Pat Walsh

Did you know that President Trump is cancelling the New World Order the US proclaimed in the 1990s – starting with the last and most disastrous of its projects, the advance into the Ukraine?

President Trump and his revolutionary band (Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz, Steve Witkoff, General Kellogg and Pete Hegseth) have hit the ground running in this, much to the angst of the British, Europeans and Kyiv.

Back in 1997, as President Clinton was beginning NATO’s eastward expansion as part of the New World Order project, Ted Galen Carpenter described the problems that the US would inevitably face in Europe as a consequence. His words have stood the test of time much better than the oceans of lies told by its advocates in the Foreign Policy establishment and the compliant Western media.

Carpenter wrote: 

“NATO is first and foremost a military compact… If NATO moves eastward, the United States will be undertaking new and potentially far-reaching security obligations. No amount of “feel good” rhetoric should be allowed to obscure that reality.

There are numerous dangers associated with NATO enlargement… expanding the alliance to Russia’s borders threatens to poison Moscow’s relations with the West and lead to dangerous confrontations. Extending security commitments to nations in Russia’s geopolitical “back yard” virtually invites a challenge. The United States will then face the choice of failing to honour treaty obligations or risking war with a nuclear-armed great power…

 The desire of the East European states to be part of NATO creates difficult enough problems for NATO… since satisfying those countries would require a highly provocative alliance presence in Russia’s “near abroad” … 

Given Russia’s weakened condition, the United States and its allies may be able to force Moscow to accept NATO enlargement accompanied by such sops as statements that the alliance has no plans to station nuclear weapons or large numbers of conventional forces in the new members – plans that can easily be changed at a later date. But someday Russia will recover politically, economically, and militarily. And Russians will likely remember that the West exploited their country’s temporary weakness to establish hegemony throughout Central and Eastern Europe.

 NATO enlargement, therefore, could become the 1990s’ equivalent of the Treaty of Versailles, which sowed the seeds of revenge and an enormously destructive war… There are already ominous signs of a Moscow-Beijing axis. Russian and Chinese leaders now speak of a “strategic partnership” between the two countries…

An enlarged NATO is a dreadful, potentially catastrophic idea. Instead of healing the wounds of the Cold War, it threatens to create a new division of Europe and a set of dangerous security obligations for the United States.”

A hundred years before Otto Von Bismarck had advised Europeans:

“Do not expect that once you have taken advantage of Russia’s weakness, you will receive dividends forever. The Russians always came for their money. And when they come – do not rely on the treaties you have signed and which you hope will get you acquitted. They are not worth the paper they are written on. Therefore, it is always worth playing fair and straight with Russians or not playing at all.”

This was a warning that whatever international order was constructed and proclaimed in the chancelleries of Europe, if Russia was not treated as others and given fair treatment there would be payback.

In 1994 Carpenter, aware of the direction of Washington’s foreign policy, had forewarned America in a book entitled, Beyond NATO: Staying Out of Europe’s Wars, of the dangers in what it was doing.

He noted that the US foreign policy establishment had worked hard to build the mystique that NATO “was even more important in the post-Cold War era than it was during the Cold War and was essential to prevent the resurgence of the instability and national rivalries that spawned two world wars.” (p.2)

Beyond that, Carpenter noted that the alliance’s advocates were arguing that NATO was the only institutional vehicle enabling US influence to be maintained on European affairs in the aftermath of the Cold War, that protected its important political and economic hegemony in Europe.

George Kennan warned in 1997 that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.” But from 1999 NATO was advanced up to Russia’s borders in 3 waves – right up to the Ukraine.

Russia was down and out, and meanwhile a confident US took up other adventures – smashing up the Muslim world in a series of invasions and wanton acts of political vandalism that destroyed functional states and has now come back to haunt the West in its migrant crisis and the turn to the Right.

