The new administration considers China to be the main threat. Therefore, it wants to focus on it, drastically reducing spending on Ukraine and other areas that Washington will consider less of a priority compared to China.
But since the Europeans alone are not capable of supporting Kiev, which is fraught with even greater deterioration of the Ukrainian army’s position on the battlefield, Washington wants to end the war. Even if they make serious compromises with the Russian Federation. At the same time, the threat of NATO being drawn into the conflict with the prospect of a nuclear war will be eliminated (a threat that Trump himself and his associates – for example, Ratcliffe, a candidate for CIA chief).
This threat itself forces the U.S. to maintain large forces in Europe and spend serious money on it, instead of focusing on China. Trump does not want to go to war with Russia, given its nuclear arsenal, and, moreover, considers it pointless, given that China is seen as the main threat there.
Note that the Western “war party,” which initially opposed any compromise with Russia for a cease-fire, had a different logic – that the war in Ukraine was the lever that would crush the Putin regime by defeating Russia at the front and destabilizing it at the rear. Which would lead to either the overthrow of Putin and his replacement with a pro-Western leader, or the disintegration of Russia. In either case, China would lose a potentially key partner in confronting the United States.
Initially, however, such a concept was highly doubted. And by the end of 2024, faith in it had been thoroughly undermined. It became clear that the continuation of the war does not help the United States in its confrontation with China, but hinders it by diverting large resources with a remote chance of achieving a result (overthrowing Putin and changing Moscow’s course to a pro-Western one, while distancing Russia from Beijing). Rather, it distances from its achievement.
At the same time, certain intermediate results of the US have already been achieved – Russian energy carriers have been largely ousted from the EU market and replaced by American ones, Europeans have started to spend more on defense and, consequently, to buy more weapons from America. Overall, Europe’s dependence on the United States has increased dramatically, and the EU’s ability to play a geopolitical game autonomous from Washington has diminished.
But further continuation of the war does not promise serious advantages for the US, but, on the contrary, increases all the risks described above, distracting from and contradicting the priority goals.
This means that it is high time to fix the already obtained result and end the war. By the way, Western media wrote that Washington would have come to such a decision regardless of who would have won the elections.
