International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies (IFIMES)[1] from Ljubljana, Slovenia, regularly analyses developments in the Middle East, Balkans and around the world. Dr. Masahiro Matsumura, Professor of International Politics and National Security, Faculty of Law, St. Andrew's University (Momoyama Gakuin Daigaku) and member of IFIMES Council, prepared an article entitled “Why truce talks now? The significance of the Trump revolution”. In the article he explores an answer for the dramatic shift at the negotiations between U.S. and Russia to stop the war in Ukraine. The article is published in its entirety.
On February 18, U.S. and Russian negotiation teams had the initial formal truce talks on “the War in Ukraine” in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Why did the two governments finally agree to sit at a negotiation table although having long refused to do so? This paper will explore an answer for this dramatic shift.
Certainly, Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a protracted warfare since February 24, 2022, primarily in Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, Crimea, the Kursk Oblast of Russia, and some areas in European Russia proper. Yet, the limited warfare may be comprehended as “the final stage of U.S.-Russia proxy war in Donbas” (2014-2022)”[2], in the context of their overall strategic rivalry and, more specifically, in light of the interplay of their continual political interference and direct or indirect armed intervention[3] . Now this is shown by the Riyadh truce talks between the U.S. and Russian governments that excluded Ukrainian participants.
As Carl von Clausewitz says, war is the continuation of politics with other means. This implies that a war is waged due to an irreconcilable conflict of the national interests of different states and is to be settled through victory and defeat or through wartime diplomacy that reflects their relative military superiority or inferiority consequent on actual warfare. For the U.S. and Russian nuclear superpowers, a total war is impracticable. Also, Russia possesses adequate military power and war potential, while the United States is capable to continue providing sufficient military and financial aids to Ukraine, involving significant war protraction. Thus, the conflict will surely go on until at least one of the two great powers runs out of its war resources and/or will power or make a basic change of its war objective.
Obviously, the key is the birth of the second-term Donald Trump administration that has come to power with his strong public pledge to reverse President Joseph Biden’s Ukraine policy and put an end to the armed conflict, particularly given Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unchanged approach to it. Thus, it is crucially important to examine Biden’s and Putin’s war objectives and Trump’s general foreign and security policy line that encompasses Ukraine policy. On March 26, 2022, about one month after the Russian invasion to Ukraine, President Biden in his major address at Warsaw’s Royal Palace said, “Putin cannot remain in power”, revealing his war objective of forcing President Putin out of power through political, economic, and military pressures, not direct armed intervention, against Russia[4]. On the other hand, in August 2022, President Putin delivered a speech on putting an end to U.S. hegemony as the prime war objective[5] , formalizing the point in an official Russian government document, “Foreign Policy Concept” of March 2023[6] .
Thus, it is no wonder that both Biden and Putin had refused any truce talks for the “War” in Ukraine, and natural that Trump and Putin are now aligning themselves against the longtime U.S. global hegemony policy that had evolved over Bill Clinton, G.W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden presidencies, with the interruption of Trump’s first term. In fact, Trump vainly attempted such an anti-globalist strategic alignment with Russia in view of countering China as a prime competitor. Yet, he had only been mired in the so-called “Russiagate,” or unsubstantiated allegations and failed impeachment inquiry that had been put forth by the globalist establishment on Capitol and amplified by the mainstream media, about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections.
Now it is necessary to comprehend the essential features of the American globalist establishment, the longtime struggle between the top-dog globalists and the underdog anti-globalist, and the decisive reversal of their power positions that involves major shifts of basic U.S. internal and external policy lines. The analysis has to begin with the U.S.-U.K. “special relationship” that has been central to the longtime U.S. global hegemony policy, including the “War” in Ukraine.
