Terry Glavin: Fixing the wreckage Donald Trump has made of the world - National Post
Copy URL Facebook Linked In X (Twitter) Loading account options Sign In Manage Account Close account menu Sign Out U.S. President Donald Trump is seen through a teleprompter as he speaks at a midterm campaign rally in Rock Hill, S.C. on Oct. 29, 2026. (Kent NISHIMURA / AFP via Getty Images) By Terry Glavin November 4, 2026 at 3:21 p.m. It wouldn’t be fair to say that a key takeaway from the just-concluded midterm elections in the United States is that Vladimir Putin has lost control of the U.S. Congress. That would be too clever by half. The Trump administration’s capture of American foreign policy on behalf of Putin and in aid of profiting from Russia’s barbaric war on Ukraine has been on shaky ground for months. For that, Democrats can thank their bipartisan measures with a handful of Senate Republicans who hadn’t completely lost their damn minds along with the rest of the Grand Old Party.
The ground under MAGA’s feet is surely shakier now that the Democrats control both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but it’s not like the American voters’ rebuke of Trumpism on Tuesday will necessarily make much immediate difference to the drawn-out suffering of Ukrainians, or of Venezuelans, or Iranians, either, for that matter.
Since the dramatic exfiltration of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro in January, Trump has sidelined Venezuela’s democrats by collaborating with Maduro’s Bolivarian socialist successor Delcy Rodríguez in plunder, “the greatest oil victory in history,” promising American voters untold oil riches and proposing to Venezuelans that they become America’s “51st state.” The new Congress might have something to say about this.
After the Khomeinist regime’s slaughter and imprisonment of tens of thousands of Iranians over the past year, Trump’s on-again, off-again war has left ordinary Iranians to cope with an annual inflation rate of 89.9 per cent. Wages are stagnant and falling, the cost of basic food stuffs has nearly doubled, and fuel prices have skyrocketed around the world. The White House is expected to resume strikes on Iran now that the midterms have passed. As for an Iranian endgame, Trump has expressed a preference for an Iranian version of his Venezuelan operation — a joint venture running the country in alliance with some faction of the Khomeinist dictatorship. It’s unclear whether a Democrat-controlled Congress would be keen on this sort of thing. One would hope not.
Canadian and American workers and farmers menaced by President Trump’s wildly unpopular and destructive border tariffs may even see some reprieve by way of Congressional intervention. You never know. But what matters most at the moment is the Trump administration’s service as an accomplice in the campaign of state terror that Russia is inflicting upon Ukraine.
The Democrats’ renewed control of Congress may move the needle a bit against President Trump’s persistent connivings on Russia’s behalf. Trump was already at odds with American public opinion on the Ukraine war, opposed by majority opinion in his own party, even, and he’s been running his manoeuvres on Moscow’s behalf in defiance of bipartisan consensus in the House and the Senate. The Democrats might be capable of at least encumbering Trump’s ceaseless humiliation and sabotage of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
So there’s that. Congress has subpoena powers, which should come in handy. In his new lame-duck status, Trump knows he has nothing to lose. He may be more dangerous now. In any event, his White House shouldn’t be expected to reverse course, so it’s up to Congress to act.
Trump has sided with Putin all along. As soon as he was elected, Trump cut off all military aid to Ukraine and busied himself with Russia-Ukraine “mediation,” usually in the form of self-dealing contrivances pushed by Putin’s sanctioned slush-fund manager Kirill Dmitriev, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s cofounder of the shadowy and immensely lucrative “stablecoin” racket known as World Liberty Financial.
More than once, Kushner, Witkoff and Dmitriev have colluded in efforts to challenge Europe’s control over the $245 billion in frozen Russian sovereign wealth funds locked down in the Euroclear securities depository in Belgium — funds that should be handed over to Ukraine in their entirety, as war reparations. One of the trio’s more recent schemes: Another lifeline to Russia, this one by way of a plan to circumvent European sanctions on Russian natural gas that would enrich Russian suppliers and American investors alike in a U.S. venture to pump Russian gas through Ukrainian pipelines into European markets. The idea followed a related Witkoff-Kushner-Dmitriev plan to revive the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to carry Russian gas to Europe. The proposals landed with loud thuds in Kyiv and Brussels.
