Dr. Pascal Lottaz is an Associate Professor at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Law and Hakubi Center (Japan). He researches neutrality in international relations and directs the network neutralitystudies.com.
Guillaume de Sardes: In line with statements made during his election campaign, new US President Donald Trump is strongly committed to resolving the conflict that has pitted Russia and Ukraine against each other since 2014. After discreet contacts via their entourages, an initial telephone discussion lasting an hour and a half took place between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on February 12. This was followed by a high-level meeting between Marco Rubio and Sergei Lavrov in Riyadh on February 18. Both parties seem keen to achieve a rapid outcome. How do you see the future?
Pascal Lottaz: A lot of things have happened since then and all of them at breathtaking speed. Especially the intervention by the Europeans, trying to sway Donald Trump to giving de-facto security guarantees to Ukraine. However, France and Britain failed in this endeavor and on Friday February 28, Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy even got into an argument at the White House when Mr. Zelenskyy refused to sign a previously negotiated minerals deal and spoke back to vice-president Vance and President Trump during a press conference. Now the relationship between the US Administration and Ukraine seems to be even worse than before. All of this has many implications for the US-Russian relationship, too, as Mr. Trump seems now even less inclined to support the Ukrainian position towards Russia, while his determination to try to normalise relations with Moscow is becoming stronger. What I see happening next is that Mr. Trump will probably try to move forward with Russia in order above all to re-establish a degree of normality in their relations, even if the war in Ukraine continues. The Europeans made it quite clear that they are intent on supporting Mr. Zelensky’s approach which is still far away from trying to bring the conflict to a negotiated settlement. The Ukrainian position remains that only the 1991 borders would constitute a “fair peace” and that nothing else is acceptable. However, for the Russians, rather than resign themselves to this, they prefer to continue the war. Mr. Trump was trying to create the diplomatic space for a negotiated settlement but it seems that this is not working. However, this is not the only method at his disposal for normalising relations with Russia. At this stage, the easiest thing for him to do is to ensure that Ukraine becomes one of the subjects of US-Russian relations, which would be in line with the Russian approach. The Russians have repeatedly stated that they do not see the Ukrainian question as the only one that needs to be addressed. Their foreign policy goes far beyond that. Thus, the United States and Russia are likely to continue the process of rapprochement between the great powers, while the war in Ukraine is likely to continue for a few more months, but with much weaker American support than before.
Negotiations seem likely to go beyond the strict framework of the war in Ukraine, to focus on the European security architecture. For the first time, the United States seems willing to take Russian concerns into account. Do you think we are witnessing the beginnings of a genuine reversal of alliances? Could President Donald Trump be seeking to separate Russia from China, just as Henry Kissinger was able to separate China from the USSR during the Cold War? Does such a maneuver seem likely to succeed?
Lottaz: There exist several theories about this topic. Some see this as a genuine US approach for a permanent improvement of relations with Russia. Others interpret it as a temporary warming of relations, but with an underlying strategic purpose: to gain time to fight Russia later. The analyst, Brian Barletic, pointed out that there is a pattern to the US improving relations with Russia whenever its military approach hits a wall. He gives as an example the escalation towards Russia in the early 2000s, from the colour revolutions in Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Georgia), to the promise in 2008 to add Ukraine and Georgia to NATO, and finally to the short war between Russia and Georgia when Tbilisi, under the leadership of Mr. Saakashvili, decided to test the new relationship and attacked Russian peacekeepers in the northern provinces of the country. When this approach failed and Russia won on the battlefield, the USA tried to renew ties in the 2009/10 NEW START negotiations and a “reset” of the relationship under the first Obama administration. However, as it turned out, already Obama and then again Trump (in his first administration) continued arming Ukraine and supporting more color revolutions, most importantly of course the Maidan unrests in 2014. Mr. Barletic therefore concludes that the United States has already demonstrated its ability to buy time, and he also shows how the United States is still talking today about the need to maintain pressure on Russia, even if this is not coming directly from Donald Trump but from some of his Secretaries of State and various Washington think tanks.
My point of view here is that we are clearly seeing a policy shift at the moment, and that while Mr. Barletic could be right about the long-term strategic level, I think that Donald Trump and his team are indicating that they have a new outlook on the feasibility of achieving US primacy in the international system. For the first time ever, we’ve heard top officials, most importantly Foreign Secretary Marco Rubio, officially admit that we are now living in a multi-polar world and that the US was only one of several great powers. Hence the Trump Administration is not seeking to reestablish the uni-polar moment of the Post-Cold War period but aims for a strategic balance. These words and the vision of the world they express are new and, if they are sincere and reflect more than the opinions of a few senior officials, then we could be witnessing the beginning of a new way for the United States to conduct its foreign policy. So the question for me is whether this new vision of what the US can achieve in the world is sincere (and not misleading) and then whether it is shared by enough people in Washington. If it is not shared, then we could simply return to the old pattern, either because lower-ranking officials will sabotage the approach, or because a next administration could simply reverse the trend and return to the old habit of fighting for unipolar dominance.
