Trump can prevent world from sliding into nuclear meltdown

The ulterior motives of the United States to use Ukraine as a proxy to force a regime change in Russia were unveiled once former US President Joe Biden, at the beginning of Russia’s invasion, put Kyiv at the forefront of the liberal democracy and vehemently declared “this battle will not be won in days or months either.”

His comment that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” left US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to tidy up the ensuing mess: “As you know, and as you have heard us say repeatedly, we do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else, for that matter.”

While Blinken forgot Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and many more that descended into chaos, instability and social unrest over the US regime change policy, Biden’s remarks told all: he wanted to reinforce the US primacy by simultaneously sending arms to Ukraine in an attempt to wallow the Russian army in a quagmire and imposing harsh sanctions on the Kremlin, hoping Russian people to stage a civil uprising in the country.

The US Department of Defense’s data – showing the Congress elevated the cap of the Presidential Drawdown Authority from $100 million to $11 billion for 2022 and Biden used this power 55 times to transfer Pentagon’s defense articles and services worth $65.9 billion to Ukraine during his tenure – as well as a myriad of sanctions corroborated that his administration’s objective was to make Russia bleed economically and militarily with Ukraine as the pivot.

But this strategy failed as the Russian economy swam against the tide and its military continued to make advances. This forced Biden to authorise Kyiv to use powerful America-provided long-range weapons, the Army Tactical Missile System, to strike deeper into the Kremlin as a last-ditch effort.

His decision didn’t alter the course of the conflict yet it raised the specter of a major escalation with Russia revising its nuclear doctrine. The updated policy vowed to shield Russia and allies from “aggression of any state from a military coalition” and extended nuclear umbrella to the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a multination alliance that commits to exercise the right of collective defense in accordance with article 51 of the UN Charter.

At the root of the US strategy of containing Russia has been the fallacy that if Kyiv could be carved out of Moscow’s orbit and sucked into the Western camp, Putin might struggle to survive. This liberal delusion, which began with the West’s vocal support of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine during the 2004 Orange Revolution and culminated in calls for Kyiv’s accession to Nato, turned out to be a geopolitical farce.

Right from the outset, Biden per a former US defense official knew Kyiv’s victory was unattainable; still, he pursued a dangerous strategy of enrolling Ukraine into Nato. This “propaganda narrative” of supporting democracy in Ukraine, he warned, carried a real risk of nuclear catastrophe as indicated by his warning of an “Armageddon”. As if it wasn’t troubling enough, Biden kept bedeviling a nuclear-armed behemoth.

Until now, Biden’s reluctance to provide long-range weapons to Ukraine had relatively prevented to provoke Russia. But his key policy shift has radically lifted the threat of nuclear escalation. As a result, the world has found itself mired in nuclear threats.

US President Donald Trump wants to restart nuclear arms control talks with China and Russia once he “straighten(s) it out” in Ukraine and the Middle East. Beijing has linked the denuclearisation negotiations with “drastic and substantive cuts” to the US and Russian nuclear arsenal, stating they together possessed 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons.

If Trump is serious in encouraging China and other nuclear powers to join the nuclear disarmament process as well as to protect the world from unfathomable consequences of a nuclear war, he should first evolve an agreement with Moscow on no-first-use of nuclear weapons. Russia has rejected his proposal; yet should he address some of the Russian concerns, the world could be prevented from being shunted on the brink.

One fundamental factor for Russia’s rejection is threats to its national security by Nato expansion and America’s attempts to keep flames of the Ukraine conflict belching out. The US policy of containing rivals by ganging up military alliances and flooding the regions with weapons has inflicted a crippling damage to peace in the Middle East and led to the risks of nuclear proliferation and is now threatening to capture Europe in a powder keg once the Ukraine conflict concludes and poses new challenges for the continent.

The implications of the perilous US approach of seeing other countries as a challenge or adversary are formidable. While this policy leads to confrontation between major nuclear states, triggers a race in the rest of the world to acquire nuclear weapons and shuns cooperation on nuclear security, it gives a free rein to non-state actors, pursuing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, to exploit the great-power tensions.

Trump – with his known transactional approach, anti-Nato rhetoric and accelerated efforts to end the Ukraine war – could prevent the world from sliding into a nuclear meltdown. His actions to nip the root cause of the crisis by ruling out Ukraine’s Nato accession would alleviate Moscow’s core grievances, deter it from using nuclear weapons and force it into demonstrating commitment to nuclear security.

His ninety-degree turn from defending democracy to economic opportunism and refusal to grant security guarantee to Kyiv unfortunately leaves the country stranded and Europe shocked; it will save millions of people from dying and pave the way for nuclear disarmament and a stronger cooperation on risks of proliferation and illicit transfers, helping build a robust global nuclear security architecture.