The US has stopped supplying anti-aircraft defence weapons to Ukraine at exactly the time when the latter is undergoing its most violent missile attacks since the beginning of the war.
Behind the US administration’s choice, justified with the alibi of not depleting its arsenals, which are useful in other crisis scenarios, there is a precise strategy, foreseen by some analysts when the Israeli-American operation in Iran was triggered.

Between Trump and Putin there is not only a bilateral pact for the spoliation of Ukraine, with Russia taking a piece of it and the US exploiting the remaining piece in exchange for a simulacrum of security, guaranteed precisely by the agreement between the Kremlin and the White House.
Between Trump and Putin there is a global pact – which perhaps some geopolitical wizardry of the Maga party will legitimise in an anti-Chinese function – for the re-perimeter of zones of influence, with Putin leaving the Middle East to the US and Trump leaving Russia free to roam in Ukraine and North Africa, replacing Syria with Libya, and putting Europe in the crosshairs not only of missiles, but also of geo-politically oriented migratory pressure, as Belarus is doing on the EU’s eastern borders.

The global pact between Trump and Putin is thus programmatically against Ukraine and against Europe, which both consider, for essentially identical reasons, an obstacle to the full deployment of the neo-imperial power of the ‘big boys’.
Of the Trumpian-Putin strategy one can of course execrate its scandalous wickedness, but first of all one must understand its so to speak ‘philosophical’ presuppositions. Just as one cannot understand fascism and communism simply by investigating the moral and psychological monstrosity of Hitler and Stalin, without delving into the historical and cultural foundations of the two phenomena, so one cannot understand (or even confront) what Trump and Putin are doing if one does not understand what thread of coherence links what they do and what they think.
If with respect to Putin there is some (small) awareness that his strategy is linked to the paranoia and frustrations of the Russkiy Mir and to an imperial nostalgia that binds and rehabilitates the czarist and Soviet pasts together, with respect to Trump not only his friends, but also his adversaries seem unwilling to look deep into the abyss of America First (perhaps for fear, as Nietzsche would have said, that the abyss will look into them).

The rejection of the West and zero-sum logic

The Trump doctrine is simple because it is based on a radical repudiation of the foundations of the liberal-democratic West as it has been built up in the eighty years since the end of World War II. What has the West been? An international political order founded on an intellectual and moral bet: that of the possibility of overcoming ‘zero-sum’ political and economic games, whereby someone’s gain (of freedom, wealth, security) is followed by a corresponding loss by someone else.

It was an order of peace and not of war, of law and not of oppression, not because it was impersonated by holy men or holy women, but because it was guided by the rational confidence that a system of international cooperation and competition based on the rule of law, for individuals and for states, would ‘multiply’ that capital of development and human happiness that political violence not only ‘divides’ into arbitrarily unequal parts, but also deteriorates and corrupts.

The ‘zero sum’ is not absolutely illogical, but responds to a primitive workings of the human mind, which reduces every problem of scarcity or danger into a ‘mors tua, vita mea’, when for the absolute majority of problems faced by individuals and societies the most efficient solutions have a cooperative basis, which recognises the not necessarily malign nature of competitive interdependencies.

In fact, the history of the West and the extraordinary fortunes of the United States are there to prove that the gamble of a ‘global America’ has been won, and today this very success is being disavowed and abjured by its main beneficiary.

Trumpism as neo-imperial ideology

Trumpism is the overbearing return of ‘zero-sum’ logic. What others gain, Americans lose. And just as the pre-Trumpian West tried to universalise the model experienced within Western societies, making the relations of law not only the foundation of social relations, but also of international ones, the Maga doctrine started from America’s war against the world to arrive at the theorisation of a necessary American civil war, which saves the United States from its internal enemies, while making it triumph over its external enemies.

With its epistemic foundation gone, the liberal-democratic order ceases to exist except as an electoral organisation of domestic and international political violence, which is what Trumpism is trying to perfect in the form of an imperial plebiscitary autocracy.
Trump gets on well with Putin not so much because of an equal moral abjection, but because of a common intellectual conviction that Russia and the United States are entitled to reparations for what has been taken from them and that in the jungle of political relations between individuals and between states the only form of justice is respect for the food chain between the ‘big’ and the ‘small’.