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In the words of President Donald Trump, ‘nobody’s happy’ with the dimming prospects for further US–North Korea talks; last week Pyongyang renewed short-range missile tests and the US Justice Department impounded North Korea’s second-largest cargo vessel for sanctions violations. But this wasn’t the first instance of backsliding after negotiations broke down. In March, mere days after Kim Jong-un dined with Trump at the Metropole Hotel in Hanoi, satellite imagery suggested renewed activity at the Sohae satellite-launch and rocket-testing facility.

The Hanoi summit’s unsatisfying conclusion stemmed from dissimilar definitions of ‘complete denuclearisation’. US officials later clarified that North Korea’s ballistic missile capabilities and chemical and biological weapons programs must also be eliminated. More significantly, US National Security Advisor John Bolton rejected North Korea’s preference for a step-by-step, reciprocal approach to talks, in which negotiating carrots such as sanctions relief, economic development, a peace declaration, or diplomatic normalisation could keep pace with corresponding progress towards weapons dismantlement and a verification framework.

After three decades of intermittent negotiations with North Korea, direct engagement between heads of state was a fresh approach, for which Trump should be commended. But his administration’s indigestion when contemplating anything less than an all-encompassing, landmark accord should have been tempered with a seasoned helping of negotiating flexibility. And looking beyond Hanoi, it’s evident that Trump and his team are hardly committed to nuclear arms control writ large.

Only weeks after the US declared its intention to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which forbids both nuclear and conventional missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,000 kilometres, the Pentagon announced its plans to test a ground-mobile version of the sea-launched Tomahawk cruise missile in August, followed by a 4,000-kilometre-range ballistic missile in November.

Russia and the US have each critiqued the other for treaty noncompliance. Washington has continued to cite the operating range of Russia’s 9M729 missile and Moscow’s failure to course-correct since 2014, whereas Moscow has countered that the US Aegis Ashore missile defence site in Romania could perhaps be repurposed to launch offensive cruise missiles instead of only defensive interceptors.

At a January meeting in Geneva, Russia purportedly offered an inspection of the 9M729 system in exchange for a demonstration that the Aegis launchers couldn’t be converted to accommodate offensive missiles. American diplomats rejected this proposal, and, with the US Defense Department wasting no time to prepare for tests of INF Treaty–violating weapons soon after the agreement becomes void on 2 August, the Trump administration appears all too willing to dispense with existing arms limitations.

US officials have also yet to communicate their stance on prolonging the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). In a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin in January 2017, Trump reportedly disparaged the treaty as a ‘bad deal’ after Putin mentioned possible extension beyond 2021. Top US Air Force generals have testified before Congress and spoken publicly in unequivocal support of New START, calling bilateral and verifiable arms-control treaties ‘essential’, ‘of huge value’, ‘unbelievably important’ and ‘good for us’.

Regrettably, Bolton was a strident critic of New START before his appointment to lead Trump’s National Security Council, and the US State Department’s top diplomat for arms control remains noncommittal, explaining that the administration’s consolidated position towards treaty extension is still meandering through bureaucratic interagency review. ‘It gives reason to suspect our American counterparts of setting ground’ to let the treaty expire quietly, said Russia’s deputy foreign minister. Without the INF Treaty and the binding, verifiable limits contained in New START, American and Russian nuclear weaponry could soon be unconstrained for the first time since 1972.

And signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty have just concluded their final preparatory meeting in advance of the treaty’s review conference next year. Non-nuclear states have expressed irritation that the US and Russia have further created ‘doubt about their intention ever to fulfil their disarmament obligations’. Instead of faithfully pursuing another stepwise reduction in its numbers of launchers and warheads, the US proposed multilateral working groups to discuss specific disarmament challenges. Among the 122 countries that voted in July 2017 for a nuclear-weapons ban, this American initiative, called ‘Creating an Environment for Nuclear Disarmament’, smells like much high-minded talk without any meaningful effort towards US arms reductions.

