Opinion | ‘The World Is There for the Carving’: Two Columnists on the Trump-Putin Alliance
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 Trump’s deals are all of the “I win, you lose” variety. His goal is less to score strategic or tactical victories and more to humiliate others, particularly those he feels have slighted him or paid insufficient obeisance. And the attitude pervades the administration. The ill grace JD Vance showed in refusing even to meet with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, was flabbergasting but very much on-brand. It’s the attitude of a dismissive viceroy, not a gracious ally.
