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And just like that, Joe Biden was out. After weeks of Democrats hand-wringing over the state of their leader’s cognitive health, and a botched shooting that appeared to have lent unstoppable momentum to his opponent’s campaign, the nation’s oldest serving president suddenly announced on Sunday he’d be withdrawing from one of the most hotly-contested political races in modern US history.
While Biden’s decision to clear the way for Vice President Kamala Harris now affords their party, in the words of one senior official, a “fighting chance” to defeat Donald Trump at the November polls, recent events have nevertheless raised the undeniable spectre of what consequences a second Trump administration might have both at home and beyond US borders.
Few will be unfamiliar with the Republican nominee’s unabashedly far-right populism, nor the stark provisions of ‘Project 2025’, nor his unconcealed admiration for other authoritarian leaders like Recep Erdoğan, Nadrenda Modi and Vladimir Putin.
But during his previous stint in the White House, Trump’s fiery brand of domestic nativism also translated into a tendency toward a kind of boardroom geopolitics of selective isolationism. One that stood in hard contrast to the foreign policy pursued by predecessors Barack Obama and George W. Bush, and one which could, in the event of a second Trump presidency, soon be playing out again on a global stage already beset by multiple confluent crises and conflicts of seemingly ever-deepening severity.
“To the extent there’s any real coherence to Trump’s outlook, it would be overall retrenchment to focus on domestic issues and husbanding our resources in terms of foreign policy,” Bob Hamilton, a retired US colonel who heads Eurasia Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Pennsylvania, told Byline Times. “If the US is to engage, in his view, it should be toward confronting China and Iran, essentially ignoring Russia.”
In February, Trump boasted that he would actively encourage Moscow to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO member states who do not meet their military spending targets as mandated by the alliance.
‘America can’t write blank cheques indefinitely’ to Ukraine
NATO-partner Ukraine might hardly hope for a greater degree of support if Trump’s recent pick of running mate is anything to go by, with vice-presidential candidate JD Vance having played a key role in earlier efforts to block further US assistance to the embattled Eastern European country. “America can’t write blank cheques indefinitely,” Vance has said.
Tentative groundwork for a prospective end to the war is already being laid by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a longtime ally of both Trump and Putin, who in the face of mounting outcry from other EU leaders has lately embarked on a rogue “peace mission” to establish a forum for formal talks between Kyiv and Moscow, with a view toward Trump acting as an intermediary in the discussions should he win in November.
“Even though Trump has said that Putin’s peace plan is not acceptable to him, I think what we’ll actually see is an attempt at forcing Ukraine to accept most of Russia’s occupation along current lines, as well as quite possibly some sort of demilitarisation or pledge that it will not pursue NATO membership.”
A domino effect
Experts say any such outcome to the two-and-a-half-year conflict would not only prove disastrous for Ukraine, but would also reverberate powerfully beyond its borders. In particular, across Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia – those former Soviet countries to a greater or lesser extent subject to Moscow’s “forever wars”, where the past three decades have seen Russian troops stationed in part or all of their territories, and where the Kremlin continues to exert considerable, often covert influence on domestic political dynamics.
“Moldova’s fate now really is hitched to how Ukraine’s war with Russia goes,” says William Hill, a former head of the OSCE in Europe’s Mission to Moldova. “The Russians view Moldova as having been part of their country for more or less 200 years, and since 1991, if not to restore it as part of their territory, they’ve wanted to exercise the predominant influence there.”
Sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine, Moldova has arguably proven the most exposed of all other former Soviet states to the fallout of Putin’s ongoing “special military operation”.
During the early stages of the invasion, there were widely shared concerns that Russian troops sweeping through the southeastern theatre may have sought to push on through to Transnistria, a pro-Kremlin separatist entity to the east of Moldova that’s been home to a small contingent of Russian peacekeepers since a bitter civil war in the early 1990s.
Though that advance was eventually halted, Moscow has since maintained a degree of heat through concerted disinformation campaigns and by fomenting political turbulence with its backing of pro-Russian domestic actors, even at one stage allegedly attempting to orchestrate a coup.
Moldova’s Moscow problems
For now, the government in Moldova continues to pursue closer ties with the West, namely by capitalising on the EU’s offer of a rare and expedited opportunity to pursue membership of the bloc, similarly extended to Ukraine and Georgia following the outbreak of the war in 2022.
Two key elections now lie ahead for Moldova – one for the presidency in October, and another round of parliamentary polls to be held no later than next summer.
While the current, pro-European President Maia Sandu appears to enjoy a relatively comfortable lead over her prospective competitors, Hill warns that a change in geopolitical tide prompted by a Trump victory the following month could well see some of that support drift toward centre-left parties “generally considered to be pro-Moscow, or at least more amenable to Moscow” ahead of the subsequent election next year.