If Trump desires credibility, dialogue with Russia promises fertile ground. At the outset, his political opponents may deride such overtures as cosying up to Putin. But as highlighted by former admiral Mike Mullen, the top American military officer from 2007 to 2011, ‘even in the darkest days of the Cold War’ the US had regular interchanges with the Soviet Union, but ‘we don’t have them now—it’s not even close’.

And responsibly trimming American and Russian arsenals would make any future pressure on North Korea all the more compelling.

Commitment to arms-control talks could help Washington and Moscow further comprehend areas of shared concern, such as China’s economic clout in central Asia and its adventurism in the Arctic, short of a thaw in relations. If mutually beneficial agreements with Moscow stimulate Trump’s appetite for open-minded negotiations and incremental processes, and achieve appreciation and esteem from the international community, perhaps step-by-step progress with Kim would then become palatable.

In his 1982 Nobel lecture, the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez condemned the West’s insistence on ‘measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves’ and ‘forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all’. That is, in a sense, what the West’s progressive left is doing when, caught up in an outdated narrative about Latin American revolutions, it fails to recognise the associated devastation.

It’s because of this failure that, until fairly recently, the most heinous—and long-lasting—insurgency in Latin America’s history, waged by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), had advocates in the European parliament. Now, the story is repeating itself, with many Western leftists rejecting any international effort to push back against President Nicolás Maduro’s disastrous leadership.

The scale of the disaster should not be underestimated. Severe food and medication shortages are the new normal. The International Monetary Fund estimates that inflation will reach 10 million per cent this year. The result is a desperate people, 10% of whom have already fled the country. Among those who remain, 90% live below the poverty line.

A revolutionary delusion has collapsed, leaving behind only the tyrannical rule of a class of corrupt tycoons—effectively a mafia—that has purchased the military’s loyalty with massive cash bonuses and lucrative oil-smuggling and drug-trafficking deals. The mafia’s opponents are repressed, often brutally. In terms of the number of political prisoners, Maduro’s Venezuela has joined the ranks of China, Cuba and Turkey.

One might expect US President Donald Trump’s administration to minimise Maduro’s repressive practices. But Trump was also quick to recognise the leader of the opposition, Juan Guaidó, as interim head of state, after Guaidó, with widespread support among Venezuelans, invoked a constitutional provision to challenge Maduro’s legitimacy.

Practically all of Venezuela’s democratic neighbours—including socialists in these countries—have spoken out against Maduro’s tragic parody of a revolution. Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla and Colombia’s most emblematic far-left politician, has labelled Maduro ‘a dictator’. Brazil’s Socialist Party denounced his regime as ‘crazy’ and ‘a totalitarian state’, while the country’s former left-wing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, distanced himself from his Workers’ Party’s endorsement of Maduro. Even the Venezuelan socialist group Marea Socialista denounced Maduro’s ‘totalitarian tendencies’.

But leftist politicians in the West resist taking a similar stand. America’s rising socialist stars staunchly oppose this approach. Representative Ilhan Omar has warned of a ‘US-backed coup’ aimed at picking a leader ‘on behalf of multinational corporate interests’, and ignorantly defined the opposition as ‘far right’. (Guaidó is a member of a social-democratic party.) Likewise, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agreed that the large-scale, human-rights-violating crisis is an ‘internal polarized conflict’, and argued that the United States should not recognise Guaidó as head of state.

Senator Bernie Sanders, for his part, invokes America’s dark history of interventions in Latin America when discussing Venezuela. In the United Kingdom, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who memorialised Maduro’s mentor Hugo Chávez in 2013 for his ‘massive contributions to Venezuela and a very wide world’, also opposes ‘outside interference in Venezuela’.

These leaders subscribe to a Cold War world view, in which virtually any domestic revolution stands in direct opposition to the ultimate enemy: Western imperialism. By not recognising the nuances of the current crisis, they end up effectively advancing the interests of multiple dictatorships, including those in Iran, Nicaragua, Syria and Turkey, as well as the real colonial powers in Venezuela right now: China, Cuba and Russia.

