TL;DRussia Relaunch: Volume 3

20 January 2026: Same shit, different dictator

Nuuk, Greenland. Wikimedia Commons.

This is the final of three issues re-launching the newsletter. The first, on the war in Ukraine, was published 10 January. The second, on domestic developments in Russia, saw the light of day on 14 January. The newsletter’s original cadence will resume this weekend.

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This issue was supposed to be the easy one to write. It would write itself, I thought. It’s all so blindingly obvious, I thought. And yet.

And yet.

I have spent way too much of the last quarter century trying to get journalists and policymakers and students to stop asking what’s going on in Vladimir Putin’s head. Trying to acknowledge and embrace uncertainty, rather than to fill black boxes—inherently opaque spaces that our analytical toolkits cannot penetrate—with fundamentally unknowable “truths” about the man’s mentality. And broadly speaking (without wanting to take any credit for this myself), Europeans broadly stopped asking those questions in 2022. It’s been a very long time since a serious European analyst or policymaker posited that maybe we’re reading Putin wrong. And that’s a good thing, not because we’re always right, but because “reading” Putin is an analytically pointless task.

And yet.

European policymakers and pundits are now playing exactly the same game with Donald Trump that they played with Putin prior to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In this, they’re being abetted by the same Americans who once berated them for not taking Putin seriously, but who now proffer grains of salt with which ostensibly to interpret the American president. It needs to stop. Now.

To be fair, the Trumpsplaining community is smaller now than it was a week or so ago, not least since Trump ‘splained himself in that remarkable “I-no-longer-feel-an-obligation-to-think-purely-of-Peace” text to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Støre. Increasingly dominant is analysis of the kind Phillips O’Brien published on 17 January, arguing that Trump is, in fact, “deadly serious” about taking Greenland.

And yet.

As the reality of Trump’s intentions has dawned, European leaders have responded with an odd mixture of resolve and resignation. Over the weekend, European leaders began discussions in earnest of deploying the EU’s Anti-Coercion Instrument, a sweeping set of trade and investment barriers initially designed to inflict maximum pain on China. Some even began exploring dumping Europe’s trove of US sovereign debt—estimated at between $8-12.6 trillion—though the feasibility of such a move is questionable. Within 24 hour, however, Europe evidently decided to negotiate, rather than to fight. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer deplored Trump’s “give-me-Greenland-or-else” tariff threat but indicated that, even if tariffs are imposed, Britain would likely refrain from retaliating. “A tariff war is in no one’s interest,” he said.

The vexing part for me is that that’s exactly the tack that smart European commentators are applauding. Thus, Ulrich Speck wrote on X that European threats of retaliation were “an unnecessary and predictable escalation that the Europeans can only lose. Merz, Starmer, Macron should have gone with Denmark and Greenland to the White House and made a big offer for sharing the burden of Greenland's defense. Win-win.”

Similarly, Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to Washington and currently head of the Munich Security Forum, wrote in the New York Times that, “the Greenland issue does not have to become a rupture. Handled wisely, it could instead become another example of NATO’s enduring strengths: consultation, compromise and collective problem-solving. The alliance has survived other crises — precisely because members chose dialogue over confrontation. It is not too late to do so again.”

Alain Berset, Secretary General of the Council of Europe, took a slightly different tack in the same newspaper, appealing not to Trump but to America’s better angels: “When Europe insists on sovereignty and accountability, it is not posturing. It is defending what makes both America and Europe strong. To ignore this is to set a dangerous precedent, one that could unravel the trans-Atlantic bond and weaken the foundations that keep us standing.”

All three of those sentiments are fine. And Ulrich is right, as is Stephen Miller (ugh): if it comes to a military or economic fist-fight for Greenland, the US will walk away with Greenland. But all three lines of reasoning are predicated on assumptions about Trump’s reasoning, as though if we just concentrate hard enough we could identify the core thing Trump wants and figure out a way to give it to him at minimal cost to Europe. And in that, this approach is indistinguishable from the pre-2022 approach most of Europe took to Putin. Hell, people are even looking around for an “off ramp” for Trump. Because that worked so well the first time around.

So, maybe Trump’s text to Støre is his version of Putin’s essay on the “historical unity” of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples, just with more concision and worse sentence structure. Maybe there’s a deep-seated ideology driving all of this. Or psychosis. Or both. Or maybe Trump is actually a keen geopolitical strategist, trapped in the body of an incompetent communicator. On some level, it doesn’t matter, or at least it shouldn’t. As Anne Applebaum writes in The Atlantic, “Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him.” That should be enough evidence that the standard diplomatic toolkit isn’t going to cut it.

But my point is actually different. We don’t know what Trump thinks, any more than we know what Putin thinks. We can’t. And we shouldn’t pretend that we do. As I’ve written again and again and again in this newsletter, the thing to do when we face uncertainty is to embrace it, rather than trying to replace it with false certainty.

When faced with a black box like Trump’s brain, we have two imperatives, I think. The first is to make the black box as small as possible, by focusing on what we actually do know. With enough historical data, we can recognise patterns and predict future behaviour. We can also observe the degree to which an actor’s behaviour is constricted by structure and other agents. And then we can make reasonable judgments about the range of plausible behaviours for which we need to be prepared, but it’s infinitely better than making an unfounded judgment about a single eventuality and preparing exclusively for that.

