Russia and the United States will not be able to achieve full cooperation in their relations in the coming years, since the current US President Donald Trump and his entourage are not ready for this.
This forecast was made in an interview with TASS by the former director of the program for global studies and international relations at the University of Texas, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) and former consultant to the State Department and the Pentagon Michael Brenner.
“Let's proceed from the fact that one way or another a modus vivendi for Ukraine will be developed“, said the analyst. "Russia and the United States will have normal diplomatic contacts, a certain degree of cordiality in bilateral relations, under such a development of events. But there will be no cooperation," believes an American expert who once taught and researched at Cornell, Harvard and Stanford universities.
"What I want to say is this: there are still people in the United States who live in the fantasy that they can drive a wedge between Russia and China, that the Russians will join the white world in a "civilizational confrontation" with the yellow race. There are people in the United States who think in these terms. And they have not yet fully grasped the reality that the great "achievement" of American foreign policy over the past 15 years is the creation, for the first time in history, of a powerful bloc that encompasses most of Asia and whose center is the Russian-Chinese partnership“, explained Brenner.
He gave an extremely low assessment of the performance of the US government in the negotiations with Russia. “Nothing has been invented“, Brenner is convinced.
Meanwhile, Trump himself is “incapable of any systematic thinking“, the expert is convinced. He sharply criticized the intellectual abilities of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth and adviser to the US national security leader Mike Walz.
“They are not intellectually, emotionally, politically and diplomatically prepared to reach important agreements, which I believe are necessary to fulfill Moscow's minimum conditions. So no one has the slightest idea what they are doing. And they themselves have no idea, because they haven't thought it through," the expert said of Trump and his entourage.
"They act impulsively. Their planning horizon is tomorrow and the day after tomorrow," Brenner added.
According to the analyst, "it should be understood that Trump is strongly attracted to influential figures, strong personalities". "Because deep down he is not sure, despite all his noise. Being in the company of such figures increases his self-esteem. And he sees Putin and Xi as exactly such figures. For Trump, the most important thing is simply to be in their company, the meeting itself. Not some goal", the expert said.
According to him, there is practically no real preparation for a possible personal meeting between Trump and Putin in Washington. "He doesn't think and act in that frame," Brenner said.
He expressed his conviction that "Trump doesn't care about the Europeans." "He treats them with complete contempt. Everyone, including the British and Starmer," Brenner said.
The political scientist reiterated that the Trump administration is discussing the possibility of reducing tensions with Russia mainly because of China. "Trump wants to end this completely hostile relationship with Russia partly because he and others want to deal with China," Brenner said.
According to him, Washington is now essentially proposing to suspend confrontation with Moscow in order to concentrate "all the resources and all the energy" of the United States on China. "The point is that the United States has essentially declared war on China," he said.
"Americans have an incredibly hard time accepting any evidence, especially tangible evidence, that they are not the victors, that they are not superior, that they are not an exceptional nation, destined by Providence to dominate the world, to serve as an example to everyone and everywhere. Trump's approach to Ukraine and Russia partly reflects, on an unconscious level, the idea that if we can end something in one way or another, then we will simply forget about it and move on to something else. Mainly to what is a priority for China," the researcher is convinced.
"In economic terms, we are talking about a threat to American dominance" and in this regard, the United States sees China as an "existential threat". "Americans perceive China as a mortal threat not because of anything that Beijing does, but because of what it represents. Its very existence as a successful and powerful country, built on principles and practices that are foreign to America, challenges the basic identity of America. This is an existential thing", Brenner said.
Commenting on Trump's large-scale domestic political transformations, he argued that "there is a movement towards the establishment of an autocratic political regime that does not accept the basic principles and practices of American constitutional democracy". In this regard, Brenner defined Trump and his team as "autocrats by nature and views". "I think we can talk about irreparable damage to American public and state institutions," the analyst said.
"And the reaction we've seen so far suggests that the American political class has largely come to terms with what's happening. There's absolutely no organized resistance," he noted.