Washington, having taken its eye off the ball, Russia indeed found the time and space to rebuild itself, recovering politically, economically, and militarily under Vladimir Putin.

And when the third wave of NATO advancement was launched in 2008, starting with Georgia and proceeding to Ukraine in 2014, it was met with solid resistance from Moscow and the revived Russian world. Putin the rejuvenator of Russia had, of course, warned the West about NATO’s advance in 2007 at the Munich Security Conference. But deaf ears were presented to him.

The US had given Gorbachev security guarantees at the winding down of the Cold War relating to the non-expansion of NATO. But when NATO was advanced up to the borders of Russia, and capitalist Russia complained about being cheated, it was explained by NATO that these promises had been given to the Soviet Union and not to Russia. Russia was then forced to cast off the delusions it had developed about the West from the time of Gorbachev.

It is important to note that NATO expansion eastward was not done to contain an actual Russian threat. Washington saw little threat from Russia before 2007. NATO was maintained and enlarged largely to justify its own existence. Expansion was the expansion of Western liberal hegemony, done through the NATO/EU double act. Because NATO had to produce a reason for its existence after the Cold War ended and its demise had undermined its reason for existence, it inevitably regenerated “the Russian threat” to justify its existence and maintain the profits of the military/industrial complex and the salaries of the bloated and influential “Russia specialists” of the Foreign Policy establishment.

Carpenter, in 1994, got to the nub of the issue when he noted that NATO’s expansion would inevitably end in a future war about the Ukraine:

“It is on that issue that NATO expansionists of all types tend to be the most evasive. They insist that alliance security commitments would prevent a repetition of Russian expansionism and thereby enhance the stability of the region. Yet they also seek to minimize both the likelihood and the severity of the risks the United States and its alliance partners would be incurring if the alliance moved eastward. Such a position is inconsistent if not disingenuous. Either the alliance intends to afford the nations of Eastern Europe reliable protection against Russian expansion or it does not. If the former is true, the commitment involves very serious risks. If the latter is the case, NATO’s leaders are engaging in an appalling act of deceit that could prove fatal to any East European nation foolish enough to rely on the alliance.” (Beyond NATO: Staying Out of Europe’s Wars, p.62)

This is the essence of the problem which President Trump is trying to address now, in his attempt to cancel the New World Order and start America all over again with Russia.

It should be noted that the Europeans of the 1990s were initially opposed to the expansion of NATO eastward. However, they were drawn into it through the expansion of the European Union eastward, at the instigation of the UK, along with the US New World Order. It meant taking on the vengeful Eastern Europeans who were more disposed to Reaganite America and Thatcherite Britain. East European anti-Russian hostility, bolstered by the many Russia-hating Jews of East European origin within the influential Washington Foreign Policy establishment, has been the lever employed to stiffen the faint hearted Western Europeans.

It has been so successful that the Europeans are now more zealous than Washington about the New World Order and are horrified that a US President is about to cancel their world.

President Trump, realising that the New World Order has run its course and it is increasingly expensive and dangerous to maintain it within a developing multi-polar world, has a problem to clear up. Trump’s solution to the problem is to negotiate an armistice with Putin and turn the problem over to Europe. If it wants to continue the New World Order and the financial and military commitments involved in it, Europe is welcome to it. But America is out. It will, in future, plough its own furrow.

The Trump plan for an armistice, communicated by Pete Hegseth, US Defence Secretary, acknowledges modestly that a return to Ukraine’s 2014 borders would be “unrealistic”, and Russia would not likely give up anything it has captured after three years of war and the loss of considerable blood and treasure.

The implication is that there will be a freezing of the front line where it stands, when an armistice is eventually signed. This means the new line of contact would stretch from the mouth of the Dnipro river in the Black Sea, north-east to the border between Ukraine and Russia at Kharkiv. Ukraine would, therefore, lose about 20 per cent of its pre-war territory.