Since WWII until the start of the second-term Trump administration, the United States and the United Kingdom, the current and previous hegemons, had kept the evolving strong special alliance relationship for hegemonic world policy. Such a relationship has been demonstrated by the two countries’ frequent and close cooperation in foreign and security policy and joint military operations in major regional wars, most notably the Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq Wars, with the longtime Anglo-American global communication intelligence (COMINT) alliance since the WWII among the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Yet, the special relationship is neither natural nor permanent. As is well known, U.S.-U.K. relations had evolved from early hostilities to great-power competition then to conflictual hegemonic transition. In the 17th century, Puritans emigrated from England to North America after having suffered religious persecution from its absolute monarch. Then, North American colonists won the Revolutionary War against the British monarch and declared independence in 1776. Thereafter, the new state won the second de facto War of Independence (1812-1815) against the former suzerain. The United States took advantage of the favorable international balance of power to continue protracted confrontation against the British Empire, while referring to the Monroe Doctrine. Notably in the American Civil War (1861-1865), the Empire followed favorable neutrality to the secessionist Confederacy by recognizing it as belligerent community under international law, enabling unimpeded commercial trade with it amid the Union’s imposition of blockade, and economically supporting the Confederacy against the Union[7]. Toward the end of 19th century, the United States steadily became a prime industrial power, involving significant relative decline of the then-British economic hegemony and putting its military hegemony in a great strain without adequate economic power base.
A typical British choice was the Anglo-Japan alliance (1902-1923) in which London employed Tokyo as its surrogate regional military power in East Asia, demonstrated by the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) as a part of the Great Game. The alliance turned out to be a great geostrategic obstacle to the U.S. mega-regional hegemonic aspiration as it marched into the Pacific after it ceded Guam and the Philippines as a result of the victory of the Spanish-American War (1898). Eventually, Washington drove a wedge between London and Tokyo by replacing the alliance with the ineffective collective security framework under the Washington Naval Treaty (1923). It is well known that Washington entertained the War Plan Red against the British Empire and the War Plan Orange against Japan[8]. Given that the Plan-Red document was declassified only in 1974, such strategic thinking might have continued well beyond the end of WWII[9], and possibly continues even today.
Obviously, the United States had long had highly competitive relations with the British Empire until WWII when the debilitation of British hegemony and the power transition to U.S. hegemony became irreversible. During the transition, Britain uselessly struggled to retain its hegemonic power and influence at the systemic levels by institutionalizing its permanent member status of the U.N. Security Council, vainly establishing a supranational currency, Bancor, in the postwar international economic system through the Bretton Woods Conference[10], and reinforcing the British Commonwealth prior to the full postwar decolonization. Instead, as discussed below, Britain explored building the aforementioned special relationship to enjoy a privileged position within the U.S. hegemonic system, rendering itself a superficial prime supporter and arguably a significant backstage manipulator
Building the special relationship had required a long prelude to form the core of trans-Atlantic interpersonal networks at the elite levels who share similar values, worldviews, national interests, and external policy lines, especially in foreign and security affairs. In modern international history, Britain became the first predominant colonial power with genuinely global outreach, with the need of running its own global commerce, trade, financial, transportation, and military systems. To sustain a British-style global hegemonic policy, the history of British democracy shows that effective control over the legislative and executive branches and its central bank is essential because active external political interference and armed intervention require sufficient national fiscal flexibility and financial liquidity to finance such external policy. These three conditions are crucial to transform the United States to a hegemon.
The former British North American colony had an anti-British political culture, government institution, and external policy lines that are built in the U.S. Constitution. In fact, the United States had not made a decisive shift toward building global hegemony until WWII. The country adhered to the anti-globalist policy line according to the Monroe Doctrine that long called at most for regional hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, later expanded to the Pacific after the cession of Guam and the Philippines. This is well exemplified by the Senate’s rejection to accede to the League of Nations and strong reluctance at both elite and public levels to intervene in European and global international relations prior to Japan’s attack against Pearl Harbor, while, until then, the Franklin Rosevelt administration was only authorized to provide arms and equipment to Allied powers according to the Lend-Lease Act of 1941.
Also, globalist shifts in U.S. external policy lines needed major transformation toward a strong federal government, involving power shifts from state governments. More specifically, this transformation required significantly strengthening bureaucracies in foreign and security policy, the military and armed forces, and intelligence apparatuses, which had to await a big bang during the Cold War.
The United States had long lacked a modern central bank, despite the First Bank of the United States (1791-1811) and the Second Bank of the United States (1817-1841), both for fiscal management during and after the War of 1812. They did not set monetary policy, regulate private banks, hold their excess reserves, or act as a lender of last resort. This precluded a prerequisite to sufficient financial liquidity for globalist foreign and security policy, which is fully made possible by leaving a gold standard system to freely issue non-convertible paper money and national bonds.