In Venezuela, Russia is following its playbook from Syria, where it intervened not to save besieged people, but to prop up the tyrant they were trying to escape, Bashar al-Assad. Both Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping want to secure repayment of the massive loans they issued to Venezuela’s Chavista regime. And free oil from Venezuela has been vital to Cuba’s economic survival.

These ties mean that Maduro’s regime poses a legitimate national security risk to the US. Though Trump himself was probably motivated to recognise Guaidó more by his desire to win support from Hispanic voters, the fact is that Russia’s deepening military cooperation with Venezuela could conceivably result in a modern rendition of the Cuban missile crisis.

But there’s a more fundamental issue at play. The world’s dictatorships support Maduro because they want to undercut the principle, adopted unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005, that the international community has a responsibility to protect populations from atrocities carried out by their own governments. By backing Maduro, they seek immunity for themselves. Defending the spirit of the so-called R2P principle, which the left should cherish, was a key motivation behind the decision by many other democracies—including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and the UK—to recognise Guaidó.

Rather than stick to their old political dogma, leftist political figures should heed the voice of Toshiko Sakurai, a Venezuelan exile. ‘I am sick of you’, she told the Spanish left. ‘We both believe in public universal education and health care financed with taxes’ and ‘a safety net and wealth redistribution’. But, she continued, ‘supporting socialist policies doesn’t keep me from denouncing the brutal monstrosity being inflicted upon my country’.

The 2008 economic crisis has fuelled the rise of a new political class that revived the social-democratic call for a fairer society. These figures are right to reject any consideration of a potentially calamitous foreign military intervention in Venezuela. But—for the sake of their own political credibility, as much as the principles of human rights and democracy—they must abandon well-meaning but obsolete assumptions in foreign policy.

Instead, the left should support increased international pressure on the Maduro regime, including through the sanctioning and isolation of its core leadership. Efforts to boost the capabilities of Venezuela’s suppressed democratic opposition would also help.

Western non-intervention killed Spanish democracy in the 1930s. More recently, it sustained Assad’s appalling tyranny. Venezuela must not be next.

France’s last-minute compromise with Germany on a proposal to bring the Nord Stream 2 project fully under EU energy regulations—potentially fatal to the project—will likely ensure that the controversial project will be completed. France had earlier indicated that it would support a proposal for the entire offshore gas pipeline to come under EU regulations, but at the eleventh hour agreed to a compromise proposal that EU oversight should only commence ‘at the territory and territorial sea of the member state where the first interconnection point is located’, which is the German Baltic port of Greifswald.

The French–German position still needs to be ratified in the EU Parliament, but despite significant opposition to the project from Baltic and Eastern European states, it will likely receive the required votes.

Moscow was quick to criticise the new position, warning the EU not to adopt tighter energy rules. It does appear that the EU’s new proposal will likely mean that the market—and not Gazprom, the Russian company behind the project—will determine gas prices, and make the operation of the pipeline more expensive. But Russia is also probably objecting because the new EU position will limit the scope for corruption by involving European companies in the project. Despite these protestations, the EU’s revised position is a qualified victory for Moscow and effectively ends a two-year impasse.

From a purely economic perspective, European support for Nord Stream 2 is understandable because it should provide a more reliable and (in the long term) cost-effective solution to Europe’s energy needs. Germany, the strongest advocate of Nord Stream 2 in the EU, has characterised it as a ‘purely economic project’ providing cheaper and more reliable gas supplies that also helps Berlin diversify its energy sources at a time when Chancellor Angela Merkel has committed to phasing out coal and nuclear power.

However, Nord Stream 2 is about much more than cheaper and more reliable energy, and unfortunately the EU’s new position does little to resolve two of the issues at the heart of the project.

First, Nord Stream 2 will make Europe more dependent on Russian gas supplies at a time when Russia appears increasingly intent on destabilising the EU. Nord Stream 2 will dramatically increase the availability of Russian gas to European markets, effectively doubling the capacity of the existing Nord Stream 1 pipeline to 110 billion cubic metres per year. This will make Russia by far the largest gas supplier to Europe just as gas is becoming more prominent in Europe’s energy mix. Nord Stream 2 will also operate parallel to the TurkStream pipeline in the Black Sea, which will service Turkey and eastern and southern Europe.

