Trump Is Buying Time In Order To Compete

A historian could have watched the 28 February 2025 Trump-Vance-Zelensky press briefing without recognizing that it was a 21st-century ritual execution of a Roman gladiator in front of a worldwide audience.

- ANDREW SHENG

Donald Trump gave a lesson in brutal realpolitik to the world when he told Zelenskyy that "you don't have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards... You're gambling with World War III."

Two weeks earlier, Vice President JD Vance shocked Europe during the Munich Security Conference by saying that the greatest enemy was Brussels (and not Moscow) because it was stifling innovation, under-spending on defense, and not pulling its fair share of weight on Ukraine. At that conference, Singapore Minister of Defense Ng Eng Hen quipped that the United States had shifted from a country once perceived as a force of "moral legitimacy" to something akin to "a landlord seeking rent." Sorry, it's more like a capo di capo telling his underlings that they need to pay more for his protection.

If Trump 1.0 was China's wake-up call in 2018 when he launched the first round of tariffs and sanctions, 2025 is Trump 2.0's wake-up call that Europe cannot take America's defense umbrella for granted. While Trump detractors dismiss his actions and pronouncements as chaotic and destructive, his Make America Great Again carries two clear goals—one is to restore America's manufacturing prowess under the tariff wall and the second is to restore America's unipolar position.

Three years of carnage and destruction from the Ukraine war drew four crucial lessons for Trump and his right-wing tech oligarchs. First, forever wars were bleeding the US fiscally and industrially, delaying America's ability to focus on its peer rival, China.