The triumvirate of our time: President Vladimir Putin of Russia, President-elect Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping of China.
Jan. 2, 2024 by David Silverberg
In the year 60 before the common era (BCE), the three most powerful men in Rome conspired to divide the world between them.
Gaius Julius Caesar, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, and Marcus Licinius Crassus, having reached the pinnacle of military and financial power and unable to overcome each other for complete dominance, agreed on an accommodation that gave each of them mastery over a piece of what was then the known world.
This arrangement came to be known as the First Triumvirate and the only reason we know about it was that Caesar exposed it when he became consul the following year.
Today we are living in the age of what can be called the first Global Triumvirate: President Xi Jinping of China, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and when he takes office on January 20, Donald Trump of the United States.
This is not an alliance of countries, it is a personal arrangement between three powerful men. Thanks to modern communications they don’t have to work through national bureaucracies or layers of ambassadors to conspire together; they can each pick up the phone as circumstances demand and carve up the world as they please.
Seen in this light, Trump’s recent threats to annex Canada, re-take the Panama Canal by force and buy Greenland make sense. After all, the Western Hemisphere is his fiefdom now to loot, plunder and exploit as he sees fit. In his mind no Canadian, Panamanian or Dane should have the temerity to stop him. Likewise, Putin should be able to do whatever he pleases in Europe and Xi in Asia.
Xi (71 years old) and Putin (72 years) are already effectively presidents-for-life. Both changed their countries’ constitutions, first to extend their terms, then to lift term limits. Trump (78 years) may try to do the same this year, likely by attempting to change the US Constitution. Should that fail, when his nominal term ends in 2028, he may try overriding it altogether as he did in 2021.
In these circumstances it becomes difficult to forecast actions and policy in the year ahead. Traditional analysis is an attempt to rationally think through possible courses of action and outcomes based on national interests, countervailing forces, government policies and other factors. But when governance is personal, the question becomes the mood of the monarch at any given moment and his possible responses to whatever stimuli tickle his perception.
And make no mistake: Whatever happens abroad will affect every American, even those as far from central government as in Southwest Florida.
That said, the year begins with certain basic questions based on objective reality.
Will the United States remain in NATO and will the alliance survive under Trump?
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is the most powerful alliance in history and now includes 32 countries, which are pledged to come to each other’s assistance should any one of them be attacked.
It has been a force for international stability since its founding in 1949. Then, it was intended to counter Soviet expansionism, ensure US engagement in international and specifically European affairs, and aid the integration of Europe to prevent the kind of hyper-nationalism that led to World War II.
It has been spectacularly successful in all its aims. Today it stands as a bulwark against Putin’s aggression and it continues to attract new members who are fearful of Russian designs.
Trump, as a friend and admirer of Putin and an America First isolationist (whose title echoes the pre-World War II isolationist movement), puts America’s NATO leadership—and the entire alliance—in jeopardy.
In his first term Trump was contemptuous of NATO, viewing it as a scam that cost the United States money to protect allies who didn’t do enough for their own defenses. He called it obsolete, aimed at a Soviet Union that no longer exists.
His most recent statement about NATO is perhaps the most alarming one to date. During a South Carolina campaign rally in February, he told the audience that when he was president, a NATO head of state asked him if he would defend that country if Russia attacked.
“I said, ‘You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent. No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want,’” he told the crowd.
Given Russian actions, NATO has never been more important.
And given Trump’s attitudes and past statements, the question in the year ahead is whether Trump can or will break the alliance and whether NATO can survive with an America that is insular, isolationist and possibly no longer a member.
This brings up the next big question for the year ahead:
Will Ukraine survive as an independent country?
For Vladimir Putin, the road to Kiev runs through Washington, DC.
Putin’s gamble on a lightning conquest of Ukraine has been a near-complete disaster. What was to have been a two-week coup has turned into a two-year war of attrition that has killed anywhere between 300,000 to 500,000 Russian soldiers. Putin has had to turn to North Korea for replacements and even these troops have reportedly suffered severe losses. The Russian economy has been crippled by western sanctions, especially those emplaced by the United States. The Russian Navy has suffered heavy losses including the sinking of its premier flagship. Even if he succeeds in conquering Ukraine he will take possession of a land that he himself devastated.
Even worse for Putin have been the strategic geopolitical costs of the war. While one of his war aims was trying to stop the expansion of NATO into Ukraine and elsewhere, instead NATO gained two new, well-armed NATO allies, Sweden and Finland, which were alarmed by Russian aggression. In the Middle East Putin’s Syrian ally ignominiously fell and its president fled to Russia. It was not just a blow to Russian prestige and influence in the Middle East; the Russian Navy was denied a warm water port it had come to count on in the Mediterranean.
The losses have even been personal. Putin’s friend, fixer and the leader of the fearsome mercenary Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, mutinied against the Russian Army leadership and had to be put down, which he was with a plane crash in August 2023.
Russia can theoretically still win and experts have said that a war of attrition favors Russian superiority in resources and personnel.
But from Putin’s perspective the war has become a costly ordeal with a very uncertain outcome—unless Putin can turn the United States against Ukraine, or at least neutralize Ukraine’s most important ally.