A last issue here is connected to China. If Trump is doing in Europe what he is doing only because he wants more time and energy to focus on dominating the Pacific and maybe even “break” China, then all we are seeing now is a shift of focus. But if the reassessment of world politics mentioned above also extends in spirit to China, then we could see a paradigm shift. The US might accept the idea of a negotiated settlement of world affairs between great powers. This would of course be unfair to the smaller powers, but there would be a chance that we could get an agreement between the bigger ones to collectively dominate the global sphere without resorting to mass violence. That in itself would be a step forward.
From a strictly economic point of view, what opportunities could a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine offer the United States?
Lottaz: It would first and foremost allow the US redeploy to the pacific and devote more attention to China (as explained above), which is something Mr. Trump said he wants to do. Furthermore, Mr. Trump seems to be well aware that there is a real danger of escalation in Ukraine and that the Ukrainians and Europeans want the United States to be on the ground so as not to lose the war. That would itself involve massive costs for the United States and if the war escalated, it could become really dangerous and lead to a nuclear exchange, which is a cost Mr. Trump seems not willing to gamble with. Thank god.
Secondly, a normalization of relations with Russia would of course come with potential economic benefits for US businesses in Russia. I think Mr. Trump, as a businessman, is well aware of the importance of creating a space for trade. He certainly sees peace as potentially more profitable than war.
Lastly, it is something he was elected to do and if Mr. Trump wants a chance at building a lasting legacy, he’d need to deliver on that. Only if some of the electoral promises come true and the domestic situation for Americans in the USA improves, will there be a chance that his now Vice-President, J.D. Vance will have a serious shot at taking over the mantel in 4 years and become the next Republican president in 2028. I believe this is something Mr. Trump would want since he is so fixated on “success”. For this, he needs foreign and domestic policy achievements.
As someone who lives in Japan, could you tell us how these events are perceived there? Does the American change of course arouse hope or disapproval?
Generally, Japan views events in the US similarly to how they are viewed in most of Europe, but at a less heated level. Many Japanese people are worried and even fearful of Trump, because he is disrupting the American foreign policy to which they have become accustomed. However, Japan does not like instability and unpredictability very much. So for Japan, the greatest issue is that the US is now much less predictable than before. The Japanese cannot count anymore on the “iron clad” US commitment to their archipelago. Even during Mr. Trump’s first mandate, the Japanese did not know how to handle this element of unpredictability. With Biden, they returned to the United States as they knew it and many people thought the page had been turned. Now that Trump has succeeded in coming back, there is a realisation here that this kind of unpredictable (according to the Japanese) foreign policy was not just an “accident”, but is now probably a new characteristic of the US that is here to stay.
At the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Japan decided to participate in international sanctions against Moscow, while remaining involved in Russian oil projects. While Anglo-Saxon oil majors ExxonMobil and Shell relinquished their stakes in Sakhalin-1 and 2, Tokyo was allowed to maintain its existing shares (30% of Sakhalin-1 via a public-private consortium and 22.5% of Sakhalin-2 via private companies Mitsubishi Corp and Mitsui & Co). By the same token, while Japan participates in the Russian oil price cap introduced in December 2023 by the G7, the European Union and Australia, it has exempted the oil it imports from Sakhalin-2 from this mechanism. Unlike the European Union, Japan has been able to defend its interests, particularly in the field of energy. How do you analyze Japan’s position? What are Japan’s economic relations with Russia today, and what might they be tomorrow in the event of peace?
Japan has been more skillful than the Europeans in striking a balance between being faithful to their military alliance with the USA and their direct economic interests with Russia. Japan in this sense is much more similar to Turkey than like the European Union. Both have successfully implemented some, but not all, of the sanctions and have publicly adhered to Western rhetoric, while maintaining important relations with Moscow under the radar. Although make no mistake, Russia is not a trusted partner for Japan. Not at all. Tokyo was just more realistic about its national interest and guarding them than most European states who were ready to put everything on the line in this ideological fight against Russia. Japan, while sharing the rhetoric, did not actually take things to that level. This is what I mean when I say that the mood in Japan towards Russia is similar to Europe, but the whole affair is boiling on a lower level. It is more nuanced over here, at least on the concrete policy level.
