Is Ukraine becoming a ‘proxy war’ between the West and the rest?

The war in Ukraine is coming to be seen as a “proxy war between the United States and the rest of the world,” Fiona Hill, who served as a foreign policy adviser to former US president Donald Trump, said.

Speaking on The Irish Times Inside Politics podcast, Ms Hill said that concerns about the Republican Party’s opposition to support for Ukraine and a potential return of Mr Trump to the White House are forcing Europe to take a greater leadership role in Ukraine.

Ms Hill was a senior director for European and Russian Affairs on Mr Trump’s National Security Council. She later testified at his first impeachment inquiry, where Mr Trump was accused of withholding aid from Ukraine unless President Volodymyr Zelenskiy agreed to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The former foreign policy adviser said that attitudes to the United States, not Ukraine or Russia, are influencing how the conflict is seen around the world.

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“There’s a lot of fatigue with the United States as the global hegemon out there in the rest of the world and so the fact that the United States is out there defending Ukraine militarily feeds into that perception of ‘here we go again. This is another US military intervention,’” she said.

“We have had the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, which was obviously not just a strategic blunder, but something of a big violation of international law. And then people talk about, well, what about what the US did in Vietnam, and in Korea?

“I get letters and notes from people all the time and I think, well, what’s this got to do with Ukraine?”

This global perception risked “losing sight of what’s really actually happening on the ground in Ukraine, or what Ukraine is doing, which is fighting for its own sovereignty and independence,” she said.

“Increasingly, there is this debate going on: is this a proxy war? A proxy war between Russia and the United States or the collective West, which is what Putin calls the United States and Europe, plus Canada or Australia and New Zealand and some of the allied countries of the United States,” she said.

“Or is it really ultimately about what Russia’s done in Ukraine? I think that’s what surprised me the most, is how muddied and confused the whole discussion about this war has become.”

In the United States, right-wing members of the Republican Party including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have voiced opposition to continued involvement in the war, raising doubts about the long-term reliability of US support, said Ms Hill.

“The Marjorie Taylor Greenes are setting the tone on Ukraine and setting it up as a political football. You always have this impulse in the United States to disengage,” she said.

“There is concern about the United States now. Will the United States just get so snarled up in the churn of the domestic politics and the presidential campaigns leading up to 2024, which nobody knows where it’s going to lead, that the US will kind of go off the rails?”

Ms Hill said that if Trump is re-elected, the US would have “a bucketload of problems because you’ll be returning to power somebody who has tried to affect a coup, as well as somebody who’s kind of lied egregiously on pretty much every front.”

“There will be questions around the world about whether the US is even a country that anybody wants to do business with, let alone what kind of impact that will have on Ukraine,” she said.

This would be “a spur” to Europeans to “figure out contingencies.”

“You can see that happening and hear that happening because that question comes up over and over again,” Ms Hill said on the podcast.

“Europe has found its spine. It is the realisation that this is a European conflict. This is the last gasp of the 20th century. It’s yet another great power war in Europe,” she said.

“And Europeans don’t want 20th Century wars. They don’t want to go back to pre-1945, as Putin is taking them back to 1783 and sometimes 988, when he talks about all of these ties of the Russian state to Crimea and Ukraine.”

‘There’s a certain feeling that the United States is critical to the war, but it’s Europe that’s going have to pick up the mantle of the peace’.

Ms Hill is the author of a book, There Is Nothing For You Here, about her life, her path to the White House and what she describes as the declining politics of the US, Britain and Russia.

She is a Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think-tank.