A Concert Without Europe: How the Riyadh Talks Reflect Failure of Washington’s post-Cold War Foreign Policy

Though controversial, Donald Trump’s Ukraine policy starkly contrasts with Washington’s yesteryears push for NATO expansion as an unquestioned imperative.

In his latest book ‘Hubris: The American Origins of Russia’s War against Ukraine,’ historian and foreign policy expert Jonathan Haslam offers a typically fascinating dissection of how the United States and its European allies laid the ground for the war in Ukraine, painting a damning picture of American foreign policy since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The book lays bare how, through a combination of miscalculations and hubris, American leaders helped set the stage for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In a splendidly apposite observation, Haslam notes that the elite in Washington had “abjured the spirit” of Lord Castlereagh in 1815, when the British statesman had included a defeated, post - Napoleonic France within the ‘Concert of Europe.’

Today, in Riyadh, as American and Russian diplomats are meeting in what is touted as the first real step toward ending the three-year Russo-Ukrainian war, the most striking aspect of these talks is that neither Ukraine nor the European Union has been invited.

The images from Riyadh of Marco Rubio, U.S. President Donald Trump’s secretary of state, shaking hands with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov under Saudi chandeliers have set off alarm bells in Kyiv, Paris and Berlin. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was left to fume that his country was being pushed to the margins of its own war. European leaders, meanwhile, met in emergency session in Paris only to conclude that for all their rhetorical resolve, their voices carried little weight.

The Riyadh negotiations highlight a shift in global power dynamics that many in Europe have been reluctant to acknowledge. For decades, Western European capitals assumed that American commitment to European security was unshakable. Even after Trump’s erratic first term, wherein he called NATO “obsolete,” European leaders largely reassured themselves that Washington’s support was institutional rather than personal. That illusion has now been shattered.

Would this have happened had America (and NATO) resisted triumphalist impulses at the end of the Cold War and instead engaged more with Russia?

Trump’s approach to the Ukraine war reflects a form of pragmatic realism that contrasts sharply with Washington’s post-Cold War triumphalism. While his exclusion of Ukraine and European allies from peace talks is being widely criticized, his willingness to directly engage Russia sans the ideological baggage of past administrations marks a departure from the unrelenting expansionism of U.S. foreign policy since the early 1990s.

Unlike his predecessors, Trump's approach to foreign policy (with his ‘transactional’ mindset) has been less about enforcing a liberal international order than bringing Russia to the negotiating table.

By exploring negotiations, even in this controversial manner, Trump’s approach acknowledges the limitations of Western military support and the potential exhaustion of U.S. political will for a protracted conflict.

In contrast to the late Biden administration, which strictly adhered to a pro-Ukraine stance, Trump implicitly recognizes that Russia’s concerns over NATO’s eastward expansion cannot be ignored. While many view his comments as ‘appeasement,’ they do reflect a willingness to understand the roots of the conflict rather than treating Putin’s aggression as purely irrational.

The Riyadh talks thus acknowledge that a security arrangement with Russia, rather than a purely military solution, is long overdue.

Successive U.S. administrations have failed to resist the temptation to expand NATO after the Cold War, despite repeated warnings from realists like iconic Cold Warriors George F. Kennan and Henry Kissinger.

Kennan, one of the wisest of the ‘wise men’ of the Cold War, had, in a 1992 opinion piece in the New York Times, witheringly written that the “suggestion that any American administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic-political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is intrinsically silly and childish. No great country has that sort of influence on the internal developments of any other one.”

After the Soviet Union’s collapse, Washington, with its Fukuyaman ‘end of history’ mentality operated under the assumption that liberal democracy had triumphed and that Russia could be permanently sidelined. This triumphalist approach ignored Russian national interests and assumed that expanding NATO eastward would have no consequences.

In the 1990s, Western leaders, including U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, had assured Russia that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward” beyond a reunified Germany. However, this promise was abandoned under Bill Clinton’s presidency with Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joining NATO in 1999.

As Haslam points out, unlike the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, when Britain’s Lord Castlereagh ensured that post-Napoleonic France was integrated into the Concert of Europe in 1815, the U.S. failed to offer Russia a meaningful role in the European security order.

At the Bucharest Summit in 2008, the U.S. and its allies declared that Ukraine and Georgia would become NATO members - a move that was seen as a direct provocation by Russia. This declaration, made without a clear pathway for Ukrainian security, only heightened tensions and contributed to Russia’s later interventions in Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014, 2022).

Putin has frequently argued that Russia’s objections to NATO expansion are not about imperial ambition but about security concerns. His concerns, whether justified or not, should not have been dismissed outright by the West.

That said, the history of modern diplomacy is littered with superficial parallels to the Riyadh talks where the fate of smaller nations has been decided without their consent. The 1945 Yalta Conference comes immediately to mind, when the ‘Big Three’ - Churchill, Roosevelt and particularly Stalin - carved up post-war Europe. The Munich Crisis of 1938 saw Czechoslovakia being practically handed over to ‘appease’ Hitler without a single Czech representative being present.

That said, it is facile to compare Yalta with Riyadh for Trump has consistently downplayed the significance of Ukraine in U.S. foreign policy unlike Churchill, who agonized over losing Poland to Stalin before ultimately conceding it to the Soviets.

Trump does not view Ukraine as a core U.S. interest and has openly questioned the necessity of supporting Kyiv. Whereas Churchill fought to uphold Western alliances, Trump has repeatedly criticized NATO and suggested that the U.S. should not be responsible for European security.

Trump has openly blamed Zelensky for failing to strike a deal with Russia earlier in the war as if Putin’s full-scale invasion were a negotiation failure rather than an act of aggression. In Riyadh, the Russian delegation, led by Lavrov, was characteristically blunt: Ukraine would not regain all of its occupied territories, and NATO membership for Ukraine was off the table.

For Zelensky, the Riyadh talks are a humiliating reminder that, for all the sacrifices Ukraine has made, it is still a pawn on a larger geopolitical chessboard. Nearly 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died since the war began, and the country’s economy has shrunk by nearly a third. The idea that a peace deal could be reached without Ukrainian input is an affront not only to national pride but the very principles of sovereignty and self-determination.

Ukraine’s quest for independence has been long and fraught. The present situation is a grim reminder (if it at all needed reminding) of its history as a pawn in larger geopolitical struggles.

In his book ‘Lost Kingdom,’ historian Serhii Plokhy says that “the question of where Russia begins, ends, and who constitutes the Russian people has preoccupied Russian thinkers for centuries.” It is an observation that Vladimir Putin has weaponized in his attempt to justify the war in Ukraine—a war whose conclusion now being debated in Riyadh with neither Ukraine nor Europe at the table. A war that probably needn’t have occurred had Washington and NATO followed a Castlereagh-like approach after 1991.