Importantly, only in 1913, the Federal Reserve Act was enacted to establish the unique central banking system that is governed by the Presidentially-appointed board of governors -- the Federal Reserve Board -- but consisted of 12 District Federal Reserve Banks (FRBs) as collective goods of privately-owned commercial banks in individual districts. To be noted, as of July 23, 1983, the FRB-New York, arguably most influential as it serves for the nation’s financial center, was, according to its stock list, “heavily influenced by banks controlled by ‘the London Connection’, that is, the Rothschild-controlled Bank of England”[11]. In fact, the original plan for such a system was made in a closed manner by a small exclusive group of those who has “the London connection”, and the establishment bill was passed when a significant portion of objecting legislators were absent for Christmas holidays[12]. Obviously, adherents and promoters for the system contrived a plot for enactment through following legal but law-evading procedures.
To develop cross-Atlantic interpersonal networks, especially after WWI when a hegemonic transition from the British Empire to the United States would be considered inevitable sooner or later, independent think tanks were designed by Anglo-American political leaders, policy makers, practitioners and academics for policy research and discussion in foreign and security affairs, involving possible policy coordination and cooperation. The design led to establishment of two sister think tanks, or the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in London in 1920 and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York in 1921, both of which have since been highly influential intellectually and in providing political appointee and policy advisor candidates[13] These nonpartisan think tanks have included diverse members, both globalists and anti-globalists, but have been instrumental to strengthen sharing common values, worldviews, national interests, and external policy lines and to form general or specific mainstream views, if not consensus. Earlier, the CFR played a prime hub role for the U.S. revolving door between the government, Wall Street & big business, intelligence, media, and academia, which has undergone relative decline through the significant expansion of the think tank sector.
Yet, even toward the end of the WWII, the U.N Charter stipulated the functions and powers of the Security Council, especially the five permanent member states with veto power—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and the Republic of China—, constituting a new variant of the multipolar balance of power system among the P5 with each possessing its own de facto sphere of influence. Signed in June 1945, the Charter took an anti-globalist and anti-hegemonic approach to the postwar world order in the early formative years. At this stage, a global-hegemony approach was evidently not yet a mainstream line in the United States.
The U.N. Security Council was incapable of coping with the postwar Soviet expansion due to its ideological and military hyper-aggressiveness. Consequently, the Council’s functions had considerably been hollowed out through the all-out U.S.-Soviet exchanges of vetoes until the Cold War ended, which might have set world politics adrift.
Yet, there was a decisive shift in U.S. domestic opinion, at both elite and public levels, toward a liberal international order under U.S. global hegemony and with formation of the so-called national security state. The then-immediate past British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered “Iron Curtain Speech” of 1946 at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri. It constituted a turning point to building the U.S. global hegemonic system, including the world’s strongest armed forces with predominant power projection capability, the network of global bases and facilities, and forward deployment, as well as extensive intelligence apparatus, such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), military intelligence agencies, and the homeland counter-intelligence organs of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The United Kingdom has supported U.S. hegemony as a prime ally with its intelligence power that is built on the British Empire’s experience, legacy assets and networks across the world, and with limited yet significant military power that is used for joint military action with the United States to enhance its international legitimacy. Recently, intelligence cooperation has carried increasing importance in the special relationship because the United Kingdom has undergone conspicuous relative economic and military decline, making it almost impossible to be a self-reliant global power[14]. The effectiveness of U.K. military power considerably depends on the predominant U.S. military system, particularly its war-fighting capability and national technical means for intelligence. Yet, the country possesses marked comparative advantage in HUMINT capability and public diplomacy, supplemented by the influence of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and other major media. Due to the substantial soft power in contrast to the dwindling hard power, the U.K special relationship with the U.S. system, therefore, is partially and concurrently symbiotic and parasitic.
Unsurprisingly, the British globalists have been able to wield such soft power effectively on American counterparts through the aforementioned interpersonal networks at the elite levels and also on the public indirectly through government and media. As a result, they have played a backstage manipulator role to influence and sometimes shape U.S. global-hegemony policy from within.
