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M. Gessen and Bret Stephens

By M. Gessen and Bret Stephens

Mx. Gessen and Mr. Stephens are Opinion columnists.

Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists M. Gessen and Bret Stephens about Donald Trump’s first month in office and his use of power on the world stage.

Patrick Healy: Bret, Masha, you’ve both written powerfully for years about Russia and the West, totalitarian states, Vladimir Putin, the Ukraine war and Donald Trump’s use of power. We are one month into Trump’s presidency, and the West seems at the beginning of a potentially significant realignment: Trump is starting to align with Putin over Europe, Trump is repeating Putin’s lies about Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky being a “dictator” who caused the war, and foreign allies and Republican leaders seem weak or pliant in the face of Trump. What is all of this adding up to? Are we seeing a realignment among the United States, Russia and Europe?

Bret Stephens: It might be premature to draw firm conclusions. But, for now, I’d say the word “realignment” feels much too weak. “Reversal” comes closer to the mark. A reversal in our vision of who counts as a democrat or a dictator. A reversal in who counts as a friend or an adversary. A reversal in our approach to the domestic politics of allied states. A reversal in the overall direction of our post-World War II foreign policy, which was about supporting embattled or enfeebled allies, promoting economic liberalization, embracing democracy or at least nontotalitarian states, favoring open societies over closed ones. It’s a world turned upside down.

Another thing: It feels that Trump is seeking to turn America into a predatory state. The casual demand that Denmark relinquish Greenland. The not-so-casual demand that Ukraine hand over much of its mineral wealth. The surly threats to Panama, whose president is as pro-American as they come. The deal to return desperate Venezuelan refugees to the socialist dictatorship from which they fled in hunger and desperation. The joking — or not — about turning Canada into a 51st state. The unilateral and unprovoked trampling of trade agreements, like the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement he negotiated in his first term as a replacement for NAFTA.

There are, in fact, spots where I find myself agreeing with the administration, particularly its tough stance on Hamas and Iran. I don’t want to lose sight of that. But on the whole, I find myself returning to the same word: nauseating. In fact, it’s actually worse: emetic.

Healy: What you’re describing, Bret, I’ve come to think of as a new Trump doctrine: coercive conquest. And what’s extraordinary is that we now have a president of the United States who subscribes to the same worldview of coercive conquest as the president of Russia. Are you surprised that Trump is going in this predatory direction?

Stephens: Surprised? The reason I voted for Kamala Harris, despite my millions of reservations about her competence and ideas, is that I feared something like this. Still, it is breathtaking to experience these policy shifts in real time. Also astonishing, in that some of these positions will be politically ruinous for Trump if he really follows through with them. If, for instance, Zelensky is deposed and a Russian puppet government in the mold of Belarus is somehow installed in Kyiv, it will be as politically disastrous for Trump as the swift fall of Kabul was for Joe Biden. To use Trump’s preferred epithet, it will look very weak.

M. Gessen: Putin has been saying for years, in many different ways, that what he really wants — and feels he deserves — is to return to 1945, when the leaders of the U.S.S.R., the U.S. and Britain sat down in Yalta and carved up Europe. This idea is fundamental to Putin’s understanding of the world as it should be. He feels that Russia was cheated out of what it had won, fair and square, both in terms of land and in terms of influence. The war he unleashed in Ukraine was — and he made this explicit — had as its goal the recapture of power and land in accordance with this vision.

So it’s not about Ukraine, has never been about Ukraine. And what he is proposing to Trump as they start talking — we are seeing this in the readouts of their first, 1.5-hour phone conversation and in the hypercharged tweets of Aleksandr Dugin, Putin’s favorite so-called intellectual — is to sit down and carve up the world.

Healy: That’s how Trump thinks, too. The world is there for the carving.

Gessen: I think that Trump is likely to find this irresistible. From Trump’s own newly expansionist rhetoric — his demands for Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, Ukraine’s natural resources — we can see that he is groping for this same sort of thing. So, yes, for these reasons and others, even though it’s only been a month, I think we are clearly looking at a realignment of the postwar order. I am saying this based on what Trump and Putin — and Pete Hegseth and Putin’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and Dugin — have been saying. We need to listen to them.

Healy: You both are getting at Trump’s core. He is a transaction-oriented empire builder who wants to keep other people over a barrel. He sees America’s allies largely as moochers or rip-off artists that he needs to squeeze and get better deals from — all those mineral rights Bret referred to. Trump doesn’t operate based on shared values or historic relationships; he has a survival-of-the-fittest mentality and thinks Americans elected him to get a better deal from other countries, not to get shared values. In this vein, I think Trump and Putin see Europe as something to plunder — Ukraine, Greenland, squeezing NATO for more money, pressing them to give up things in return for superpower benevolence.

Gessen: Patrick, I think you are right. And I also think that Trump’s views, or his sense of himself, have evolved over the last eight years. During his first term, you could really tell that he felt like an accidental president. This time, he seems to feel genuinely chosen. There is a new messianic quality to his behavior. He is not just making deals so he can accumulate wealth while he is president, as he did during his first term. It seems to me that he is now planning to rule for a long time — forever, in his imagination? — and he wants to wield genuine power in the world.

Stephens: I agree with Masha. The creepiest line in his inaugural speech was, “I was saved by God to make America great again.” There’s a degree of messianism there that befits an Iranian ayatollah or a medieval crusader, not an American president.

I’m also not sure the word “transactional” quite fits the president. The art of a great deal, to adapt a phrase, is that both sides are supposed to come out as winners. But........

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