President Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy is 33 pages long. Considering the fatuous self-praise it contains, heaped upon the president himself, it was released in an unusually low-key way. Much of it is a so-called ‘Trump corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. It also contains an echo of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Although Roosevelt claimed that the United States would be a ‘good neighbour’ to Latin America, he rather gave the game away when he privately admitted that Anastasio Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua, was ‘a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch’. This is a very Trumpian way of thinking, but it is also a fantasy.

Trump thinks he can get dictators in his pocket and yet he seems to have no idea when they are playing him. He has utterly misjudged Vladimir Putin, who clearly despises him. Putin kept his negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kuchner, waiting for three hours, then showed quite clearly that he had no intention of compromising on any of the 28 points that he himself appears to have dictated to the White House as a basis for discussion.

As far as Trump is seen by Putin, he is just a ‘useful idiot’ in Lenin’s phrase. It really is worth re-emphasising how, at the G20 summit in 2019 at Osaka, Putin, to please him, at one point said how much he had been doing secretly to help Israel. Trump apparently boasted: ‘Nobody’s done as much as me to help Israel.’ Putin, putting on a straight face, reportedly said: ‘Maybe they should just name Israel after you, Donald.’ Trump, after considering this suggestion quite seriously, is said to have replied: ‘Oh no, that would be a bit too much.’

The Witkoff-Kuchner negotiations, if they merit such a term, are too extraordinary and utterly unprecedented. They are being conducted not by diplomats or statesmen but by two New York businessmen – Witkoff, a real estate mogul, and Kuchner, the president’s son-in-law – with Kirill Dimitriev, the head of the Russian Sovereign Wealth fund. It suggests that the process is not about finding a just peace, but about dividing up the spoils of war and what might be called thug diplomacy. The proposals would have legitimised Putin’s totally illegal war of aggression and thus contributed even more to the collapse of the rules-based order of the world. They were a shameless imposition of injustice based on the idea that might is right.

This National Security Strategy claims that ‘core national interests’ are the ‘sole focus of this strategy’, which is a little rich when Trump and his entourage seem to be running a protection racket presidency. ‘Nobody judges a victor’ is a favourite Russian saying, but it exactly matches Trump’s own philosophy.

To help Putin increase his power by strong-arming Ukraine towards surrender is surely not in the security interests of the United States, so it is hardly surprising that political scientists such as Eliot A. Cohen should describe Trump’s National Security Strategy as an ‘incoherent babble’. The NSS document expresses deep concern about immigration and multiculturalism in Europe, leading to ‘civilisational erasure’, yet ignores the rapidly growing threat of hostile states – Russia, China, Iran and North Korea – co-operating against the West. Its hatred of the European Union and desire to support populist, extreme-right parties in European countries is tantamount to a call for regime change among its most reliable allies. Yet the same document expresses a hypocritical respect for the political cultures and beliefs of other countries.

If Trump really does have a ‘strategy’, it is one of unpredictability and opportunism, a combination which is in fact nothing more than short-term tactics. It might be argued that this is a response to the unreliability of Presidents Putin and Xi. During the Cold War, we may not have liked the Soviet or Chinese Communist leaders, but at least we had a rough idea of where they stood and knew that they basically kept to agreements. That is no longer true with Putin and Xi. Yet Trump, infatuated with the idea of his own deal-making abilities, believes that he can divide and rule while fragmenting the western alliance and ignoring the increasing co-operation of its enemies.

It must be acknowledged that Trump has not been alone in his miscalculations. The West has also been guilty of appeasing Russia because it is blinded by democratic confirmation bias and fails to understand the mentality of dictators. Just as the British and the French in the interwar years believed that nobody could be stupid enough to want another war like the First World War, Angela Merkel and Gerhard Schroeder were not alone in thinking that commercial dependency on Russia would prevent another conflict. The Nord Stream pipeline became a symbol of Europe’s strategic subservience, while Britain woke up too late from its complacent slumber, during which the City of London shamelessly laundered Russian money.

All the resources that should have been devoted to defence in the UK were instead diverted into the bottomless pit of welfare dependency. Look at the latest British budget and its failure to look beyond the Channel. Extra billions have just been found for welfare at a moment when UK forces do not have the ammunition for more than a few days of combat. No wonder Putin despises us. The first duty of any government has always been the defence of the realm, but there is still no sign of that at this moment, when the whole of Europe could be on the brink of war. We may well be in a more vulnerable position than in 1939.