Such is the usefulness of Trump as an anti-Ukrainian US president who may take Russia’s side, cut off the arms flow to Ukraine and withdraw from NATO, or at least cripple the alliance.
Putin could see the utility of Trump and that’s why he supported him in his 2016 campaign. Despite Trump’s calling it the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax,” that Russian support was extensively documented in the report by Robert Mueller, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Even if Mueller’s conclusions were neutered by Trump’s attorney general, they still detailed a damning connection between Trump’s campaign and Russian efforts (which included considerable activity in Florida).
Russian interference on Trump’s behalf in the 2024 campaign has not been authoritatively detailed but the Russians themselves alluded to it in November when Nikolai Patrushev, a member of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and former Secretary of the Security Council told a Russian newspaper that “To achieve success in the elections, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”
What were these “forces?” What are the “corresponding obligations?” The public doesn’t know and as long as Trump is president it is unlikely to find out, certainly from official US sources.
Whatever the “forces” and “obligations,” the question this year will be whether the United States remains the arsenal of democracy and the primary backer of an independent, western-oriented, democratic, anti-Putin Ukraine or if Trump chooses to end aid and hand Ukraine to Putin.
Trump said on the campaign trail that he could solve the Ukraine crisis in 24 hours. That doesn’t bode well for subtle or nuanced negotiations. Russia has already explicitly dismissed an early Trump proposal for a peace deal that would have delayed Ukrainian membership in NATO for 20 years and deployed European peacekeepers to the border.
“We are certainly not satisfied with the proposals sounding on behalf of representatives of the president-elect’s team,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Tass on Dec. 29.
If frustrated with negotiations, there exists the possibility that Trump may try to impose a diktat on Ukraine that Ukraine would almost undoubtedly reject.
It needs to be remembered that Trump betrayed a US ally before, in 2019 abandoning Kurdish forces after he had phone call with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who wanted to invade their territory. That betrayal led to displacement and massacres of people who had bravely fought off the Islamic State in Syria in cooperation with US forces.
Given Trump’s past adoration of Putin, Putin’s seeming grip on Trump, and Trump’s choice of the pro-Putin Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, as the year dawns the indicators for Ukraine are grim.
Who will win the BRICS versus bucks battle?
However, on a different front a rift has already opened between Trump and Putin and the issue is, perhaps unsurprisingly, money.
The United States dollar is the standard currency of world trade and that has proved a problem for a sanctions-burdened Russia.
In October, Putin hosted a BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia. BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa and it is a Russian-created international economic organization. First convened in 2009 as BRIC, it has come to include a variety of countries outside the US-Western orbit.
From the beginning, Putin advocated finding an alternative to US dollar dominance. With the Ukraine war and Putin’s need to evade sanctions, the search has taken on greater urgency. This was the theme of the 2024 BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan.
But in a rare show of dissent from the Putin line, on Nov. 30, Trump issued a direct cease and desist order via a posting on X:
“The idea that the BRICS Countries are trying to move away from the Dollar while we stand by and watch is OVER. We require a commitment from the Countries that they will neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other Currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar or, they will face 100% Tariffs, and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful U.S. Economy. They can go find another ‘sucker!’ There is no chance that the BRICS will replace the U.S. Dollar in International Trade, and any Country that tries should wave goodbye to America.”
While the posting was uncharacteristically long and coherent for Trump (so it was likely drafted by someone else) it sent an unmistakable warning shot in Putin’s direction.
The Kremlin responded on Monday, Dec. 2.
“More and more countries are switching to the use of national currencies in their trade and foreign economic activities,” observed Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman. “If the US uses force, as they say economic force, to compel countries to use the dollar it will further strengthen the trend of switching to national currencies” for international trade.
The fight over international currencies may seem wonky and obscure, especially for Trump who finds serious policy matters boring, but this is a major issue and a test of whether Trump will actually stand up for American interests when the conflict is with Putin. It will also determine whether the United States remains the mainspring of world trade in the future, given Trump’s tariff infatuation.
The fate of bucks versus BRICS is more than likely to be a key issue in the year ahead and one that bears close watching.
What will be the fate of Gaza, Syria and the Middle East?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows that the way to Trump’s heart is flattery.
“That’s the art of the deal,” he joked in 2017 as he troweled on praise for Trump’s “clarity” and “courage” even as he privately discounted Trump’s diplomatic proposals. He even named a planned city for Trump (Ramat Trump) on the Golan Heights.
Although Netanyahu briefly fell out of favor with Trump for daring to congratulate Joe Biden on his victory three weeks after the 2020 election, Trump’s depiction of himself during the campaign as Israel’s “protector” and his extreme pro-Israel positions indicate that the United States will support any actions Netanyahu takes in the year ahead.
Those actions would appear to include killing every single member of Hamas, even if each one requires a 500-pound bomb to do so.
As the year dawns there are some indications that what is left of the Hamas leadership might be willing to release the remaining hostages they hold and bend on their demands in order to stop Israeli operations.
