did add, however, that he would be “very unhappy” if something happened).
Trump has been equally accommodating toward Russia. After meeting Putin in Alaska last August, he urged Zelenskyy to “make a deal,” telling Fox News: “Look, Russia is a very big power, and [Ukraine is] not.” Back in February 2024, Trump said that if NATO members don’t pay their dues, he would “encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want.” He framed it as a negotiation tactic on NATO spending, but the underlying premise is that Russia’s aggression is a natural force which the U.S. can choose to enable through its policies.
Trump treats Russia’s aggression as a natural force which the U.S. can choose to enable through its policies
A world governed by spheres of influence only produces stability when great powers mutually recognize each other’s claims. Currently that recognition relies on Trump’s temperament, not institutional buy-in. If Trump sours on Putin or is replaced by a president not instinctively enchanted by him, we will again be in a world where great power rivalry becomes the primary lens for viewing U.S.-Russian relations. This would be a bigger problem for Russia than it ever was during the age of the liberal order.
The devilish details
Which brings us back to Thomas More’s warning. Putin wanted a world where powerful states weren’t hemmed in by liberal pieties about sovereignty and international norms. He’s getting it, and clearly hopes for a short-term payoff with Trump disengaging from Ukraine and Europe more generally.
But in a rules-based order, with its nuclear weapons and a permanent Security Council seat, Russia could punch above its weight. It could play the victim of Western hypocrisy. It could rail against the bindings of the global order that also constrained its enemies. It could invoke international law when convenient and ignore it when not.
In an anarchic spheres-of-influence world, what does Russia have? A slowing economy, a military bleeding out in Ukraine, and a strategic partner in Beijing that increasingly treats it as a junior supplier of raw materials.
After a period of wild fluctuation coinciding with the Covid-19 pandemic and the early years of its full-scale war in Ukraine, Russia’s GDP growth has returned to an anemic 1%. With inflation stubbornly high, the central bank has been forced to maintain interest rates above 16 percent. The budget is running deficits as oil revenues decline. Labor shortages are so acute that Moscow has begun talks with the Taliban about importing labor from Afghanistan. The Moscow Times recently reported that Russia is sliding from “managed cooling” into “outright stagnation.”
This erosion is already underway. Last August, Trump brokered a peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan at the White House, sidelining Moscow from a conflict it had mediated for three decades. The agreement dissolved the OSCE Minsk Group, which had served as Russia’s primary vehicle for influence in the South Caucasus, and required the withdrawal of Russian forces from the Armenian border. A transit corridor bypassing Russia now bears Trump’s name. The same president who appears to be offering Putin a free hand in Ukraine has displaced Russia from its own backyard in the Caucasus.
Meanwhile, Moscow’s relationship with Beijing has become, as one analysis put it, “deeply asymmetrical.” China has overtaken the EU to become Russia’s largest trading partner, but Russia accounts for just 3 percent of China’s exports and 5 percent of its imports. Russia sells China oil and gas at steep discounts, and in return China sells Russia the components it can no longer procure from the West. At the 2024 BRICS summit in Kazan, a journalist asked Putin if Russia felt like “a junior partner” in the China relationship. Putin bristled, but the question would not have been asked five years ago.
The liberal order’s constraints may have shackled Russia’s imperial ambitions, but they were also protecting it from suffering the full implications of its own weaknesses. Russia may find that securing Western non-interference in its sphere comes at the cost of watching China dominate Central Asia, Turkey challenge its position in the Caucasus, and regional powers exploit the vacuum left by American disengagement from Europe.
Putin is betting he can cut down the liberal order’s laws and stand upright in the winds that blow. But this is a risky proposition for a petrostate with a shrinking population and a broken army. What happens when the devil turns around?