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Ruth Deyermond Profile picture
Ruth Deyermond
@ruth_deyermond
Senior Lecturer, Dept of War Studies, King's College London. Russian and US foreign & security policy, US-Russia relations, European security. Views my own.
31 subscribers
Apr 8 • 21 tweets • 3 min read
Term 2 Trump foreign policy - from tariffs to NATO to soft power to China and Russia - is an epic mess. One reason seems to be that the administration is operating with two conflicting, equally flawed, views of the world and the US's place in it. 🧵 Trump administration policy is partly grounded in a worldview in which the US is one of several great powers, each with its own sphere of influence, but also in a view of the US as the unconstrained unipole.
Mar 22 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Absolutely agree with Amb. Fried that this is very damaging - to the US's credibility and national interest. But the idea that this will damage the US position in talks with Russia suggests that these are genuine negotiations. I really don't think they are. 🧵 Everything we can hear and see and everything we know about the dominant figures in the Trump administration indicates that the talks are being seen as a mechanism for building an informal US-Russia alliance. Attempting to carve up Ukraine is part of how this is being done.
Mar 7 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
“Do you still believe [Putin] when he tells you he wants peace?” Trump: “You know, I believe him, I believe him, I think we’re doing very well with Russia […] I’m finding it more difficult, frankly to deal with Ukraine.” 🧵 Trump’s claim he’s “strongly considering” sanctions against Russia needs to be viewed in the context of this comment and the many other similar things he's said in the past. Penalising Russia is not something he's ever wanted to do, whatever Russia has done.
Feb 28 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
This is a generally excellent thread, but this is not correct as far as Russia is concerned - Trump has been highly consistent in his approach to Russia since before his 1st term (though the approach isn't internally coherent). 🧵 Trump has *always* spoken and acted as if, in his words, "getting along with Russia" is one of his foreign policy priorities. This is not something on which he has ever changed position, and there is no reason to think he will do so now or in the future.
Feb 14 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
Lots of talk about "spheres of influence" in the context of the Trump admin's novel approach to foreign policy and their apparent plan to hand some/all of Ukraine to Russia, which is very keen on the "spheres of influence" idea. It's a non-starter for both Russia and the US 🧵 The idea that an International Liberal Order - much hated by Russia and others, though always more of an aspiration than a reality - can be replaced by a return to 19th century great power politics, where the US, Russia, and China carve up the world between them, is delusional.
Feb 13 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
"Over 4 years [of Trump's presidency], there was no Russian aggression." Er, not quite. 🧵 Throughout Trump's 1st term, Russian aggression continued in Eastern Ukraine, killing hundreds of civilians and hundreds, maybe thousands, of Ukrainian soldiers defending their country. @OKhromeychuk's brother was killed during Trump's time in office. Image
Feb 12 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
As was always highly likely, the Trump administration has given Russia what it wanted on Ukraine's NATO membership and Ukraine's borders. It's also making it clear that it has no interest in Ukraine's security. This is, first and most importantly, a disaster for Ukraine, but it's also catastrophically bad for European and US security. The US and some in Europe will tell themselves that this is about the US sensibly reprioritising on security. But Putin will see it as capitulation to him
Jan 20 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
A few quick thoughts on the reporting and the reality of the Trump administration’s foreign policy.🧵 Both US and European news media are likely to talk a lot about the “unpredictability” of Trump’s foreign policy as if it’s some kind of strategy. This is misleading – Trump foreign policy wasn’t and isn’t unpredictable, it’s incoherent.
Jan 8 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
If Trump's demands for 5% spending on defence really plunges European NATO members into crisis mode then they haven't been paying attention. It seems to me that the point of this demand is that it's designed not to be met. That's what should be causing alarm. 🧵 Since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, NATO members' defence spending as a percentage of GDP has been transformed. Compare 2021 and 2024 estimates: Image
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Dec 30, 2024 • 62 tweets • 9 min read
Time for another end of year 🧵. Apologies (again) for the enormous length. In many ways, late 2024 looks like late 2023, but choices confronting policymakers and citizens are both more constrained and more urgent as we move closer to a temporary ceasefire in Ukraine and to a post-West US - and thus a post-US West - under a Trump administration.
Dec 6, 2024 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Not sure any state in the world has a foreign policy or diplomatic infrastructure that can cope with what’s going on at the moment. Foreign policy is, obviously, about advancing priorities (and dealing with the legacy of previous governments’ foreign policies) while broadly trying to hold everything else as constant as possible in order to achieve that.
