If that's isolation I want some of it

Putin is hosting the emerging world's leaders at a BRICS summit. The US election is also going his way. There is little evidence of Western planning for these looming disasters

For an isolated pariah state, Russia appears to have plenty of friends at the moment. President Putin is currently hosting an expanded BRICS summit, with Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Cyril Ramaphosa all in attendance. Brazil’s president Lula had to cancel due to a medical issue but the group’s new members are also there: the leaders of the UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia and Iran. Saudi Arabia and most of the Southeast Asian economies are represented at ministerial level and a host of other global figures are there including Mexico’s president, the UN Secretary-General and Turkey’s president Erdoğan who’s country is a NATO member. There is no way around the fact that this represents a diplomatic triumph for Russia, even if several of the attendees have spoken out against the invasion of Ukraine on previous occasions.

Putin and some of his mates at the BRICS summit

It comes as Russia’s war on Ukraine has been given a huge boost by the arrival of troops from North Korea as well as continued supplies of weapons from that country, in addition to missiles and drones from Iran and a wide range of engineering supplies from China. All of this is proof that support for Ukraine remains limited to the West, including its Asia-Pacific allies such as Japan and South Korea. Further afield, Ukraine is seen as unimportant.

The economy, stupid

Western powers were confidently predicting Russia’s economic collapse in 2022, and in 2023, and have continued to do so this year. As this has yet to happen, western officials are now confidently predicting that Russia’s economy will collapse in 2025. None of this appears to anchored in the harsh realities of a country enjoying continued high energy prices (driven in part by the escalating Middle East conflict). In spite of western sanctions Russia has managed to increase its oil and gas exports in 2024 and achieved a seven per cent increase in the revenues. The average price of Russian oil sold for export is $70 per barrel, making a mockery of a western-imposed ‘price cap’ of $60. Of course, Russia faces economic headwinds, not least with the extraordinary scale of its defence budget, now amounting to over 30% of government spending. But recent experience suggests that it has much more economic resilience than outsiders appreciate.

A present from America’s voters

Russia’s biggest change in fortune is still to come, in the form of an incredible gift from the people of the United States of America. The centrist dads have called it: there seems to be an emerging consensus in podcastland that the Kamala Harris campaign is in trouble. The latest expression of this oeuvre was a genuinely insightful discussion on Not Another One, the podcast amiably chaired by Steve Richards (which, for good measure, also has a centrist mum on its panel in the form of Miranda Green).

It’s easy to mock the podcast world (particularly if you are part of it), but the point here is that a lot of political experts are looking at the Harris campaign and saying that it isn’t winning. For those that like their predictions to have a little more data sitting behind them, The Economist prediction model has put Trump ahead (by narrow margins, but those are the margins that matter). This model correctly called it for Biden in 2020 but overestimated the Democrat vote. Perhaps they are over-correcting this time, but all the experts I know seem to share the view that Trump is ahead. The best thing you could say is that it is going to be very tight. Coin-flip territory.

Disaster response

If there’s a fifty per cent chance of a cataclysmic event within the next few weeks, it’s the sort of thing that should prompt some contingency planning. If you knew that there was an even chance that your house would be destroyed by an earthquake or that you would lose both your job and your pension, it would take a pretty cool customer to say. “Well… I’ll just see how this one pans out.” But that seems to be exactly what the West has decided to do.

Last week I found myself talking to the very model of a modern major general. This person, a senior serving army officer in a technical function, is all the things you’d expect to go with such a role: highly intelligent, well-informed, pragmatic. We were having a private conversation (which is why I’m not naming them) and I asked about what contingency plans they were making for a Trump presidency. The reply left me staggered: “Well, he's made some fair points about European defence budgets.”

This brand of thinking (which I have heard a few times both from officials and from Trump-apologists in right-wing circles) is basically two ideas: Trump will shock Europe into taking its defence seriously and anyway Trump’s bark is worse than his bite. “Look at what happened last time he was president,” these people say.

This seems to be missing a really important point: Trump was prevented from carrying out many of his craziest ideas by the traditional GOP types in his administration. Trump is a pathological liar but he actually tried to carry out many of his outlandish policies. He attempted to put a Muslim ban into place. He tried to pull US troops out of South Korea. He made nice with Putin. He wanted to fire missiles at Mexican cartels and nuke hurricanes. He tried to buy Greenland. There was a sort of honesty to his campaign: “I am a crazy guy. In power I will do crazy things.” The Deep State stopped him, mostly.

Not gonna let that happen again

Trump 2.0 is a very different proposition: it is abundantly clear that slavish loyalty will be the overriding recruitment qualification in a second Trump presidency. There are already plans to gut the federal civil service to cement loyalty to the commander-in-chief. He won’t let himself be stopped by ‘disloyal’ staffers.

What does this mean for Europe and for Ukraine? Well, we should listen to what Trump says. He doesn’t like the EU, he doesn’t like NATO and he doesn’t like Ukraine, which for him is bound up in a sense that it caused his first impeachment. On the other hand Trump likes Russia, likes Putin and had Russian agents working for him as well as extensive financial connections to the country. I hear delusional chat in Western capitals about how Trump will be happy with Europe once it starts paying for its own defence. But there’s something far more important than that, which goes to the heart of the Western alliance: the concept of mutual defence.

NATO, as Trump has never understood because he is a man of limited intelligence and even more limited curiosity, is not a joint bank account. It is a mutual defence alliance. NATO’s members believe that, in the event of an attack on one of them, the other members will, mutatis mutandis, step up to defend them. Who seriously believes that Donald J Trump would risk one American life and one US dollar in defence of Latvia or Lithuania, whether or not those countries had spent 2%, 3% or even 6% on their defence?

A second Trump presidency spells the end of NATO as a deterrent to Russian aggression because Moscow knows that Trump wouldn’t lift a finger to defend Europe. That’s the sort of thing that will make Vladimir Putin happier even than being feted at the BRICS summit. And it’s the sort of thing that Western countries should be planning for right now, as if their futures depended on it.

They aren’t.