Necropolitics, Ukraine, and the Trump-Brokered Negotiations
The Berlin Congress of 1878 â where Russiaâs battlefield triumphs were undone in a diplomatic ambush orchestrated by Britain, Austria-Hungary, and a coldly calculating Bismarck â repeats itself today as Trump plays the âimpartial peacemaker,â ensuring that Ukraineâs fate is determined not by war but by the necropolitical calculus of empire, where survival is rationed, sovereignty is an illusion, and power belongs only to those who decide who must perish and who is permitted to persist.
A century and a half ago, blood spilled in the East like a swollen tide that did not know how to recede. The Russo-Turkish War (1877-78) had reached its climax, and the Russian army, hardened by brutal battles in the Balkans, was within striking distance of Constantinople â Tsargrad, the imperial dream of the Orthodox world. The Ottoman forces suffered a devastating defeat at Pleven in Bulgaria, their European domains rapidly slipping into the hands of Slavic rebels and Russian bayonets. Only a short distance remained before Russian troops could raise their banners over the Golden Horn â the strategic natural harbor of Constantinople that had safeguarded the cityâs naval defenses for centuries â and yet, as history often dictates, the march of the sword was halted by the scheming of diplomacy. Victory was near, but diplomacy, as the German political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) reminds us, is never neutral. It is war by other means, a field where the victors are often those who do not fight.
Britain, alarmed by the prospect of Russian dominance in the Balkans and a potential Russian fleet in the Mediterranean, moved swiftly. The British Mediterranean Fleet entered the Dardanelles, signaling that any further Russian advance would be met with war. Russia, militarily exhausted after years of brutal conflict and heavy casualties, found itself unable to risk another confrontation. Austria-Hungary, fearful of growing Russian influence in the Balkans, also threatened military intervention. Germany, which Russia had expected to support its position, instead played Bismarckâs cold game of balance, siding with Britain and Austria to ensure that no single power dominated Europe. Russia, diplomatically isolated and with no allies to back it, had little choice but to submit to the Berlin Congress of 1878, where its victories were carved up like spoils in a backroom deal.
The Treaty of San Stefano, which had granted Bulgaria near-total independence and massively expanded Russian influence, was rewritten under British and Austrian pressure. The new Treaty of Berlin curtailed Bulgariaâs autonomy, returned much of the Ottoman territory Russia had liberated, and reduced Russiaâs hold over the Balkans. Britain, having done nothing but threaten, walked away with Cyprus, while Austria-Hungary was given control of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Russia, although humiliated diplomatically, accepted this rollback out of necessity: war with Britain and Austria would have been suicidal, revolutionary unrest was brewing at home, and the Tsar calculated that Russian interests could be advanced through patience rather than immediate confrontation. Schmitt would have laughed at the naivety of those who still believed in justice as something other than an expression of force. The political is about deciding, and those who sat at the table had already decided: Russia could fight, but it could not rule.
Schmittâs friend-enemy distinction reveals that the true struggle for power is not decided on the battlefield but in the aftermath, where the victors define the new political order by determining who retains legitimacy and who must be restrained. Even military success can be futile if a nation is reclassified from a potential âfriendâ to a constrained âenemyâ in the eyes of the ruling powers, as Russia experienced when its battlefield triumphs were undermined by diplomatic containment at the Berlin Congress, proving that control over political decision-making â not just military force â ultimately dictates the shape of history. The past clots and hardens but remains unfinished, and now it is playing out again with a new cast of imperial gamblers. This time, the role of Germany belongs to the United States, a nation that pretends to loathe empire while lashing itself to the mast of perpetual war. Britain is still Britain, always that greasy, grinning jackal, whispering into its alliesâ ears while bartering other peoplesâ fates. Ukraineâs army â rotting in real-time, losing ground, losing men, losing hope â limps through the fields of the dead, and every fresh defeat underlines the inevitable. So now, in the name of order, or peace, or whatever word the technocrats are using to make annihilation sound civilized, Russia is beckoned to the table. Not to win. Never to win. But to âresolveâ things, which in the lexicon of global power means to dilute and delay.