Should that happen, it would likely not only see Moldova’s path to the EU become more fraught but also further empower Russia to project its interests further into Europe than afforded by whatever gains it may consolidate in Ukraine.
Beyond its formal role as peacekeeper in Moldova, Moscow has historically served as a security guarantor in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, locked in a seemingly endless cycle of ethnic violence since even before both South Caucasian nation’s independence from the Soviet Union.
Lately, the distraction of war in Ukraine has seen the Kremlin’s waning capacity for keeping the peace diminish almost to vanishing point, something critics argue has opened the way for Baku to fuel and in turn capitalise on mounting domestic radicalisation and irredentism to pursue an ever more bullish stance in its territorial disputes with Yerevan.
Last September, that stance saw the launch of a lightning attack forcing more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee Nagorno Karabakh, a previously autonomous mountain enclave within Azerbaijan’s borders. The assault was the climax of a more than ten-month blockade that had pushed the territory’s inhabitants almost to starvation.
Armenia has responded to this and other acts of renewed aggression by seeking new alliances and security guarantees from beyond the former Soviet space, appealing to the US for the facilitation of peace negotiations with Azerbaijan and to France for additional military support, while also winding down its reliances on the Kremlin to the extent of undertaking to withdraw from the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO).
Armenia and Azerbaijan
If Trumpian foreign policy favours the aggressor in regional conflicts, much the same might well be said of the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan as of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – an increased risk of concessions to the detriment of Armenia, and little assurance that arrangements once agreed will indeed hold going into the future.
“First of all, we would expect to see the retreat and end of US facilitation in the so-called peace process of negotiations between Armenian and Azerbaijan,” says Richard Giragosian, founding director of the Regional Studies Centre, a Yerevan think-tank. “Trump’s State Department would be less patient and much less interested in hosting or facilitating the talks, likely only emboldening Azerbaijan and posing the danger of a punitive peace going forward.”
This would not only deepen an already acute sense of isolation and vulnerability within Armenian society, but also, Giragosian adds, threaten to create a potential crisis of public confidence in democratic processes and institutions. “After the 2018 revolution, we saw the emergence of a truly democratic government in Armenia, with a rare commodity of legitimacy,” he explains. “There is a real danger of Armenia losing faith in that, and actually seeing democracy as insufficient in the face of overwhelming power and threats from neighbouring authoritarian states like Azerbaijan, Turkey and Russia.”
Of all countries within Russia’s sphere of influence, however, perhaps nowhere is the danger of democratic backsliding more acutely pronounced than in Armenia and Azerbaijan’s neighbour to the north.
Georgian Dream’s Russian Plans
In Georgia, where Russia has enjoyed de-facto control of two breakaway territories since the 1990s, the government has pursued an increasingly autocratic legislative agenda over the past two and a half years that has only served to alienate historic allies in the West despite overwhelming popular support for further Euro-Atlantic integration.
Most recently, this saw the ruling Georgian Dream party pass a draconian new law on ‘foreign influence’, decried by critics as a Kremlin-inspired attempt to stifle dissent ahead of parliamentary elections in October, that effectively put a halt to the public’s hopes of following Ukraine and Moldova along their path to EU accession.
Much of this anti-Western pivot is understood to have been under the impetus of Georgian Dream’s billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili. Having made his fortune in Moscow during the privatisation frenzy that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the oligarch has increasingly used an ongoing spat with Credit Suisse as evidence of “unofficial” Western sanctions against his interests, spinning wild conspiracy theories about a nefarious “Global Party of War” hellbent on dragging Georgia into the conflict in Ukraine.
According to Ivanishvili and his party, it was not only this shadowy cabal that was responsible for the recent attempt on Trump’s life, but also for the spread of “liberal fascism” and “LGBT propaganda” in Georgia, which they’ve pledged to crack down on under the provisions of their recent Russian-style law once the parliamentary elections are concluded later this year.
“Ivanishvili has been betting on a Russian victory in Ukraine since the war began, and he’s now anticipating some sort of counter-revolution, internationally, which will wipe away all liberal forces and allow true patriots like Trump and Orban to come through and realign European and Transatlantic politics,” says Kornely Kakachia, director of the Georgian Institute of Politics in Tbilisi.
Whatever the domestic consequences of Trump sailing to office on a mandate of hardline right-wing populism, it’s hard to imagine a reality in which the former president’s selective isolationism would not result in a seismic geopolitical shift across this corner of the former Soviet Union.
From Moldova and Armenia to Azerbaijan and Georgia, concerns are already mounting over a prospective new order of emboldened authoritarianism and diminished regional security under the shroud of a Putin regime emerging vengeful from at least a partial victory in Ukraine.
Nor is it likely such ramifications would be confined solely to this pocket of the world, with the potential fallout of a strict “America First” policy on issues ranging from relations with China and Iran to climate change and the War in Gaza raising perhaps the most salient question of all ahead of the US presidential elections in November – just how far would “wherever else” come last?