Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
A year has not been well spent unless you have changed your mind about something important during it. For me, 2025 was well spent. But more on that later.
First, to Ukraine. If the US now prefers Russia to democratic Europe, it is important to pin down exactly why.
One theory is that American conservatives are drawn to Russia’s Christian nationalism. But this is truer of the wider Maga movement than of Donald Trump himself, who is not one for abstract ideas, much less spiritual ones. Another guess is geopolitical: that he wants to detach Russia from China. But Trump is far from consistently anti-China. He has let Nvidia export its H200 chip there. He is sketchier about whether he would defend Taiwan than Joe Biden ever was. In all the fuss about its Europe section, the national security strategy’s mildness towards China got lost. Trump has a narrow fixation with the two countries’ trade relations, to the pique of colleagues who see the contest as strategic and even civilisational.
Consider a more prosaic explanation. Trump is a commercial animal. So is his envoy Steve Witkoff. By “commercial animal”, I don’t just mean someone from the private sector, such as Mitt Romney, but someone who views the whole world through a business lens. Understand this, and the Russia bias makes sense. For one thing, a quick and Kremlin-friendly peace would open the door to moneymaking opportunities in resource-rich Russia. “There’s upside for everybody,” said Witkoff last month.
More than that, the war — in fact, war itself — must baffle a commercial animal. The idea that people would fight out of principle is alien to homo economicus. (Remember Trump’s attitude to even US veterans. Militaries everywhere have a scale of values that a self-seeker cannot compute.) A phrase I have heard a lot from people in business since 2022 is “this stupid war”, as though it is all a sort of accident or misunderstanding, and not the choice of an implacable state. This explains Trump’s approach. He genuinely thinks the war is a nonsense, which a clear-sighted third-party can fix. If he puts the burden on Ukraine, that is because the country costs the US something to support, which Russia doesn’t: another commercial calculation.
A political commentator must befriend business people, for their original angle on things, for their range of international experiences, for their (often) pleasanter company. But doing so also brings home their intellectual blind spot, which is an inability to understand fanaticism. And by that I mean a literal refusal to believe that such a thing really exists. There are exceptions, but people who have to be pragmatic for a living will tend to assume that all the world is the same, and that ideology is just a cover for reasonable material interests.
On this account of things, someone who extols a Greater Russia doesn’t mean it, or might mean a bit of it but what’s the big deal if there is upside for everybody? On the surface, this attitude is streetwise and cynical. In truth, it is the ultimate in naivety. For all the talk of Trump being a strongman-fancier, it is not clear that he, much less Witkoff, has the first clue how deep and almost mystical are the ideas that drive a Putin or a Xi Jinping. He could scarcely be less suited to dealing with them.
And so the commercial cast of mind has to be kept at some distance from the state. This is something of a liberal heresy. Economic and political freedom are meant to go together. Markets depend on certain rules — such as not having one’s assets seized arbitrarily — that democratic constitutions protect. In turn, democracy is more stable if there is a property-owning middle-class, which is something well-regulated markets tend to produce. Almost all the world’s high-income countries are democratic, unless very small (Singapore) or blessed with natural resources (Russia) or both (Qatar). South Korea and Taiwan became high-income after democratising, not before.
At a certain point, though, the two ideas conflict. My change of mind in 2025 is that democracy, far from being the natural twin of capitalism, has to watch it like a hawk. The problem is not just that people with great private fortunes can bend public life to their interests, as John Pierpont Morgan did in the Gilded Age and as the tech barons do now. That much was obvious before, even if it is unnerving how much the US government now identifies Silicon Valley’s interests as its own.
The larger problem is the attitude that business instils in people: that everyone is negotiable, that a so-called extremist must just be bluffing. (Am I pushing it if I note that Neville Chamberlain was from a commercial background?) There almost could not be a worse framework for thinking about the modern world, with its many ideological opponents of the west. Germany’s enthusiasm for a second gas pipeline with Russia right up to the eve of the Ukraine war, despite incessant warnings, was commercial naivety to a tee.
In its proper place, which is business itself, the commercial instinct achieves miracles. When it permeates a nation’s government, and especially its foreign policy, that nation is defenceless against enemies who act out of intense belief. Thomas Jefferson spoke of a “wall of separation” between church and state. Two centuries on, in a secular age, it is not religion that the state needs a wall against.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