On top of this, Hegseth made it clear that Ukraine would not be joining NATO or be provided with NATO Article 5 guarantees. Instead, any guarantee against Russia would only be from a “non-NATO” force made up of others – but strictly no Americans.

Russia is likely to oppose any European troops from NATO countries. It does not want NATO in disguise along its borders after putting in the hard effort of defeating NATO’s Ukrainian army.

Trump’s plan represents a clearing up of the fatal piece of ambiguity connected with NATO expansion that Carpenter noted back in 1994.

The US President has also made it clear that he does not intend to commit to providing Ukraine with any guaranteed future protection against Russia. Hegseth told the NATO defence ministers, on behalf of the President, that the United States would no longer be “primarily focused on the security of Europe”. An earlier draft of his speech is reported to have suggested Trump wanted to go further and say that America would no longer be the “primary security guarantor of Europe”.

According to the Vice President of the United States there is “a new Sheriff in town” and Europe had better get used to it.

With Europe, rather than the US, being invited to provide the rump Ukraine with its security guarantees from now on, the Europeans will no longer be able to shelter under the petticoats of the US and will have to deal with Russia as the substance she is – with the military experience of a major war behind her – rather than act in the irresponsible way the British and Europeans have been doing for the last decade or so.

Both Macron and Starmer are attempting to retain a “back stop” role for Washington in European security, but it is unlikely Trump would be gullible enough to accept a position for the US which could easily lead it being drawn into another conflict upon the whim of bitter Ukrainians, or mischievous Europeans, wishing to free ride again on American protection.

That would surely undo all the hard work now being done to free America of the foreign entanglement its New World Order got it into.

Why has Trump acted as he has?

Precisely to shock Europe into a state of reality by giving it a very cold shower. What has been happening on its doorstep is something that Europe has been in denial about for the last three years, while it has been hiding comfortably behind a false narrative presented to its public and US power.

It is very apparent that the European elite are terrified at their US protector deserting them and having to exist in a new, big bad world. But Europe was a big and very bad world before the coming of the Americans. Two World Wars were started there during the last century, millions died, before the continent was pacified and developed into a coherent unit by the US in the Cold War interest.

Europe believed it had unlimited liability from the war in Ukraine. It was being fought by Ukrainians who were bearing all the losses. Europe comfortably presumed that it was immune from the consequences of its Drang nach Osten.  Russia could be antagonised as much as it liked since Europe had the Ukrainian bulwark at its front and the US had its back.

But now the chickens are coming home to roost for Europe. War involves paying a price, despite any attempt to retain a free hand, and Europe has been defeated and must now pay for its unwise adventure.

European misadventure will now carry a high price. By inciting Russia and declaring it to be a great threat to Europe Trump is able to call the European’s bluff. European nations will now have to fund their own militaries, using up to 5% of its GDP, instead of free riding on the benevolence of the US taxpayer. That is likely to deal a substantial blow to EU and UK economic growth, standards of living and social provision. The UK cannot even afford 2.5% at the moment, seeing it as breaking the Bank. Will the British working class give up its standard of living, health services, education of its children, welfare state and pensions to defend Europe? Good luck to Sir Keir in the next election, with Reform snapping at Labour’s heels.

The popularity of liberal governments across Europe depends very much on prosperity and rising standards of living. This is now in question if citizens will have to fund their own military forces to the tune of 5% GDP. Perhaps Europe will now have to curb its expansionary aims, which are made effective by promising peoples to the east a higher standard of living in order to agitate them and take them away from the Russian “sphere of influence.”

Trump is aware of the shifting sands in the world and this is what is behind America First. He knows the US has fouled up since the 1980s with de-industrialisation, forever wars and the increasing realisation among the 80 per cent of Americans that their children will be worse off. The New World Order is a luxury the US can no longer afford. The US cannot look after the West anymore and it is going to take care of itself – with the Europeans having to look after themselves and pay their way in the world.

(First published in Irish Political Review March 2025)