Second, it’s not clear whether the EU will be able to safeguard Ukraine’s interests as a transit country for Russian gas.

Approximately half of Russia’s current gas supply to Europe passes through Ukraine. During early negotiations on the Nord Stream 2 project, the question of Ukraine’s ongoing role as a transit hub was a key issue for Brussels. The EU vice president for Energy Union stated, ‘If the aim of these projects is to gradually drain the Ukrainian transit route, it is simply unacceptable for the EU, as it will change the European gas balance [and] place central and south east European countries into a very difficult situation.’

But the fact that Gazprom is investing so heavily in offshore capacity, which is significantly more expensive to construct than onshore capacity, suggests that this is exactly what Moscow is trying to achieve. Analysis by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies concluded that the combined capacity of Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream—both of which are routed to specifically bypass Ukraine—would enable Gazprom to meet the demands of all European countries, effectively ruling out Ukraine as a transit point for Europe’s energy supply.

Unfortunately, there’s little evidence to suggest that this ‘red line’ will or can be enforced by Brussels once Nord Stream 2 comes on line, and it’s possible that any European enforcement attempts may actually backfire.

The implications of this outcome for Ukraine are significant. It would deny Kyiv an important source of revenue: transit tariffs charged on gas moving through its transit network provide annual revenue of around US$2–3 billion (approximately 3% of GDP). It would also deny Kyiv a geopolitical lever that can be used in negotiations between the two countries, including those relevant to Ukraine’s own supply of gas from Russia. By effectively making Ukraine’s ageing gas distribution network irrelevant to Russia’s supply of gas to Europe and capacity to earn foreign revenue, Moscow would also be free to expand its hostilities against Ukraine without fear of disrupting the gas supply to Europe.

European countries that remain opposed to the Nord Stream 2 project have voiced their objections on geopolitical grounds. Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland have called Nord Stream 2 ‘an instrument of Russian state policy’ that ‘should be seen in the broader context of today’s Russian information and cyber-hostilities and military aggression’. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki also expressed his disagreement with Germany’s position, noting that once Nord Stream 2 is built, ‘Putin can do with Ukraine whatever he wants … and then we have potentially his army on the eastern border of the EU’.

Critics of Nord Stream 2 in Poland and other eastern European countries, whose views are informed not only by acute geopolitical considerations but also history, appear to understand what policymakers in Berlin, Vienna and Amsterdam do not—that the project is about much more than energy security. Not only will it embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin to think that he can act with impunity in Ukraine and elsewhere, it will also make both Ukraine and the EU more vulnerable to Moscow’s malign influence in the future.

It’s tempting to view the recent confrontation between Russian and Ukrainian naval vessels in the Sea of Azov—in which Russia denied Ukrainian vessels access to the Strait of Kerch and the Ukrainian city of Mariupol—as an extension of the ongoing conflict between the two countries.

Moscow was clearly testing Ukraine’s response to its aggressive interdiction and may have been seeking to provoke an overreaction by Kyiv. These events are also part of a broader pattern of behaviour by Russia that not only impedes legitimate Ukrainian commercial activity, but also significantly encroaches on Ukraine’s exclusive economic zone. Since May, Russia has been stopping and delaying shipping in the region, in the process imposing significant costs on vessels seeking to transact in Ukrainian ports. It has also seized a number of maritime gas fields in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea belonging to Ukraine and has reportedly extracted an estimated 7.2 billion cubic metres of gas from those fields.

Moscow has significant strategic interests in Mariupol, which is an important port city that not only sits on critical Ukrainian maritime, rail and river junctions, but also dominates the territory between the Russian–Ukrainian border and Crimea. Russian-backed separatists seized Mariupol during the early stages of the Ukrainian conflict but were forced by government troops to relinquish it. It’s likely that Moscow’s designs on the important industrial and commercial hub haven’t diminished.

However, these recent events are potentially more about Moscow asserting military dominance across the Black Sea than about a new phase in Russia’s proxy war in Ukraine. Russia’s brinkmanship in the Sea of Azov could also presage a more aggressive pursuit by Moscow of its strategic interests across the entire Black Sea region, and has profound implications for both regional and global security.

