At the meeting of G7 foreign ministers and EU officials held in Quebec on March 12-14. The foreign minister of Germany, Annalena Baerbock, emphasized that Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Ukrainian territories must be reversed. But sadly, due to the current world disorder, she asserted that the territorial integrity of Panama, Greenland, and Canada also needed to be ensured. In this, she drew an unmistakable parallel between Putin’s aggression against Ukraine and Donald Trump’s bullying of the latter three countries.
Here, it might be helpful to note the work of 1973 Nobel Prize-winning Konrad Lorenz, an Austrian zoologist who conducted a classic study called On Aggression. From his observations of animals and humans, Lorenz determined that aggressors and bullies do not usually pick on the weakest members of a group but on the ones unwilling to resist.
Can such an insight apply to governments and countries? It appears to be accurate if one considers the cases of Putin’s aggression against Ukraine and Trump’s three annexationist designs. What do events reveal?
Yet early in his incumbency as Russian President, Putin taunted “Gayropa” and the collective West as decadent and unwilling to defend themselves despite their great wealth. As per Lorenz, Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014 was emboldened by Washington’s and NATO’s passivity. Subsequently, a chorus of Western officials led by Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel leaned on Ukraine to acquiesce to unfavorable terms in the Minsk I and II settlements. Recently, the Trump administration has been pressing Ukraine, the victim, to submit to the Russian bully and renounce its claims to Russian-occupied territories, limit the size of its army, and decline Western military aid and alliances in any form.
Russia in the Meat Grinder
However, despite being much smaller in terms of territory, resources, and population, the Ukrainian government and people found the courage to oppose the massive Russian invasion of February 2022. They have since destroyed the best and most modern parts of Russia’s vast stocks of armor, forcing the Russian army into wasteful infantry meat grinder tactics. The Ukrainians effectively demoted Russia from superpower to regional power status—at a terrible human and material cost, to be sure. They showed that the Russian bully could be resisted.
Analogously, Donald Trump launched an asymmetrical trade war against Canada, which had readily acquiesced to a revision of the NAFTA/USMCA during Trump’s first term and probably appeared to be an easy target. But this time around, Canada took a firmer stand. Canada’s economic losses will be disproportionately more significant than America’s, but Canadians will not submit to annexation. The disruption set in trade by tariffs will see America’s own economy damaged and its international reputation sullied. Portugal has already canceled its order for F-35 fighter jets, citing America’s unreliability, while Canada and Germany are also reviewing their planned purchases. European officials, Baerbock being one of the most notable, are inspired by Canada’s example of resistance, as EU countries, themselves being tariffed by Trump, become more aware of his threats to Canada.
Along with the hubris and anti-intellectualism of bullies and aggressors—to take the narrative further—comes the opportunism and cowardice of public officials. Putin & Company invented for themselves an image of Ukraine as a failed state, roiling with ethnic intolerance and ruled by a fascist junta. This fiction made for happy propaganda, unfortunately, believed by most Russians, but led to the disastrous miscalculation of the current war in which Ukraine showed itself to be not at all the dysfunctional country depicted by the Russian propaganda machine. Ukrainian citizens of all social categories have voluntarily and massively united to support their army. Few people in Russian society challenged Putin’s historical revisions and lies, a mistake for which this society is now paying with high personnel losses at the front, economic decline, and dimmed prospects for the future.
It is likewise with Trump’s egregious falsifications of empirical statistics and historical events. Only a tiny amount of the fentanyl that fueled Trump’s ire against Canada crossed the ostensibly inadequate Canadian border to the US last year, being less than 1 percent of the Mexican amount. Trump also complains of a balance of payments deficit with Canada, which owes to only one commodity, namely oil (actually long underpriced because of American monopsony power). The President conveniently ignores the American trade surplus in services and other goods. In their infamous Ambush of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky at the Oval Office, Trump and Vice President JD Vance graphically displayed their historical revisionism, placing the blame for the Ukraine-Russia war on the former, who was not sufficiently willing to make one-sided concessions to the aggressor. Distressingly, much of the American public does not seem to mind being lied to, even regarding purely domestic matters, which signifies a cultural failure.
As European leaders embraced Zelensky, figuratively and literally, they announced an $850 billion defense industry expansion and are ramping up their military support for Ukraine. The formerly passive Europeans now appreciate the Ukrainians’ courage to stand up to the bully. Small Ukraine and small Canada have become unlikely heroes of efforts to maintain what is left of the world’s normative order.
In something that seems typical of self-deluded authoritarians, both Putin and Trump confuse price for value. From President Boris Yeltsin, Putin inherited a Russia that had considerable soft power in Ukraine and Eastern Europe and a lucrative energy market in Western Europe. NATO membership was not strongly desired by Ukrainians, who hoped for beneficial economic relations with Russia. Yeltsin’s sophisticated strategy was to employ Russian control of Ukrainian mass media and to keep Ukraine open to Russian capital and economic dominance. But by invading militarily, Putin discarded Yelstin’s project. He squandered the tremendous currency reserves that could have built up Russia’s economic and social infrastructure, and his general politics made Russia unattractive to Ukraine and other countries in the region.
Concomitantly, it is worth noting Trump’s predatory and morally disgusting extortion of Ukraine’s rare minerals in return for continued military aid. For the price of a few rare minerals, Trump is prepared to extort a valuable ally with the rarer courage, ability, and will to guard Western civilization’s eastern flank. Whereas it cost the US and Western democracies trillions of dollars and thousands of soldiers to defeat a powerful German geopolitical rival in WWI and WWII, Ukraine has humbled Russia for a historically trivial cost to the West. Incidentally, the US did not provide Trump’s claimed $350 billion of aid, but about $120 billion—most of which is actually spent within the US and is less than the aid the supposedly free-riding Europeans and Canada provided.
When the war ends, Kyiv should renounce the unfairly forced minerals deal. Instead, Kyiv should present Trump with a bill for the million-or-so liters of blood (do the math) that the small Ukrainian army and population spent in holding off the big Russian aggressor.
Trump and his entourage are on track to make a blunder analogous to the Russian one with Canada and the EU. Fortunately, the US still has traditions of the rule of law and a civil society, which Russia does not.
Perhaps Ukraine’s and Canada’s example will encourage more American placards to appear with the motto “resist,” as Lorenz might have predicted.
About the Author: Dennis Soltys
Dennis Soltys is a retired Canadian professor of comparative politics, with specialization in the former-Soviet region.