But the likelihood of an end to the Gaza war still seems distant. After the slaughter of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, Netanyahu set the destruction of Hamas as the Israeli war aim and he will stick to it until it is achieved thoroughly and completely, even if a cease fire is called in the interim.
Meanwhile, the non-combatant population in Gaza will continue to suffer, used as shields by the remaining Hamas fighters and viewed as impediments by the Israeli military. Perhaps if the shooting dies down a bit more humanitarian aid will be able to get through this year. But the suffering is likely to continue for generations. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, in a report issued in October, estimated it would take 350 years for Gaza to get back to its prewar economy. That’s not an unthinkable timeframe in the context of the Middle East but it does speak to the devastation of the conflict.
Netanyahu appears to have expended all of Israel’s “soft power;” the power of its values, its humanity and its unique moral authority. But when it comes to “hard power” at the outset of the year, Israel appears to be in an overwhelmingly strong strategic position: while some Hamas elements remain, Gaza appears eliminated as a threat; Hezbollah in the north has been decapitated and its military capabilities virtually neutralized; Iran lost its president during the year to a helicopter crash, is crippled by sanctions and facing a United States that is already antagonistic but likely to become actively hostile under Trump; and when the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad fell the Russians lost a client and their presence in the region.
Of all the questions in the Middle East, at the outset of the year Syria appears the most problematic for all concerned because it is a major source of uncertainty: how will whatever emerges as a new government govern the country? Will the Islamic State revive? What will the new Syria’s relationship be with Israel, Iran, Russia, the United States and the rest of the world?
And over it all: will all the fighting ever stop?
As the mother says in the Adam Sandler movie You Don’t Mess with the Zohan: “They’ve been fighting for 2,000 years. It can’t be much longer.”
Triumvirates’ end
The first Roman triumvirate didn’t make the ten-year mark.
Crassus led a disastrous military campaign into Parthia (modern day Iran) and was defeated in battle at a place called Carrhae in 53 BCE. The story is that he was captured and his captors, knowing his infamous greed for gold, killed him by pouring molten gold down his throat.
Pompey and Caesar maintained friendly relations for years (Pompey had married Caesar’s daughter) but over time their relations strained. Ultimately, Caesar went to war against the Senate and Pompey was sent to crush Caesar militarily. Instead, Caesar defeated him and Pompey was murdered after fleeing to Egypt. Caesar became Rome’s dictator-for-life until he was assassinated on the Ides of March, 44 BCE.
None of today’s triumvirs are likely to lead an army from the front as Crassus did but the dynamics and rivalries of men pursuing power and glory are much the same and likely to yield the same results.
As noted above, signs of personal and national rivalry are appearing, as evidenced in the BRICS versus bucks battle. Also, Trump tried to reorient US trade policy against China in his first term and seems likely to try the same again.
But also militating against the survival of this triumvirate is Trump’s inveterate lying and his lifetime record of welching on commitments and contracts. Just as a Mafia loan shark doesn’t take kindly to a deadbeat borrower, Putin and his mafia-like siloviki won’t take kindly to Trump reneging on whatever agreement they had that put him in office. The embers of this conflagration already seem to be sparking.
What does all this mean for the everyday Southwest Floridian—and all Americans?
At least initially, this year, it’s likely to result in higher prices across the board and scarcity of goods as these men’s rivalries take the form of trade wars. In particular, Trump’s hostility to China and his infatuation with tariffs may result in a decline in the amount and availability of manufactured products to which Americans have become accustomed. Far from a promised reduction in inflation, the cost of everything is likely to climb.
In a broader context, the rise of the new triumvirate marks an authoritarian reaction against the wave of democracy that swept the world from the 1990s onward. Whether it was Tienanmen Square, the end of the Berlin Wall, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the fall of the Soviet Union, or the Arab Spring, people saw the example and success of the United States, and aspired to greater freedom, democracy and human rights.
This was the movement that Putin saw and despised from his perch as a KGB agent in East Germany. It was the movement that threatened to topple China’s Communist government in 1989 and no doubt alarmed Xi. And it is a form of government for which Trump has no use except when it ratifies his own proclivities for domination and control.
As in domestic politics, the year ahead promises to be a hard one for Americans.
The United States is built on the premise that power flows upward from the people, the “consent of the governed.” The rule of the triumvirate is premised on exerting control downward from the top. It’s a conflict that goes back to the days of Athens versus Sparta and seems baked into human nature.
For most of its history, the world looked to America as an example of democracy and freedom. But now, under Trump, Americans need to look for their inspiration. to the people who smashed the Berlin Wall, the protesters who took to the streets in the Arab Spring, and the dissidents who stood up to the Soviet Union and Putin.
But there is value in persistence, especially on a matter as important as this. As the writer Thomas Paine put it at one of the darkest and direst points in the American revolution: “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”
The first triumvirate: Pompey, Crassus and Caesar. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
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Yesterday: Part 1—Defying darkness: Anticipating the year ahead in domestic politics
Tomorrow: Part 3—Defying darkness: Southwest Florida politics and the year ahead
Liberty lives in light
© 2025 by David Silverberg