Moscow’s actions in the Sea of Azov have occurred in the context of a dramatic increase in the size and capability of Russia’s Black Sea fleet and land-based forces in Crimea under the Russian state armament program. Russia is now deploying significant new surface and submarine assets in the region. It is also rolling out air and coastal defences that will provide it with the capability to establish an anti-access/area-denial zone preventing freedom of movement that covers almost all of the Black Sea and parts of NATO members Romania, Turkey and Bulgaria.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has defended the military build-up in the region by saying that it is intended to neutralise the ‘emerging threat for national security’. And while Russian defence policymakers’ concerns about NATO encirclement are largely justified, during the first decade of the 21st century there were encouraging signs of greater collaboration between NATO and Moscow in the Black Sea region. NATO and Russian forces conducted joint exercises that were held up as examples of a more constructive approach to managing shared concerns, and this collaboration reflected the reality that Russia wasn’t the only state with equities in Black Sea security. But Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and its later decision to underwrite a proxy war in eastern Ukraine killed off prospects for enduring collaboration between Moscow and NATO.

Russia’s military build-up in the region over the past five years undermines the sovereign rights and interests of all Black Sea littoral states, because it is designed to empower Moscow with the capability to assert monopoly control over the region, including to deny freedom of movement at sea and in the air. Moscow may have been able to defend its claims to the region as a ‘Russian lake’ in Tsarist and Soviet times, when it administered most of the territory surrounding the Black Sea. But Russia is now just one of five sovereign states that border the Black Sea, and the view that the area is a Russian domain is no longer defensible.

Russia’s aggression in the Sea of Azov is also clearly a marker of its intent in the region, and indicates that Moscow has no qualms about using military capabilities to interdict and delay both commercial and military interests operating in the region. Moscow’s current focus may be the interdiction of commercial shipping into Mariupol, but it has the capability to employ similar disruptive tactics against other critical Ukrainian transportation hubs and commercial centres, such as Odessa, which would have a significant impact on Ukraine’s economy. Similarly, other Black Sea littoral states—in particular, Romania—are closely watching Russia’s military build-up around the Black Sea and its associated belligerent actions and are revising their strategic calculations accordingly. Moscow sees dominance of the region through military pressure as a way to weaken the NATO alliance and European security architecture, enabling it to coerce former Soviet-bloc countries to return to Russia’s orbit.

As noted by Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, the timing of Russia’s belligerent actions in the Sea of Azov is curious. President Vladimir Putin may be seeking to maximise his gains in the Black Sea region at a time when Washington is preoccupied with China and Iran, and when Europe is fragmenting politically and economically. The inertia in Washington and European capitals is likely to continue into the foreseeable future. So, if Applebaum’s assessment of Moscow’s modus operandi is correct—that it makes a move, waits for a response, and then makes another move when no response is forthcoming—we can likely expect more provocative and disruptive actions by Russian forces deployed around the Black Sea in the near future.

If NATO and key policymakers in the US and Europe continue to cede influence and authority in the Black Sea region to Russia, not only will they be empowering Putin to enforce his will on Ukraine and a number of NATO partners, they will also be contributing to the unravelling of the global rules-based order upon which international security depends.

Much has been written about Russia’s ambitions in Syria and the Middle East, and there are numerous elements to Moscow’s strategy in the region. President Vladimir Putin has made clear his desire to restore Russia to great-power status and to build its profile as a global problem-solver. The Middle East offers him the opportunity to demonstrate Russia’s credentials.

Moscow’s foreign policy clearly reflects realist assumptions about the role of hard power as the defining feature of international politics. But such a broad characterisation does little to help illuminate Putin’s long-term ambitions in Syria and across the Middle East, the details of which remain obscure. There are also contradictions and a lack of clarity in Russia’s pattern of engagement in the region that likewise make it difficult to discern Russia’s objectives with any confidence.

Russia’s intervention in the Syrian civil war has been its most substantial recent foray into the Middle East. Moscow’s actions have been carefully calibrated and have tipped the balance in favour of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, but its motives for getting involved in the first place are complicated.

