The EUROPEAN CONSERVATİVE - The Two Superpowers Are Back in Business - Ramachandra Byrappa — August 18, 2025

 The EUROPEAN  CONSERVATİVE

The Two Superpowers Are Back in Business

In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, U.S. President Donald Trump greets Russian President Vladimir Putin on the tarmac after they arrived for a meeting on Ukraine at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 15, 2025.

Sergey Bobylev / POOL / AFP

Normalcy in Russia–U.S. relations will transform conflict into cooperation in many parts of the world.

Ramachandra Byrappa

— August 18, 2025

 

 

Peacemaking requires cooperation between the two superpowers. This was certainly accomplished at the Alaska Summit. Peace in Ukraine cannot be achieved in isolation from everything else happening in the world. If the rest of the world becomes as chaotic as Europe, there will be more wars and suffering, and the chances of a peace settlement for Ukraine will remain slim. We simply cannot put the cart before the horse. However, this has been the approach of the European Commission. That is why nothing is moving. We are stuck in a quagmire, and hope is fading fast for the peace-loving Ukrainian people.

President Trump is fully aware of the situation. He realized that time is running out and that we are quickly slipping toward a potentially dangerous global conflict. The war between Russia and Ukraine is more than a clash between two Slavic nations; it is a blaze that has set fire to an already unstable world order. No combination of nations can easily reverse the situation, but President Trump is determined to do so. Nothing will stop him—not even the shameless attacks on his genuinely good intentions. He is immune to all this because he is addressing the root causes.

This catastrophe would never have befallen Ukraine if some European countries had not worked to turn Russia into an enemy. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States had invested heavily in integrating Russia into the Atlantic system. President Putin was proud of this transformation and established the framework for the “Four Common Spaces” at the EU-Russia St. Petersburg Summit in May 2003 to deepen cooperation between the EU and Russia, including in the area of security. As a result, Europe prospered with access to cheap Russian mineral resources, and Russia modernized its political and economic systems. Unfortunately, NATO’s eastward expansion and Russia’s reaction to it interrupted this progress. 

Then came the accusations that President Putin’s Russia is involved in distorting election results in the West, including the 2016 presidential election results in the United States. These false accusations were aimed at making Trump’s Russia policy ineffective, thus robbing him of the opportunity to solve the budding Ukrainian crisis once and for all in his first term. The situation reached a tipping point when Britain accused Russia of involvement in the so-called Salisbury poisonings—the poisoning of a former Russian military officer and his daughter—in 2018. Europe moved to totally isolate Russia through unilateral sanctions, but in doing so, it isolated itself from the rest of the world. 

The American president wants to end this suicidal situation that threatens to destroy Western civilization. He wants to salvage transatlantic integration with Russia before it is too late. In Alaska, he took the first steady step by acknowledging and, in a sense, bestowing superpower status upon Russia. In doing so, he pulled the world order back from the brink of collapse because normalcy in Russia–U.S. relations will transform conflict into cooperation in many parts of the world. Furthermore, by granting Russia superpower status, President Trump has reinstated a sense of hierarchy within the West. Where there is hierarchy, order will prevail, and where there is order, peace has a chance of existing.

Ramachandra Byrappa earned his PhD in 20th-century history from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest in 2014. He teaches contemporary Asian history and geopolitics at ELTE and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs.