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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Ukraine, NATO, and the Logic of Preemption

Putin, Trump, and the Return of Spheres of Influence
- with China Watching

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

When Russian forces launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, it marked the most violent rupture of the post-Cold War international order. While the West broadly interpreted this as an unprovoked act of aggression, from Vladimir Putin's perspective, it was a pre-emptive strike—a desperate effort to block Ukraine's final integration into NATO and the Western alliance system. This logic, rooted in great-power realism and a return to spheres-of-influence thinking, has found a surprising echo in U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump's growing receptiveness to the idea that great powers should dominate their neighborhoods raises the stakes far beyond Europe. Meanwhile, China—observing closely—appears to be aligning itself with this new multipolar logic, poised to assert dominance in East Asia under the same pretext. Together, these developments threaten to undo the legal and moral architecture of the post-1945 world.

NATO Expansion and the Russian Red Line

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO has expanded eastward, incorporating countries that were once firmly within Moscow's orbit. While this process was largely voluntary—driven by the desires of Eastern European nations to escape Russian influence—Russia saw it as a betrayal of Western assurances and a strategic encirclement. The 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit, which stated that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO,” was seen in Moscow as the final provocation.

From 2014 onward, after the Maidan uprising and the annexation of Crimea, Ukraine accelerated its westward pivot. By 2021, with NATO arms shipments increasing and joint military exercises on the rise, Putin calculated that Ukraine was on the verge of becoming an irreversible outpost of the Western security order. The 2022 invasion was therefore framed in Kremlin rhetoric as a necessary, pre-emptive strike to prevent Ukraine's absorption into the Western sphere and to reassert Russia's historical claim over what it sees as part of its civilizational backyard.

Trump's Embrace of a Spheres-of-Influence World

Putin's worldview, which prioritizes strategic depth and historical entitlement over international law, might once have been dismissed in Washington. But President Donald Trump has shown a remarkable openness to this logic. Repeatedly questioning NATO's relevance, threatening to abandon treaty obligations, and admiring authoritarian leaders, Trump has voiced the view that strong nations are entitled to dominate their regions—as long as they do not interfere directly with U.S. interests.

In essence, Trump proposes a transactional form of global stability: Russia gets Ukraine, China gets Taiwan, and the United States keeps the Western Hemisphere. Alliances, in this framework, are burdens rather than pillars of stability. Trump has even warned that he would allow Russia to “do whatever it wants” to NATO members that fail to meet spending targets—effectively inviting aggression.

Such rhetoric marks a radical departure from the post-WWII U.S. role as the guarantor of a rules-based international order. In its place is a revived 19th-century logic of great-power privilege, where sovereignty is conditional and peace depends on the mutual tolerance of empires.

China's Parallel Strategy in East Asia

Nowhere is this shift more consequential than in East Asia, where China is drawing similar conclusions from the Ukraine war and Trumpist foreign policy rhetoric. Beijing views Taiwan not as a sovereign state but as a breakaway province—and has long declared that reunification is inevitable, by force if necessary. China's strategic calculations mirror Putin's: deter U.S. intervention, exploit Western distraction, and act decisively before the geopolitical window closes.

Like Russia with Ukraine, China sees Taiwan's growing ties with the West—notably U.S. arms sales and diplomatic visits—as a creeping encroachment on its sphere of influence. And like Putin, Xi Jinping may eventually calculate that military action is the only way to prevent the loss of what Beijing considers historically and culturally its own.

China has so far supported Russia rhetorically and economically, while stopping short of direct military aid. But its posture in the Indo-Pacific has grown more aggressive: expanding its navy, militarizing artificial islands in the South China Sea, and increasing air incursions around Taiwan. If Trump retreats from defending Taiwan or allies like Japan and South Korea, Beijing could interpret that as a green light for military action.

The Global Consequences of Multipolar Revisionism

If these three powers—Russia, China, and a Trump-led United States—all converge on a shared acceptance of spheres-of-influence logic, the consequences will be global and long-lasting:

• Sovereignty becomes negotiable. Small and mid-sized states—like Ukraine, Taiwan, the Baltic countries, or even South Korea—could find themselves bartered away in great-power deals.
• Alliances unravel. The credibility of U.S.-led alliances like NATO or the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty would diminish, leading allies to seek independent deterrents, including nuclear weapons.
• The UN and international law lose relevance. Military aggression could be increasingly justified as defensive or “historically grounded,” eroding norms against war and annexation.
• Instability replaces order. In the absence of a dominant global framework, regional arms races, border conflicts, and proxy wars would likely proliferate.

Conclusion: A Battle Between Two Orders

The war in Ukraine is not merely a local or regional crisis—it is the front line in a global struggle between two visions of international order. One is rooted in legal sovereignty, multilateral institutions, and the principle that no state has the right to dominate another. The other—championed by Putin, tacitly embraced by Trump, and increasingly mirrored by China—rests on spheres of influence, historical grievances, and power politics.

Understanding the internal logic of Putin's invasion is essential, but normalizing it is dangerous. If the United States turns inward or transactional under a Trump administration, and if China takes its cues from Ukraine to settle the Taiwan question by force, we may soon find ourselves living not in a stable multipolar world—but in a fractured, neo-imperial one where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.