By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

A Belligerent America Is Foiling Putin’s Strategy

Since the Cold War ended, Russia has sought to shape Europe’s security architecture and impose its will on smaller neighbors. The Kremlin has also clashed with the United States and Europe at the United Nations and in other multilateral bodies. Its leaders condemned the concept of a rules-based international order as a Western invention meant to cement U.S. hegemony. Styling itself as a vanguard promoting a more multipolar order, Russia sought to increase its own global clout, unencumbered by restraints and rules.

But now it finds itself in the curious position of watching the United States behave more like Russia. On the surface, this may seem a boon for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Instead of contending with a Washington that resists his land grabs and tussles with him in multilateral forums, he has a simpatico U.S. president who appears to subscribe to his might-makes-right worldview. Donald Trump has bashed international institutions in language reminiscent of Russian broadsides, withdrawing the United States from dozens of UN agencies and stripping them of funding while launching a rival conflict-settlement body, the Board of Peace. And he has asserted a right to coerce, even attack, smaller countries in the style of Russia’s bullying.

But in the long term, this turn of events may well be a loss for Russia. Putin’s strategy succeeded only insofar as the United States did not copy it - in other words, as long as Moscow unbound itself from rules while insisting that Washington remain shackled. And in truth, even as Russia decried legacy international institutions, it relied on them for leverage, using its veto power on the Security Council to wield influence. Trump’s actions now threaten to dilute that power. And tied up with the war on Ukraine, Putin has had to stand by and watch as Trump has eagerly used U.S. military force to throttle two key Russian partners, Iran and Venezuela.

The Kremlin is reaping some benefit from Trump’s bludgeoning approach to adversaries. The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has allowed Russia to rake in billions in extra oil revenues. And Russia may hope that Trump gets embroiled in one foreign policy disaster after another, ultimately weakening the United States’ global standing and helping Russia outlast the West in Ukraine. But it is far from certain that Putin can durably capitalize on Trump’s hit-and-run belligerence - and a mistake to imagine that if the United States begins to behave more like Russia, that will automatically benefit the Kremlin. The more likely outcome is that Russia will see its global power projection, already weakened by its war against Ukraine, erode further at the hands of the United States.

Flags at the Allée des Nations in front of the Palace of Nations (United Nations Office at Geneva).

 

Having It Both Ways

Russia has long channeled its resistance to U.S. primacy into disagreements with the United States and allied countries over international treaties and institutions. Putin memorably vented his frustrations in a 2007 speech in Munich, bemoaning the United States’ “disdain” for international law and the transformation of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe into a “vulgar instrument designed to promote the foreign policy interests of one or a group of countries.” After the Obama administration and its allies responded to the 2014 annexation of Crimea by sanctioning and reducing their cooperation with Russia, Russian diplomats clashed with Western counterparts in multilateral bodies even more frequently. At meetings of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, for example, Russia faced disputes with the United States and its partners over efforts by Syria, a Russian ally, to retain and use chemical weapons. These spats allowed Moscow to build a narrative that Western states were merely using multilateral institutions as a cover to push an anti-Russian agenda. Russia succeeded in assembling a small coterie of supporters among nations discontented with Western dominance. It also threw wrenches into the gears of these legacy institutions, hampering their ability to fulfill their mandates.

Meanwhile, Russia made it clear that it would go its own way when it wished, cooperating with like-minded countries rather than relying on what Fyodor Lukyanov, a prominent foreign policy expert close to the Kremlin, contemptuously described as “global structures issuing rules.” Russia’s 2016 Foreign Policy Concept (a document that set out the country’s worldview, interests, and goals) announced Moscow’s intent to turn more to network diplomacy, which it defined as a “flexible approach to participating in multilateral mechanisms” - in other words, to work selectively with countries whenever it suited. Starting in 2017, Russia put this theory into practice, joining Iran and Turkey in the Astana Process to negotiate and oversee so-called de-escalation zones in Syria’s armed conflict; the Astana Process gradually came to overshadow the more inclusive, UN-led Geneva Process in the search for a political settlement. And after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia took its promotion of new formats to the next level. As U.S. and European diplomacy with Russia atrophied, the Kremlin enthusiastically championed the expansion of the BRICS alliance, backing China’s initiative to add new members and then, in 2024, presiding over hundreds of events as chair to integrate the newcomers.