President Trump stumbles into the spectacle, draped in a carnival mask of diplomacy, a reality TV negotiation guru, as if capitalism had ever birthed a deal that was not rigged from the start. But this, too, is the logic of sovereignty that Schmitt outlined â the exception defines the rule, the sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception, and Trump, playing his absurdist role, holds that power now. Kievâs collapse is not just a military matter. It is an existential crisis for the liberal order, which thrives only in the presence of an external enemy it can perpetually keep half-dead. So Trump has set up the perfect theater: first, squeeze Zelensky, bring him to heel, ensure he signs a contract that strips Ukraine of whatever resources it still pretends to own. But consent is not real in necropolitics, where the weak sign treaties not out of will but because their heads are already held beneath the water. The past two weeks have been one long exercise in drowning Kiev before handing it a straw to breathe through. Moscow, playing its role with clinical detachment, issues its ultimatum. The American delegation relays it. Kiev, overwhelmed by the pressure, capitulates instantly. The script unfolds.
The logic of necropolitics, as theorized by the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe (b. 1957), is laid bare in the choreography of these negotiations. It is not just about war but about the management of death itself, the strategic control of who is allowed to live and who is left to perish. For Ukraine, existence is contingent upon its usefulness to larger powers, a pawn whose suffering is not a tragedy but a calculated necessity. The withholding of arms, the rationing of intelligence, the offering of a ceasefire not as salvation but as a way to prolong a limbo state between survival and destruction â this is necropolitics in action. The U.S. does not need Ukraine to win. It only needs Ukraine not to die too quickly. The real horror is that the decision-makers have already accepted Ukraineâs eventual demise. What is being negotiated is the tempo of its death. This is not war in the Clausewitzian sense of two sovereign actors vying for victory. It is war in the Schmittian sense, where one side is an object rather than a subject, a battlefield rather than a player. The U.S. does not merely use Ukraine. It governs the conditions of its life and its inevitable extinction.
What does Trump offer? A ceasefire â a leash. Thirty days. A pause, but not really, because a pause only matters if the subject is capable of independent movement. And Ukraine is not. A brief window to rearm, not because America cares about Ukrainian victory (it does not) but because it still needs the country as a bludgeon against Russia. The weapons, which had been withheld like food from a stray dog, will resume their flow, a controlled trickle designed to keep the corpse twitching, to extend the suffering long enough to serve its utility. Intelligence, too, will be reinstated because an army blind to its enemy is already dead. Even America is starting to wonder if this experiment in slow-motion catastrophe might end sooner than expected. The subject may expire before the final act is written. The lab rat might not make it through the maze. And then what? What happens when there is no one left to fight on behalf of the ârules-based orderâ?
And there is Europe, the great dying empire masquerading as a collection of nation-states, trying to elbow its way into the conversation. Trump, with his usual indifference, shrugs and says, sure, let them in. But Russia â historyâs old survivor â has played this game before. It will reject the ceasefire. It must. This is no different from Minsk, no different from every peace that is no peace at all but a means of ensuring war continues under different conditions. Russia sees the trap and steps over it. It will refuse the deal, and Trump will throw up his hands. A gesture for the cameras, an empty motion, a shrug of historyâs shoulders. And in the background, Schmittâs ghost murmurs: âPolitics is about deciding, and you, little nation of Ukraine, have no right to decide.â
The German historical thinker Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) saw this. Spengler wrote it down with the ink of the damned, a prophecy dressed as analysis, telling us that history is not progress but decline, a grand civilizational decomposition pretending to be movement. Western man, Faustian man, lost in his own illusions, flailing against fate while pretending he can still sculpt it. The cycle is locked in, the West in its late stage, where its wars become ritual, its leaders empty figures repeating ancient mistakes with new technology. Spengler called it civilizationâs winter, the moment when decisions become reactions, when empires feed on their own decay. The negotiations in Saudi Arabia are another scene in the tragedy, another shuffling of the deckchairs on the Titanic of empire. The game, in the grandest sense, was decided long ago.
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