Philip Blood - Trump, Putin and Global War: The Coming Russian War and the End of European Security

Trump, Putin and Global War: The Coming Russian War and the End of European Security

By Dr. Philip W. Blood Friday

15 August 2025, a day that will go down in infamy.

Two political dinosaurs stood before the cameras in Anchorage, Alaska, pretending at friendship before a sea of staged photographs.

From the landing of diplomatic jets to the unfurling of red carpets, the choreography was precise: two ageing men shaking hands as if the gesture alone could hold history at bay. Offcamera, the real handshakes—the grinding, back-room deals—were made in the dark corridors linking Washington and Moscow. These men are incarnations of their respective national military-industrial complexes.

For decades, the superpowers policed a divided world. When the Berlin Wall fell, the moral theatre of East versus West collapsed. False Communism confronted fake democracy—“freedom” scripted with Reagan, Bush, and Clinton in starring roles. The Soviets abandoned Marxism expecting a place in the capitalist order. Instead, they were dismantled, grifted, and bankrupted. Americans forgot. Russians did not.

That memory gap became the seed of today’s spiral into global chaos. Early wars in former Soviet republics were warning enough. Washington lurched between hard and soft power until 9/11, briefly recasting Russia as an ally. By 2008, Kissinger dismissed Moscow as a busted flush, even as Putin bullied Merkel and Europe. Bush dangled NATO membership, then slammed the door.

Putin responded with Project Destroy the West. Yet Western leaders—Blair, Cameron, Sarkozy, Johnson, even Trump—cozied up while he committed atrocities. Biden tried hardball, but at the wrong time. Although Putin’s war is fought in Ukraine, the decisive battlefield was always the West. America and its allies avoided direct military engagement, opting for information war. Putin chose the opposite: analogue, conventional warfare.

At first, the West celebrated perceived victories in social media. Reality told another story: Russia preserved its forces from electronic warfare and exploited the short attention span of Western publics. The West mistook media noise for truth. The public preferred anthems to Ukraine’s imagined victories over the grim reality of genocide and destruction.

The Anaconda Plan – Four Years On

In March 2022, I felt compelled to argue that Putin had adopted an “Anaconda Plan” in Ukraine. This was not an endorsement of Russia, but an objective assessment against a tide of Western myth-making and misplaced optimism. For years, Russia had been dismissed as a declining power; the invasion shocked a media that assumed diplomacy would prevail. Early reporting, reliant on Ukrainian sources and lacking OSINT verification, left a vacuum filled by speculation and false assumptions about how the war should unfold. By late February 2022, Russian methods were already clear. There was no Schwerpunkt, no decisive thrust. Instead, forces were dispersed across the frontier, stretching Ukrainian defences while communications remained intact. Heavy bombardments drove civilians from their homes. Signs pointed not to blitzkrieg but to maskirovka and attritional warfare. Terrain was flattened, indiscriminate shelling continued, and accusations of war crimes were ignored— echoes of Grozny and Aleppo. Russia imposed its own model of long war, stealing the initiative from the West and Ukraine.

By March 2023, the pattern was undeniable: Russia was reshaping its army. Inexperienced generals were replaced by battle-tested commanders. Old equipment was sacrificed to absorb Ukrainian weapons; modern reserves were held back. Casualties among untrained conscripts gave way to younger, warhardened soldiers.

Far from collapsing, Russia adapted. The army emerging from this crucible would be a serious long-term threat to European security. This war is not contingent on Putin’s survival. Regime change will not end it, because its genocidal logic has set both nations on a permanent collision course. Ukraine faces an existential struggle in which compromise is impossible, and defeat would mean national extinction. Russia, too, cannot retreat. This is a “holy struggle”—destined for an unholy outcome. The lesson for the West is stark: rearm rapidly, or face a hardened Russian military under far worse conditions.

Remember 2022

Bad predictions breed bad decisions. Worse, they breed apathy. Western experts, flooded with illusions, treated Ukraine as a force of super-soldiers and Russia as a nation of bandits. Both assumptions collapsed on the battlefield. Clausewitz’s warning is clear: misuse history, and you doom yourself to repeat its disasters. Yet misuse it they did. From Napoleonic analogies to Afghan comparisons, the war was smothered in false insight. In Putin’s War, Russian Genocide (2023), we catalogued some of these strategic debacles. The book was read silently. Critics balked.

At the time, we called the fevered rhetoric of Western politicians and experts Realkrieg: chest-beating without action. This rhetoric metastasised into MAGA-Trump language. The war became an inconvenience. Trumpists mocked Zelenskyy, hailed Putin as noble. Military historians repeated the absurd mantra: “Russians don’t know how to fight.” They broke the cardinal rule: war is politics by other means.

Media failure compounded the problem. No major outlet confronted the urgent truth: the West must face Putin. Politicians who declared artillery obsolete were indulged. Shallow strategists monetised the war and silenced counter-arguments. Four years on, one question remains for those monetised experts: when the side that generates profits loses, what do war profiteers do?

The Future Western Europe is failing.

Professionals are trapped by shortages of weapons and manpower. Politicians are lost in a world of their own design. Societies refuse to fight. America refuses outright, using Ukraine as a prop to stir MAGA chants. Eastern nations, once crushed under Soviet rule, fear the worst. Those who align with Moscow do so only to prevent invasion. Russia pushes forward, relentless in imperial ambition. The next generation of the regime is harder, more committed, less restrained. Ukraine teeters on the edge. Russia will not stop. Moscow’s horizon is imperial and unbroken. Will it aim again for Paris, as in 1814? That remains speculation.

Stalin’s real disappointment in 1945 was not Berlin’s destruction but his failure to push further. Russia’s forces are now veterans of Ukraine. European armies, stripped of memory since the War on Terror, are green. Veterans versus recruits is not always decisive—but Russia now holds the deepest lesson: absolute lethality. That is Europe’s greatest disadvantage. Europe’s future was squandered decades ago by leaders who ducked the challenge or wasted the assets that could have made the continent a contender. EU leadership has delivered only dependency on America and a catalogue of failures. They must go: incompetent, brittle, blind.

Nations with real armies— France foremost—will bear the burden, perhaps alone. Europe’s coalitions may be technologically advanced, but Ukraine has proved tech supremacy fleeting. Weapons systems taking 18 months or more may never reach the battlefield before the war is lost. Europe is next. NATO will not defend the Baltics. Its invocation during the War on Terror was no proof of solidarity—just subordination. Since 1949, American reluctance to commit has been consistent, and Western politicians bury the truth. Trump’s hostility is nothing new; Biden’s hesitation in 2022 already revealed weakness.

Today, with Washington demanding 3% of GDP, without guarantees, the message is blunt: NATO is finished. Ukraine is isolated. Europe is alone.