The original pretext was the targeting of Islamic State, but Moscow’s broader goal was to spoil Washington’s plans for regime change. Russia has also sought to present its actions in Syria as those of a mediator and peacebuilder, through its promotion of the 2017 Astana peace process.

Russia’s actions in Syria are part of a broader regional strategy that is both complex and fragile. Under Putin, Russia has sought to build ties with every state in the region, but has arguably prioritised countries closely aligned with the US—particularly Israel and Turkey—in order to undermine US interests in the region. Moscow’s decision to back Assad in Syria potentially prejudices Russia’s ongoing relations with traditional partners Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which seek to overthrow Assad and counter growing Iranian influence in the region.

The complex web of partnerships Russia has built in the Middle East equips it to play the role of mediator between regional adversaries. In mid-2018, Russia offered to broker an agreement between Israel and Iran that Iranian forces would remain a minimum of 100 kilometres from Israel. Russia has also negotiated multiple ceasefires in Syria, but has tended to adroitly use ceasefires to divide opposition groups and give the Assad regime breathing space to rebuild or refocus its forces.

Russia is also promoting itself as a mediator in other Middle East theatres, including in the conflict in Yemen, and appears determined to supplant the US as the principle negotiator in regional conflicts.

Looking beyond the façade of good global citizen that Putin is carefully crafting, it’s clear that Moscow’s primary motive is to advance its geopolitical ambitions. Following its Syrian intervention, Russia was awarded a 49-year deal for access to Syria’s Tartus naval base, Russia’s only base on the Mediterranean, and secured indefinite access to Syria’s Khmeimim air force base. Likewise, Russia’s mediation in the Yemen conflict occurred in the context of Moscow’s unfulfilled ambitions to secure rights to a naval base giving access to the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa. It is also pursuing access to military bases in Egypt, Libya and Sudan.

However, the web of relationships that Moscow is managing could unravel rapidly, with potentially disastrous consequences. Russia’s relationship with Turkey turned frosty in 2015 following the downing of a Russian jet by Turkish forces. Moscow responded by deploying air defence missile systems into northern Syria. Russian warplanes also bombed a Turkish aid convoy, and there was a real risk that the tensions would spiral into war.

Similarly, when a Russian military aircraft was recently shot down by Syrian forces targeting Israeli aircraft that were using the Russian aircraft as a shield, Moscow reacted by blaming Israel and supplying Syria with advanced air defence systems, dramatically increasing Syria’s capacity to target Israeli aircraft.

Such events test Russia’s capacity to sustain the competing bilateral relationships that underpin its Middle East strategy. Moscow’s posture has been helped by the fact that its intervention in Syria has to date been relatively low-cost in both manpower and munitions. But Putin and his inner circle likely remain mindful of the US’s disastrous interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and will be careful to avoid escalation.

Russia has similarly been wary of committing to reconstruction plans, and has sought to diffuse responsibility for post-war planning and reconstruction to regional partners. Moscow unsuccessfully approached European countries to share the cost of reconstruction in Syria, estimated at US$250 billion, and the fact that it followed its requests with a veiled threat of continued refugee flows from Syria to Europe spoke volumes about its playbook.

It’s also not clear whether Russia is seeking a definitive end to the civil war. As demonstrated in Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and eastern Ukraine, Russia prefers to freeze conflicts rather than resolve them, as this provides it with additional levers with which it can sustain its influence and interests.

And herein lies the problem sitting at the heart of Russia’s Middle East strategy—Putin’s posturing and efforts to portray Russia as a constructive actor in Middle East peace sit at odds with the hard realist core of Russia’s ambitions in the region. Russia also appears to be as much motivated by a desire to subvert US and European interests as it is interested in establishing a network of client states and military bases across the region.

So far, Russia’s regional partners have played along with this charade, and Russia has also managed to deflect the true costs of the Syrian conflict. But over time, the risk of Russia being called out on its actions will increase, and as noted elsewhere, it will then learn that it is easier to get involved in a war than to get out of one.