The planet has three main power centers. With alignment of two of them at any given time. The West, Russia and China. Each has their own sphere of influence. This is not the Iron Curtain. This not the 1930's. NATO is powerful. And it relies on the United States to pay the freight because we do it for no reason. We are charged to put bases on their land to defend them.
Apparantly you must have just returned from another planet.
Russia and China are two nodes in the geopolitical orbit.
The Western Alliance (aka the “free world”), as represented by NATO, the EU, the UN and a host of other organizations that exist within the umbrella of American world leadership.
This is the other node.
While you may claim that this is not the Iron Curtain , that is precisely Putin’s goal. he has said so in public. Russian media constantly promotes the idea.
NATO is powerful. Trump has been attacking it since 2016, and he is openly sidelining it as he plays Neville Chamberlain, prostrate before Putin.
Trump is openly calling for withdrawal American forces from Europe, and isolationists in the GOP are calling for quitting the UN.
He is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Had the us strongly backed NATO and Ukraine, Russia would lose, and exit the stage as a major global power. zTrump is trying to hand Moscow a victory.
Every single one of these things directly serve Russian long term foreign policy objectives.
Trump is asking for NOTHING in return.
Trump is betraying the legacy of the men who fought WWII, and repudiating the legacy of Roosevelt and Churchill.
Retreating into one’s narrow sphere of influence is the politics of the 1930’s.
Although an American Secretary of Defense, an American Vice President and Musk openly supporting facists in Germany is something new and shameful.