Here is a principle of international relations if that can be dignified as a “principle” when it is backed up, as is usually the case in political science, with only a few examples. The principal is this: an alliance takes a long time to develop and when alliances change quickly because of immediate circumstances, such as a casus belli or a shift in national administrations, they are likely to be short-lived. Russia became an ally of Great Britain and the United States only when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union became an adversary of Great Britain and the United States as soon as the war ended as it had been since the Russian Revolution and has remained so until this past month. On the other hand, Great Britain and the United States who were in opposition from their founding through the Civil War, gradually realigned with one another so that the Americans couldn't but help to assist the British by the time of the First World War.
The reasons for that principle are based in two overall theories of international relations: geopolitics and elective affinities. That the two powers of France and Great Britain have been at war on and off from the Middle Ages through the Napoleonic Era, the two coming onto the same side at the time of the Crimean War and ever since, is because they were separated by only the English Channel and between them could contest the entire world, not just in Europe. Croatia and Bosnia were at war with one another also because there were two distinct peoples living right next to one another. The United States went to war with Spain in the Spanish-American War not because of the sinking of the Maine but because someone had to take over the remains of the Spanish Empire, particularly the Philippines, and the Americans didn’t want that to be Japan, the new rising power. Elective affinity helped the realignment of Great Britain and the United States because, at root, the Americans shared a common language, a common culture, and a mutual appreciation of democracy and constitutionalism. John Adams admired the British system. The division for a century was fratricidal. The United States championed Israel despite the geopolitical interest in cultivating the Arab states because the Israelis were Westerners who settled in an unfriendly area and were devoted to medical research, symphonies and a democratic regime.
So what of the present situation in Ukraine? Geopolitics partly explain it. Just as the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the Nineties could be understood as a set of boundary disputes occasioned by the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989. The war between Russia and Ukraine is also a border dispute over the boundaries of Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Ukraine had been given guarantees of its independence when it gave up its nuclear missiles when it left Russia. There are also cultural differences between eastern Ukraine, which had been part of the Austro Hungarian Empire and so a European country while eastern Ukraine and Crimea were largely russified and so a partition could have been arranged between Putin and Biden but Puyin miscalculated, thinking he could get it all, including Kiev and Odessa and so restore what Catherine the Great dad conquered in the eighteenth century. And so a protracted war between Europeans and Russians. With the United States on the European side
What Trump does is intrude and alter traditional alliances on the very flimsy excuse, the casus belli, akin to the U. S. S. Maine, of regarding Zelensky as having insulted him in the Oval Office even though Zelensky was willing to give over mineral deposits if he got some guarantees of independence which Trump was not willing to accede to. What was really at stake was not the trade but a realignment to Russia rather than Europe by Trump for reasons long discussed but not uncertain. Does Trump just like strongmen or is it thatPutin, for some reason, pulls his strings? We don't know. But such an alliance will be short lived because it can be dissolved in haste if made in haste, a subsequent President restoring its shared culture with Europe and in opposition to big power authoritarian regimes, but different this time in that Europe, having matured as as entity since after the Second World War, is an alternative democratic continent and wary of the American one. America will not be the leader of the Free World because it will have two consuls and perhaps, in not too long a time, the Pacific Rim a third democratic area. That may be what Trump hath wrought.