But at the same time, the Kremlin has jealously guarded its veto power on the UN Security Council. After its invasion of Ukraine, Russia was initially cautious not to paralyze the council, coordinating with Western members on issues such as a new sanctions regime on Haitian gangs and the delivery of aid to Afghanistan. But as the Ukraine war settled into a grinding battle of attrition, Russia began wielding its veto to benefit allied governments or factions in Mali, North Korea, and Syria. Russia has helped entrench the UN’s paralysis while continuing to treat the body as a key vehicle to project influence. Moscow’s appetite for disruption has extended to the UN General Assembly: in September 2024, Russian diplomats made a brazen effort to prevent the adoption of the widely supported Pact for the Future. Although Russia failed, its intervention greatly complicated what had already been an arduous negotiation process, even by UN standards.

Over the past several years, Russia has continued to use other legacy multilateral institutions to wield influence, too. With respect to nuclear-negotiating forums and governance bodies such as the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN First Committee, and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Russia has pursued a dual strategy: it has thrown procedural wrenches and sown distrust in the bodies’ impartiality, and has conducted outreach - for instance, with the Group of 77, a coalition of developing countries at the UN - to corral states in support of its anti-Western agenda.

 

Join and Conquer

At first, Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025 seemed to be cause for celebration in Moscow. That February, Washington broke with past practice and sided with Moscow in vetoing a UN General Assembly resolution that condemned Russia’s war against Ukraine. Trump’s skepticism of NATO, dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and assault on policies protecting LGBT rights all seemed to usher in a new U.S. foreign policy that was antiglobalist, anti-interventionist, and antiliberal - and therefore much to Russia’s liking.

But Trump also began to take material steps to dilute the power of the UN and other legacy multilateral institutions - the very system that Russia had relied on as a foil. In early February 2025, he ordered the State Department to review all U.S. memberships to and funding for international organizations. That summer, Trump withdrew the United States from UNESCO. In January 2026, he announced that the United States would quit 66 international bodies, including 31 UN agencies. Under his watch, the United States has also delayed its annual UN dues payments and threatened to withhold further funding, exacerbating the organization’s financial woes.

And Trump pursued his own version of network diplomacy by establishing the Board of Peace. When he invited Putin to join the board, many U.S. foreign-policy experts viewed it as a sign of Russia’s rehabilitation. But the board’s establishment put Russia in a particularly awkward position once it became apparent that Trump wants it to do much more than implement his Gaza peace plan. Trump has made it clear that he is the board’s supreme authority and that Russia will not have the kinds of privileges there that it enjoys on the UN Security Council.

In an attempt to pander to Trump’s susceptibility to flattery, Putin offered to support the board’s budget with $1 billion, to be taken from Russian assets currently frozen in the United States. But Russia skipped the board’s inaugural meeting, and its foreign ministry has since said it is “assessing” the board’s “modalities” - diplomatic jargon for “Russia is not going to join.” Little did Putin know that his strategy for wielding global power required a functioning UN in which Russia has a say equal to the United States; membership in the Board of Peace is a demotion.

 

Humble Pie

Trump’s overtly might-makes-right foreign policy has also upended Moscow’s aspirations. For several decades, Russia’s revisionism was undergirded by growing military might. The financial windfall that high oil prices bestowed in the first decade of the twenty-first century expedited the country’s military modernization and allowed it to pursue a less quiescent foreign policy. Russia claimed some 20 percent of Georgia’s territory in 2008. It annexed Crimea in 2014. A year later, it intervened in the Syrian civil war to prop up Bashar al-Assad, launching its first large-scale operation outside the former Soviet Union since the end of the Cold War.