More importantly, the predominance of Anglo-American globalists has been reinforced by the U.S. national security state that gives them large funds, power and influence. It is well known that U.S. intelligence agencies, especially CIA, have employed extensive overt and covert operations prior to the use of armed forces. Normally, these operations are subjected to regular and stringent Congressional oversight, but, under the Cold War and similarly tense internation relations, it became imperfect and often loose so that the agencies enjoyed virtual discretion, involving high risks of misuse and abuse as typified by the Iran-Contra Affairs (1985-1987). To manipulate international affairs according to globalist policy lines, therefore, these operations are often geared to controlled instability, rather than stability and security, in which opportunities to manipulate abound.
Certainly, with the Cold War over, the U.S. intelligence sector was once substantially downsized to realize a peace dividend, involving large budget cuts[15]. The slashed intelligence functions and personnel were not only absorbed into front organizations and private intelligence companies, but also, for example, into the foreign aid programs under the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)[16] and the democracy promotion programs under the government-funded National Endowment for Democracy[17]. Yet, by taking advantage of such a camouflaging approach, the sector has expanded and thrived due to a sharp increase of intelligence activities and operations over the global war on terrorism (2001-2021), with the inertia until the second-term Trump administration[18].
Early in the 21st century, the Anglo-American globalists already gained predominant domestic and international clout through the U.S. national security state. They combined political interference and armed intervention, occasionally with self-righteous manipulation of “freedom and democracy” in individual cases and under the banner of the U.S.-led international liberal order, while such symbol manipulation may stand well if with due restraint and prudence.
During the 2010s, the Anglo-American hegemonic policy began stumbling amid serious relative U.S. economic and military decline. This resulted from the significant protraction of the Global War on Terrorism, particularly in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, and the financial crisis ensued after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, an American global financial firm. The United States and its major liberal democratic allies have undergone serious industrial hollow-out effects and socio-economic bipolarization that have been brought about by hyper-globalization during the post-Cold War U.S. unipolar moment.
The evolving realities were only favorable for the Anglo-American globalists and their supporters at the sacrifice of the anti-globalists and the seriously impoverished American ex-middle class. Donald Trump led the latter’s political movement against the former and won the presidential election of 2016. Yet, his first administration faced fierce opposition and resistance from the former, only having been entrapped into one scandal after another that impeded his struggle against the globalist establishment and its policy lines.
Backed by all the much stronger anti-globalist forces, Trump made a landslide victory in the 2024 presidential election, and, once in office this January, his second-term administration has begun launching policy change measures all at once against the globalist establishment, with a major focus on the intelligence community. With the creation of the U.S. DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) Service in January 20, 2025, the administration is trying to make major cuts in civilian employees at the Defense Department and CIA, with a wholesale early retirement encouragement to all the CIA employees. Also, the administration announced shutdowns of USAID and Department-of-Education programs and, with necessary legislation, abolition of them. Most importantly, the administration terminated providing necessary administrative and policy funds from the Department of Treasury to the intelligence agencies by promptly discharging Acting Secretary Treasury David Lebryk who had long served for globalist policies and programs for more than a decade[19] .
Thus, the essential feature of the ongoing Trump Revolution lies in thorough dismantlement of the Anglo-American globalist power base within the federal government, especially the security and state apparatus, and elimination, or at least decisive weakening of the globalist establishment. Surprisingly, the revolution necessarily constitutes a de facto third American War of Independence, after the first and second ones against the British Empire (1775-1783 and 1812-1815).
From this perspective, it remains to be seen how long it takes for Presidents Trump and Putin to reach a truce agreement for the “War” in Ukraine due to their different national interests. The two sides now sit at a negotiation table because they share the common goal to put an end to the “War” but may find it difficult to reconcile their differences. Yet, more importantly, they would agree to have a protracted negotiation because they need more time to corner the Anglo-American globalists and their supporters in other major Western, especially European, societies who would be forced to struggle a harder military and economic war of attrition that would weaken their political base decisively to lose the reins of government. The world now has to stay tuned on the interplay of the Trump Revolution and the truce negotiation.
About the author:
Prof. Dr. Masahiro Matsumura is Professor of International Politics and National Security at St. Andrew’s University in Osaka, and currently a 2024 ROC-MOFA Taiwan Fellow-in-Residence at NCCU-IIR Taiwan Centre for Security Studies in Taipei. He is Member of IFIMES Council.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect IFIMES official position.