Europe has been struggling to free itself from energy dependence on Russia, which involved payments that amounted to 10 billion euros annually by the time Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine began in 2022. By last year, Europe had reduced Russia’s share of its gas purchases to 12 per cent from 45 per cent. The EU is on target to end all gas imports from Russia over the next two years. All coal imports from Russia have been banned. Imports of Russian oil have shrunk from 27 per cent of overall imports to two per cent, and falling.
The Witkoff-Kushner-Dmitriev pipeline schemes would reverse all that. They were formulated as key to Trump’s unilateral Oct. 11 declaration of a Russia-Ukraine “energy ceasefire,” which Russia ignored, keeping up its attacks on Ukraine’s power plants. Ukraine bowed to U.S. pressure and paused strikes on Russian refineries for nearly two weeks, for nothing in return.
The energy ceasefire idea will be revisited in talks later this month in Abu Dhabi.
Trump’s interventions since January last year have consisted mostly of a series of shakedown operations weakening Kyiv along with endorsements of Russia’s demands: Ukraine must never be permitted to join NATO; Russia must be permitted to keep Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014, along with the territories Russia has seized in the Donbas region since 2022; Russia should be readmitted to the G7; Ukraine should be made to provide U.S. firms with upwards of $500 billion in rare earths and other mineral concessions; no European troops should be allowed to set foot in Ukraine in any post-war security arrangements. And on and on.
The American munitions and armaments that Ukraine has acquired since January 2025, notably Patriot missile systems, have been purchased from American arms manufacturers by Ukraine’s allies and passed on to Ukraine through the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL). The White House agreed to the mechanism in talks with NATO’s notoriously obsequious secretary-general, Mark Rutte, in the expectation that Trump might be dissuaded from pulling the United States out of NATO altogether. As of last month, the PURL purchases have earned American arms firms $10 billion.
It’s unclear whether the new Congress will be able to restore American funding to Ukraine, given Trump’s consistent use of the presidential veto to head off Congressional allocations to Kyiv. Only last month, Trump used his executive powers to waive provisions of the Lindsey Graham Russia sanctions law that would have severely disrupted Russia’s war-financing sales of oil and gas.
Named for Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died in July, the law was to come into effect on Oct. 18, but two days ahead of time Trump throttled it. The law would have authorized tariffs of up to 100 per cent on major purchasers, including Chinese and Indian importers, and it provided for stiff sanctions targeting the Russian petro-oligarchy and Moscow’s “shadow” fleet of tankers.
Trump’s waiver of the Lindsey Graham law’s provisions came only a week after his envoys concluded a deal with Moscow to sell American oil companies diesel oil from 300,000 tons that Trump unilaterally exempted from the Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act, adopted by Congress in 2022.
The move is dubiously legal, and Congress should exert itself here. The tankers carrying the diesel may not be permitted to put in at American ports, and they’re still subject to active Canadian and European sanctions. Trump’s case was the pretence that the deal would cut into the spike in fuel prices that were shaping up as voting-booth poison for his MAGA Congressional candidates.
All these manoeuvres have finally proved too much for Zelenskyy, who has quite rightly abandoned his policy of pretending to appreciate the Trump administration’s mischief. “Russia will ‘repay’ the diesel with further terror and perfidy,” Zelenskyy says. “Allowing Russia to sell petroleum products is an investment in a war that must be ended, not prolonged.”
Trump sees Ukraine as an impediment to profitable Russian partnerships in Arctic mining ventures and various oil and gas ventures. Europe and Canada see Russia as a profoundly dangerous threat to democracy and sovereignty. Overwhelmingly, majorities in both houses of the U.S. Congress see Russia the same way. That can’t be a bad thing.
If the United States wants to restore its stature among the civilized peoples of the world, containing Trumpist vandalism in Ukraine would be a very good place to start.
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