Trump Should Learn from Helsinki, Not Yalta, on Foreign Policy

Donald Trump’s presidency is raising fundamental questions about US foreign policy. Will America revive its old tradition of territorial expansion? Will it ignite a protectionist inferno that burns the global trading system to the ground? Yet the greatest uncertainty is the contest between Helsinki and Yalta — between a concept of global order rooted in liberal principles and one in which the great powers carve up the world.

This question colored the elite debates at Davos in January. Global leaders have been discussing the issue for months. That’s because two critical features of our current moment — the revisionist programs pursued by Russia and China, on the one hand, and Trump’s return to power, on the other — have raised the prospect that the world may be reverting to an older, nastier state.

In many ways, today’s world is an outgrowth of a diplomatic agreements signed half a century ago: The Helsinki Final Act of 1975. The Final Act de-escalated Cold War tensions in Europe. Its signatories — the superpowers along with Canada and nearly every European country — committed to pursue economic integration, resolve disputes peacefully, uphold human rights and foreswear territorial expansion and conquest. They agreed that sovereign states have the right to choose their own alliances and make their own way in the world.

At the time, Western hardliners condemned the accords for the diplomatic legitimacy they supposedly conferred on the Soviet Union. But as the historian Michael Cotey Morgan has shown, the Helsinki accords helped destroy the Soviet empire by exposing the hypocrisy of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the illegitimacy of the Kremlin’s presence there.

Just as Helsinki principles were central to the Western victory in the Cold War, they remain central to the liberal international order today. When Western leaders condemn Russian aggression in Ukraine or Chinese coercion in the South China Sea, when they assert the universal validity of human rights and democratic values, they are invoking the Helsinki model. But now that model is being tested by Yalta’s return.

“Yalta” also refers to a European conference, held by the Grand Alliance — America, Britain, the Soviet Union — near the end of World War II. There, the allies essentially divided Europe into eastern and western spheres of influence. Washington also bribed Moscow to enter the war in the Pacific by giving the Soviets a privileged position in northern China.

Yalta reflected the prevailing balance of power: At that point, evicting the Soviet army from Eastern Europe might have required a third world war. Yet the accords became infamous because they assented to Soviet hegemony and communist rule in the region. Ever since, “Yalta” has served as shorthand for a system in which the strong trample the rights and deny the liberties of the weak.

That’s just the system Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin aim to recreate. Moscow has spent a quarter-century trying to rebuild a Russian imperium in Eastern Europe and Central Asia: The war in Ukraine is only the most violent chapter in this saga. China seeks a sphere of influence encompassing much of Asia and the Western Pacific; it is pressuring neighbors from Japan to India and tightening the vise around a democratic Taiwan.

Both Xi and Putin desire a world in which strong autocracies can dominate lesser powers and abuse their own citizens without interference or condemnation by the West. Now America has a president who doesn’t seem so opposed.

Trump is, after all, trying to reinvigorate US dominance of the Western Hemisphere. He has pledged to expand America’s borders, perhaps through economic coercion or military force. Meanwhile, he is stoking pervasive uncertainty about his commitment to the alliances the US has long used to block Eurasian aggressors. He seems to care little about human rights and democracy in faraway places, regularly praising brutal dictators for their repressive feats.

To be sure, Trump isn’t simply rolling over for Moscow and Beijing. He has hit China with tariffs and threatened Russia with sanctions if it doesn’t make peace in Ukraine. But more so than any US president in recent decades, he seems at home in a spheres-of-influence world.

The Helsinki vision was never perfect. The idea that liberal values could become universal was always quite ambitious. For too long, European advocates of Helsinki neglected the role that power — especially military power — plays in sustaining any kind of international order.

But any renewed enthusiasm for Yalta is misplaced. The great successes of the liberal order — the global advance of democracy, the decline of aggression that endangers the survival of independent states, the creation of a balance of power that profoundly favors America and its allies — all resulted from a rejection of spheres-of-influence politics. They came from marrying Helsinki principles to the strength of a superpower and its friends.

Today, Trump is promising a new golden age. But if he brings back Yalta, he’ll deliver an uglier, more predatory world.