Nov 22, 2024 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Given how cautious the Biden admin has been in Ukraine because of this fear, it was always clear they wouldn't have authorised the use of ATACMS if there had been any risk of Russia using nuclear weapons. 🧵 The fact that Putin revised the nuclear doctrine, used his exciting new missile, and made threatening noises on TV isn't an indication that we've moved nearer to the use of nuclear weapons in the last week - on the contrary, it's a strong indication that nuclear use is not likely
Nov 15, 2024 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
Many analysts and journalists are still framing what's coming as roughly like a traditional presidency: led by the president, filled with appointees that have real roles, aiming to produce workable policy that serves US interests. I don’t think any of this is looking correct. Looking at the incoming administration picks from Gabbard to Kennedy to Gaetz to Hegseth, it seems pretty obvious that these are not serious nominations in the sense that they are expected to conduct government business in the way that’s normally understood of those roles.
Nov 7, 2024 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
I’ve seen several people argue that Trump might not be as bad on Ukraine as some suggest and cited his administration’s supply of arms to Kyiv as evidence for this. I understand why people are keen to find positives for Ukraine, but I think this is wrong. On arms: the claim is often that Trump supplied them after Obama blocked them. This is only partly true. The Obama administration allowed the commercial export of weapons to Ukraine, but did not supply them directly.
Oct 14, 2024 • 41 tweets • 7 min read
The greatest error that the US has made in relation to Russia’s war against Ukraine is just the latest variant of the same error that US administrations have been making for nearly 30 years: not taking Russia seriously. An enormous 🧵 Immediately after the USSR collapsed, Bush 41 and Clinton took Russia seriously as a threat to international stability and security. The fate of the USSR’s nukes, the possibility of Russia disintegrating, or of a Red or Brown Russian president meant that the US prioritized Russia
Sep 13, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
One of the odd things about Putin’s statement that allowing Ukraine to use long range missiles inside Russia really is a red line – honest, not like all the other red lines – is that saying it so publicly makes it much harder for the US *not* to allow it. Having indicated that it’s now maybe, possibly, open to saying yes soon-ish, if the Biden administration changes its mind in response to this, it will make the US look coercible by adversaries. That’s not a signal the US wants to send to Russia and certainly not to China.
Aug 26, 2024 • 29 tweets • 5 min read
Coming to this late, but *if* the Biden administration is imposing limits on Ukraine because “the US will eventually want to reset relations with Moscow”, then they are making an enormous mistake. 🧵 politico.com/news/2024/08/2…
Image The use of the term ‘reset’ is instructive (and perhaps not surprising given the personnel overlap between the Obama and Biden administrations). To understand just how impossible another reset with Russia is for the foreseeable future, it’s worth looking at the last one.
Aug 22, 2024 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
I'm not sure it really matters what Putin's hold on Trump is, what matters is how consistent and how strong it seems to be. Over the years, people have suggested lots of explanations for Trump's admiration for, even deference to, Putin: money, kompromat, manipulation by smarter people around him, a preference for dictators, a combination of some or all of these.
Aug 15, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Not a fan of this simplistic form of Realism, but taking it on its own terms, this is not an accurate analysis. By Realist measures, we are not in a multipolar world, we are in a world with two great powers: the USA and China. Claims of multipolarity are Russian fantasy. For about 20 years, the Russian govt and the Russian analytical elite have been announcing the arrival of a multipolar order, in which several great powers will dominate international affairs. Unsurprisingly, they claim Russia is one of the.
Jun 22, 2024 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
Since Kremlin-friendly voices have once again dragged out the claim that NATO expansion provoked Russia into invading Ukraine, I thought it was worth explaining a couple of things in addition to this earlier thread. 🧵 To repeat: there was no chance at all of Ukraine joining either NATO or the EU in the years before Russia decided to start its latest colonial campaign of stealing Ukrainian land and torturing, raping, and murdering Ukrainians.
Jun 22, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
One reason why this argument is nonsense is that in Feb 2022 there was zero prospect of Ukraine joining NATO or the EU, as Putin and everyone else knew. One widely acknowledged reason why Ukraine had zero chance of joining NATO in Feb 2022 was that Russia had been occupying parts of it for 8 years. Again, everyone including Putin knew this made NATO accession impossible - that was probably part of the reason Putin did it.