How Trump Is Quietly Dismantling Russia’s Strategic Perimeter
As Moscow fixates on its quagmire in Ukraine, Trump is rewiring the Caucasus, Central Asia and even China’s incentives — leaving Russia exposed on every border.
by Rod D. Martin
November 15, 2025
Vladimir Putin has bet his country, and possibly his life, on subduing Ukraine. His aim was to restore Russia’s strategic depth and push any future enemy far from his nation’s heart. Virtually all of Russia’s military, wealth, and resources are focused there, in a grinding four-year war that was supposed to capture Kiev inside a week.
Now Donald Trump — through energy, trade, leverage, and unapologetic American strength — is quietly taking advantage of Putin’s western fixation to strip him of his southern and eastern buffers. The result could be irreversible.
Russia has no natural borders. It lies on the North European Plain, a veritable superhighway for conquerors. It has been invaded repeatedly over many centuries, an experience that has indelibly shaped its character, its outlook, and its people. It is absolutely paranoid on this point.
Of course, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you, as Moscow learned twice in the first half of the 20th Century alone.
To solve its problem, Russia has long sought to expand to whatever point might give it enough breathing room to exhaust a future foe. That’s why in every era it has relentlessly pushed its boundaries as far west, east, and south as it could manage. At the height of the Cold War, that meant everything from Berlin to Bucharest, from past the Carpathians to beyond the Caucasus, and on to the Tian Shen and the Taedong. A surprisingly large part of that expansion remains intact today.
This geopolitical imperative shapes Russian life: it centralizes Russia, makes a police state virtually inevitable, and militarizes the country to a degree reminiscent of Frederick the Great’s Prussia or Napoleon’s France. Russia’s geopolitical imperative also shapes the lives of its neighbors, who are forever either conquered or in danger of being, if they aren’t already vassals.
Whatever its costs in human lives and freedom, for centuries, Russia’s strategy has worked. The Mongols, the Swedes, Napoleon and Hitler all came and went, defeated less by Russia’s prowess than its climate and sheer extent. Its real strength was never Moscow, or even its army, but its buffers: layers of territories and satellites between the Russian heartland and whatever wanted to kill it.
That system is now collapsing. Putin went to war to “Finlandize” Ukraine. Instead, he de-Finlandized Finland, which along with Sweden joined NATO in response. Ukraine itself — while unlikely to receive formal membership — is now tightly integrated into the West’s defense apparatus. For Russia, that would be geopolitical catastrophe enough, especially when coupled with the revelation to the world that the vaunted Russian military was and is a Potemkin village.
Now, from the Caucasus to China, Trump is peeling off key Russian allies at lightning pace. Putin thinks he’s fighting to restore 1991. In reality, his fight is unraveling 1812 and 1945.
Trump Breaks Russia’s Caucasus Wall
Start with the Caucasus, because that’s where a lot of Russian history has gone to die.
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