So, what do we know about Trump? We know that he is erratic, which does not mean that the most outlandish eventualities will come to pass, but it does mean that they are not inherently unlikely simply because they are outlandish. In fact, we have seen over the past year a consistent effort to push through barriers and to break expectations, as though calculated to communicate to anyone paying attention that Trump—and his version of American power—will not be constrained. Trump will unsettle for the sake of unsettling. He will break for the sake of breaking.

We also know that inscrutable actors like Putin and Trump know that they’re inscrutable—and they do it on purpose. Actors who cannot or prefer not to lean on institutional levers of power (which rely on consistent behaviours and stable expectations, after all) need other sources of advantage, and they find them by manufacturing and manipulating uncertainty. Putin and Trump are very different animals, but they converge almost perfectly on this point. They know that their opponents want to predict their actions before devising their own strategies, and so they know that if they can impede prediction, they can undermine strategy. Trump’s inconsistency may but be a bug in the American system, because it doesn’t serve American interests in the broader sense. But it’s a feature in the Trumpian system, because it serves Trump’s interests with exquisite precision.

And we know, by now, that Trump wants to pursue an exclusively transactional foreign policy that can be weaponised for domestic political purposes. This isn’t a guess: it’s a consistent policy line. Trump pursues a foreign policy that is explicitly partisan, and in which America builds relationships not with states, but with particular actors within states, whose interests are seen to be most closely aligned not with those of the United States, but with those of Trump. (Hell, you only need to read the National Security Strategy to see that.) And, as is common among autocrats (would-be or otherwise), Trump struggles to distinguish between the national interests and his own interests.

All of that is different from saying that I understand why Trump does what he does. I don’t, and I try to be humble in my analytical claims. But that humility need not blind me to patterns.

The second imperative, as I wrote back in March 2025, is to take uncertainty as an opportunity to re-centre the conversation:

Embracing the uncertainty when it comes to Putin and Trump means using the fact that we cannot know their thoughts as a signal that we need to reconstruct the equation at the core of our analysis. … If we think that we know what Putin or Trump is thinking, then we end up constructing an equation in which we hold their thoughts constant, in order to calculate what our responses should be, based on the interaction between their thinking and our interests. If, however, we recognize that Putin or Trump’s thinking is actually a variable—as, of course, is our response—then the only constant in the equation is our interests.

So what are Europe’s interests?

To answer that question, let’s game things out a bit. As I said earlier, it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone is going to go to a shooting war over Greenland. Europe has also made it reasonably clear that they will not go to economic war, either, and even if they did, Trump looks unlikely to be deterred. Congress, having abdicated its war powers in Venezuela, also looks unlikely to intervene. So, unless Trump has a change of heart, we have to take seriously the likelihood that Denmark is forced to cede sovereignty.

It has become a commonplace to say that any such eventuality would be the end of NATO. If only. In truth, the forced handover of Greenland transforms NATO from a military alliance into a protection racket, in which European allies are given a choice between an uncertain and extractive American protectorate and trying their luck with the Russians. At least for the time being, most European states will opt for the former.

That protection will come at the cost of more than a seat at a meaningful alliance table or the ability to define the contours of their own security. It will come at the cost of sovereignty, as America’s willingness to defend Europe will have to be weighed against the challenges from Russia and China, and Europeans’ place in the global order is decided above Europeans’ heads. And it will come at the cost of democracy, as Washington feels increasingly emboldened to intervene in internal European affairs (as, indeed, it has already announced it will; again, see that National Security Strategy). Everything from trade and competition policy to healthcare and agriculture and social policy will be subject to pressure from whoever occupies the White House. And European voters will have to think twice about the geopolitical implications of their electoral choices.

If you think I’m being alarmist, just ask Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian, Moldovan, Belarusian or Kazakh voters about the role Russia has played in their affairs, endowed as it is with the same ‘might-makes-right’ sensibility that motivates Trump’s White House. And then pause before you tell me that the US is not Russia. Of course it isn’t. But Trump’s view of how the world works is remarkably similar to Putin’s. And unlike in his first term, there are no robust barriers to him putting that vision into action.

It gets worse, though. The ‘Donroe Doctrine’, in dividing the world into spheres of influence for Washington, Moscow and Beijing—or, at the very least, spheres where each power is allowed to interfere politically and militarily without provoking the ire of the other two—is problematic on a number of levels, but it is particularly problematic for Europe. Together with Africa and swathes of the Indo-Pacific, Europe remains outside a clear claim by any of the powers in this putative tri-polar arrangement. That makes it ripe territory for zero-sum competition between the US and Russia and thus, eventually, for war, on a scale larger than what we’re already seeing in Ukraine.

If that’s a scenario that Europe needs to take seriously, Europe’s interests come into sharper focus: the maintenance of sovereignty and democracy, the prevention of an extractive and transactional American suzerainty over Europe, and the avoidance of catastrophic war. That, and not Arctic security or tariffs, or even the principles of transatlantic solidarity, is what’s on the table in Greenland. Europe’s ability to control its own fate is on the table. Europe’s ability to survive is on the table.

If that doesn’t focus European minds, I don’t know what will. But I do know this: if Europe keeps looking for the key to its own future in the black box of Trump’s head, we’re doomed.