Ljubljana/Osaka, March 28, 2025
[1] IFIMES - International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has a special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council ECOSOC/UN in New York since 2018, and it is the publisher of the international scientific journal “European Perspectives”, link: https://www.europeanperspectives.org/en
[2] Masahiro Matsumura, “The Russia-Ukraine warfare as the final stage of U.S.-Russia proxy war in Donbas (2014-2022)”, IFIMES Analysis, April 6, 2023, https://www.ifimes.org/en/researches/the-russia-ukraine-warfare-as-the-final-stage-of-us-russia-proxy-war-in-donbas-2014-2022/5156?q.
[3] Masahiro Matsumura, “Handling the Ukraine Crisis: A Geopolitical Perspective”, IFIMES Analysis, February 18, 2022, https://www.ifimes.org/en/researches/handling-the-ukraine-crisis-a-geopolitical-perspective/4998?q; Masahiro Matsumura, “Ukraine as Biden’s Sacrificed Pawn: A Mismanagement under the Declining U.S. Hegemony”, IFIMES Analysis, March 12, 2022, https://www.ifimes.org/en/researches/ukraine-as-bidens-sacrificed-pawn-a-mismanagement-under-the-declining-us-hegemony/5011?q; Masahiro Matsumura, “Unmasking War Propaganda against Russian Aggression: An Investigative Approach”, IFIMES Analysis, April 22, 2020, https://www.ifimes.org/en/researches/unmasking-war-propaganda-against-russian-aggression-an-investigative-approach/5039?q; and, Matsumura, “The Russian-Ukraine warfare…”, op.cit.
[4] Jarrett Renshaw and Karol Badohal, “Biden says Putin 'cannot remain in power' in fiery speech on Ukraine war”, Reuters, March 27, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/biden-call-free-world-stand-against-putin-poland-speech-2022-03-26/.
[5] Vladimir Isachenkov, “Putin condemns U.S. ‘hegemony,’ predicts an end to ‘unipolar’ world”, Los Angeles Times, August 16, 2022.
[6] “The Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation”, The Foreign Ministry of the Russian Federation, March 31, 2023, https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/fundamental_documents/1860586/.
[7] “British Support During the U.S. Civil War”, Lowcountry Digital Library, https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/liverpools-abercromby-square/britain-and-us-civil-war.
[8] For War Plan Red, see, https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/war-plan-red.htm. For War Plan Orange, see, https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/war-plan-orange.htm.
[9] “Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan Red”, Joint Board 325 - Serial 435, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/16749799.
[10] James Boughton, “Why White, Not Keynes? Inventing the Postwar International Monetary System”, IMF Working Paper, March 2002, WP/02/52, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2002/wp0252.pdf.
[11] Eustace Mullins, the Secrets of the Federal Reserve Bank: The London Connection, Carson City, NV: Bridger House Publishers, 1991, pp.179-180. This is also consistent with: “Bank’s Stock List Full of Surprises”, New York Times, September 23, 1914.
[12] Mullins, op.cit, pp. 1-39.
[13] Hiroaki Shiozaki, Shin-Kokusai-Chitsujyo wo Mezashite: RIIA, CFR, IPR no Keii to Ryo-Taisen-Kan no Renkei-Kannkei (Toward a New World Order: the Circumstances of RIIA, CFR, and IPR and their Coordination Relations during the Inter-war Period), Kyushu University Press, 1998. Inderjeet Parmar, Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy: A Comparative Study of the Role and Influence of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1939-1945, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2004.
[14] Michael Moran, “The United Kingdom Finally Acknowledges Its Hard-Power Limits”, Foreign Policy, April 21, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/16/the-united-kingdom-finally-acknowledges-its-hard-power-limits/.
[15] Craig Eisendrath. ed., National Insecurity: U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War, 2000, Temple University Press.
[16] Catherine A. Traywick, “‘Cuban Twitter’ and Other Times USAID Pretended To Be an Intelligence Agency”, Foreign Policy, April 3, 2014, https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/03/cuban-twitter-and-other-times-usaid-pretended-to-be-an-intelligence-agency/.
[17] Kristin Christman, “The National Endowment for ‘Democracy’: A Second CIA”, Counter Currents. Org, May 30, 2022, https://countercurrents.org/2022/05/the-national-endowment-for-democracy-a-second-cia/.
[19] Tyler Durden, “10 Days That Shook The World”, ZeroHedge, February 7, 2025, https://www.zerohedge.com/political/10-days-shook-world
