The Big Two of any age sometimes agree not to fight and to divide the world between them. Their alignment may last for a while, but often, the titans wind up fighting each other and inflicting great harm on those they tried to dominate.
Let us count the examples.
Spain and Portugal thought it a good idea to divide the new world between them at the end of the 15th century through the Treaty of Tordesillas. No other European power accepted it – there was too much pleasure to be had in singeing the King of Spain’s beard and stealing his treasure ships — and the benefits to the signatories proved fleeting.
Probably the best-known case was the Hitler–Stalin non-aggression deal of 1939-1941, but a similar pattern emerged after Napoleon met Tsar Alexander I at Tilsit in 1807.
Hitler and Stalin: After Stalin signaled he wanted to appease Hitler, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov in August 1939 signed a Nonaggression Treaty with secret clauses that partitioned Central and Eastern Europe between Berlin and Moscow.
In September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and Soviet troops soon followed by attacking the country’s largely undefended east. World War II began. The Big Two disagreed on details of the partition, but Stalin continued to deliver materials needed by Germany’s war machine. Frustrated that he could not force Great Britain’s surrender and unwilling to risk a seaborne invasion that might easily have proved disastrous, Hitler shifted his forces eastward and invaded the USSR on June 22, 1941. That began a four-year bloodbath that ultimately destroyed his Third Reich while killing 25 to 43 million Soviets (Russian authors disagree) and laying waste to the lands in between.
Napoleon and Alexander: The experience of the French and Russian emperors was no better. After French troops defeated Russia’s at Friedland on June 14, 1807, Tsar Alexander I decided that, since he could not beat the French, he would join them. The two emperors signed the Peace of Tilsit on July 7. They pledged not to fight each other and, in secret, agreed to ally and to press Portugal, Denmark, and Sweden to blockade England. Napoleon relegated Prussia, Alexander’s ally, to a minor role, even though Tilsit was in East Prussia (now Russia’s Kaliningrad).
Despite French and Russian demands, the other lesser powers resisted pressure to do as they were told – much as 16th century Europe rejected the Treaty of Tordesillas. They refused to join the blockade. Frustrated in Europe, Napoleon turned his Grande Armée eastward and attacked Russia once again, and occupied the Kremlin in September 1812. Getting nothing in Moscow and fearing winter, Napoleon began the long, disastrous march back to France in October, on the way losing most of his troops to cold and disease.
In 1814, Russian forces reached Paris as part of a grand coalition that exiled Napoleon to Elba. Russia then joined Europe’s other great powers in Vienna to redraw Europe’s map. Returning from Elba, Napoleon mobilized again but suffered a definitive defeat at Waterloo in June 1815. He was sent to St. Helena while the Congress of Vienna reimagined Europe at a fully un-Napoleonic scale. Looking back, the Tilsit accord produced great losses and few benefits for either side.
Trump and Putin: Now in his second presidency, Donald Trump seems to want some sort of condominium with Putin that leaves Ukraine and much of Central and Eastern Europe into a recreated Russian sphere of influence. (This is largely what Putin demanded in December 2021 before launching his all-out war of aggression two months later.)
Seeing Europe as weak, Trump seems ready to accept Putin’s terms, including Ukraine’s loss of territory and possibly its national eradication. Trump has praised Putin and falsely condemned Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a dictator who spurns peace with Russia. “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” the US president told Zelenskyy in a White House dressing down on February 28.
Peace on Putin’s terms would free Russia from any obligation to compensate Ukraine for the staggering $1 trillion destruction inflicted by the Kremlin’s forces, for documented war crimes, and for Ukraine’s enormous toll of dead and wounded.
It would also, of course, exempt Putin himself from war crimes charges and would likely bar any external presence to assure Ukraine’s security.
On March 7, Trump said he was finding it “more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine” than Russia in his attempts to broker peace between the two nations. The US is “doing very well with Russia”, and “it may be easier dealing with” Moscow than Kyiv, Trump said. US and Ukrainian negotiators met in Saudi Arabia on March 11 to discuss possible peace terms.
But the Trump administration has already indicated where its sympathies lie. Having paused US military aid and intelligence-sharing with Kyiv, the US also suspended Ukraine’s access to critical satellite imagery. Ukrainian air defenses thus reduced, Russia continued large-scale attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure and dwellings. Trump said anyone in Putin’s position would be hitting Ukraine ever harder and opined that Putin wanted to end the war, but Ukraine did not, a position significantly beyond mere moral equivalence.
The deadly attacks across Ukraine suggested that Moscow was happy to continue with business as usual. The Kremlin still insisted that the original objectives of the “special military operation” had to be achieved and more Ukrainian land captured.
The US president’s respect for Putin is harder to fathom than Stalin’s for Hitler because the US and its allies are far stronger than Russia and its partners. But regardless, a Trump-Putin condominium is unlikely to endure. Russia’s political systems have been anathema to Americans since at least 1903, when President Theodore Roosevelt rebuked the tsar after the Kishinev pogrom.
Trump seems enamored of autocrats, but the American public may not endure this orientation. And meanwhile, the many nations subject to Russian or US dictation will rebel.
Until Putin meets the fate of Napoleon or Hitler, every nation in Russia’s frontier lands —from Estonia to Kyrgyzstan — will resist a Kremlin drive to rebuild the empire. Sooner rather than later, Americans will seek to restore ties with those with whom their long-established values converge.
Walter Clemens is Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, Boston University. He wrote Blood Debts: What Putin and Xi Owe Their Victims.
E-mail wclemens@bu.edu
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
