For Putin, Trump’s second term just keeps getting better – this is what happens next

For Vladimir Putin, the second term of US president Donald Trump just keeps getting better and better. Trump’s threats to annex Greenland signal a new political era where it’s OK for great powers to seize chunks of their neighbours’ territory. Trump is doing more to fracture and dismantle the unity of Nato than Putin could ever manage in his wildest geo-strategic dreams.

And the icing on the cake is that Trump seems ready to rehabilitate Putin’s standing on the world stage by inviting him – as well as Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko – to join a “board of peace” being set up to oversee a ceasefire in Gaza. Such an appointment would be a significant step towards smoothing over Putin’s responsibility for war crimes in Ukraine and normalising his position as a leader with whom the world can do business.

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Small wonder that Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov declared that Trump would “certainly go down in history” for his Greenland campaign – while at the same time coyly refusing to say “whether this is good or bad, whether it will comply with the parameters of international law or not”. Trump has begun behaving exactly as Vladimir Putin has done for years – intervening violently in the politics of his neighbours and using historical justifications for claiming territory beyond his country’s borders.

“Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway?” demanded Trump in a bizarre letter to Norway’s prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre over the weekend. “There are no written documents; it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.” Trump’s confused pseudo-history echoes Putin’s own obsession with proving that Ukraine has always been part of Russia.

From Russia’s point of view, Trump is behaving as his White House predecessors have always behaved – as an outright imperialist power, ignoring the so-called rules-based order whenever they like. In 2007, in a famous speech to the Munich Security Conference, Putin denounced the US bombing of Belgrade in 1999, the redrawing of the borders of Yugoslavia by force, and the invasion of Iraq. Putin warned against excessive military force and advocated for a multipolar order with respect for international law. “No one feels safe any more,” Putin said, charging the US with “undermining global stability”.

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Soon after his Munich speech, Putin nosedived from his moral high ground with an invasion of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, an intervention in Syria to prop up the bloody regime of Bashar al-Assad in 2015, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Now, by decapitating the Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro and insisting that Greenland will become US territory, Trump has signalled that these naked power grabs are in the US’s legitimate repertoire too.

“I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” wrote Trump in his letter to Støre. “The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland."

Putin, for his part, has maintained a stony silence on both Venezuela and Greenland. That may be because he has wisely concluded that praise from the Kremlin will hardly help Trump’s domestic popularity, and condemnation could jeopardise ongoing peace talks over Ukraine. Nor is Trump unequivocally good news for the Kremlin. Venezuela’s Maduro was a key Moscow ally and a strategic foothold in South America. And many Russian securocrats remember that Trump, in his first term, was far tougher on Russia than Barack Obama had ever been, sanctioning the builders of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and providing deadly arms to the Ukrainians.

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Far from being a Russian agent or a cipher for Putin, there have been periods of Trump’s rule where the Kremlin drew his ire, too. That volatility represents a potential strategic threat to Russia if Putin mishandles negotiations with the world’s touchiest and most mercurial leader.

If Trump represents an update to Richard Nixon’s Madman Theory of diplomacy, it is that this time, there is no theory, but with an actual madman. Even if, as seems likely, Trump’s Greenland obsession blows over and ends in the usual TACO – Trump Always Chickens Out – he will have done lasting damage to the Western alliance. And that, in the long term, is good news for Putin. For the whole of the Cold War and the quarter century of Putin’s rule, no Nato member ever questioned the fundamental principle that the alliance was grounded first and foremost on an American commitment to defend Europe. Until now.

In his first term, Trump was vocal about European free-riders who failed to spend the requisite 2 per cent of their GDP on defence spending. This time around, Trump has been much more explicitly transactional about US security obligations to the Europeans. ”I have done more for Nato than any other person since its founding, and now, Nato should do something for the United States,” railed Trump in his letter to the Norwegians.

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Over the weekend, Trump doubled down by ordering punitive tariffs against Britain and seven other European allies who had dared insist that Greenland’s future was a matter for the Kingdom of Denmark and the island’s inhabitants themselves. In retaliation, and for the first time in history, the EU is preparing to invoke an “anti-coercion instrument” to impose €93bn (£80.6bn) of tariffs on US imports to the EU.

Splitting Nato unity is exactly what Putin has always tried to do, whether by overtly providing cheap gas to Germany, Hungary and Slovakia or covertly funding European right-wing political movements – such as a 2014 soft loan to Marine Le Pen’s Front National that was finally repaid only in 2023. For the most part, Putin failed in his aim – indeed, when he attempted to seize Kyiv in February 2022, he was reportedly shocked at the unity and vehemence of Nato’s resistance. Rather than destroy the Western alliance, Putin’s invasion strengthened it to unprecedented levels and reminded Europeans and Americans alike why they needed a transatlantic security alliance in the first place.

Now, for the first time since its foundation 80 years ago, Nato is on the verge of an internal trade war over territory. That can only be good news for Putin.