By 2022, Putin had arrogated to himself an assertiveness that a few decades ago had been uniquely American. If the United States could use military force in pursuit of its objectives, so could Russia. Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine epitomized his belief that Russia’s own might would henceforth make right - or, as a prominent Russian international relations scholar put it days into the war, that “great powers behave as great powers.”

Trump, however, has taken that principle to new extremes. Despite having campaigned on an antiwar platform, in 2025 he ordered the use of force against seven countries - more than any other U.S. president in the modern era. And he unleashed the U.S. military on close Russian partners. These displays of American power unnerved Moscow: patriotic Russian bloggers reacted with envy to last June’s U.S. strikes against Iran and to the lightning removal of Venezuela’s leader earlier this year. The swiftness and apparent success of these interventions stood in stark contrast to Russia’s own so-called special military operation, which was intended to be similarly snappy but is now bogged down in its fifth year. The fact that U.S.-led or -supported operations have taken aim at heads of state, resulting in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, particularly spooked Putin, who appears to have grown more fearful of drone attacks and even assassination attempts in recent months.

Trump’s ventures have also put a spotlight on Russia’s diminished capacity to project military power beyond Ukraine. Last June, Russia took a back seat when the United States and Israel attacked Iran. And although it has lent Tehran some support in the form of targeting data and operational guidance, Moscow has refrained from intervening directly to defend Iran in the current war. Russia’s refusal to risk entanglement on behalf of its partners has been a matter of political calculation, not just a function of resource constraints. Still, as Moscow sees it, Trump is shaping a world in which “the weak get beaten,” as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put it in a March interview. To ensure that the United States cannot beat Russia, Russian experts and officials have hinted, it must leave no doubt as to the formidability of its nuclear weapons.

 

Be Careful What You Wish For

For years, Russia mocked international rules, norms, and institutions. But as much as Russia squirmed and jolted, resisting a global order it viewed as stacked against it, that order gave Russia power and predictability. Now, Trump’s desire to bypass the UN and engage in unconventional diplomacy threatens to dilute Russia’s veto. And his intoxication with deploying U.S. military force leaves Russia looking like a second-tier player. This is not the world Putin wanted. He hoped to see Russia unbound, not the United States. And he wanted Russia to be consulted on matters of global import, not ignored. Yet Trump did not even bother to accept Putin’s offer, made last September, that both countries pledge to abide by their limits on nuclear warheads after the expiration of New START, the last remaining U.S.-Russian nuclear arms treaty. Trump is taking everyone “back to a world where nothing existed - no international law, no Versailles system, no Yalta system,” Lavrov complained in March.

Russia’s hope now is that Trump has bitten off more than he can chew. Nine weeks into his campaign against Iran, the U.S. president is struggling to end what he has rhetorically characterized as a “miniwar” or “excursion” - and Russia is benefiting. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has roiled global energy markets, prompting the United States to ease its oil sanctions on Russia. Russian bloggers have mocked Trump’s war with the phrase “Tehran in three days” - a nod to “Kyiv in three days,” the ironic shorthand used to describe the Kremlin’s hubris in believing it could defeat Ukraine quickly. The longer Trump’s Middle East gambit lasts without entering a clear endgame, the more Russia could profit - from higher prices on the fuel and fertilizer it exports, the diversion of critical U.S. air-defense munitions from Ukraine to the Persian Gulf, and the exposure of American incompetence.

But the fact remains that Trump’s world may not be a hospitable milieu for Russia. Trump could come for Cuba, one of Russia’s closest partners in the Western Hemisphere, next, further chipping away at the power of Moscow’s circle of friends. More fundamentally, Trump seems in no mood to accommodate Russia as a great-power equal to the United States - to consult Putin on Iran and other geopolitical dossiers; to rely on the UN, where Moscow is Washington’s peer, as the world’s foremost peacemaking body; and to grant Russia its sphere of influence. Instead, by dismantling the post-Cold War international system, Trump is taking over Russia’s mission. And Moscow will have to contend with something messier, a world with no stable frameworks or reliable rules of the game.

 

 

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