Washington has decided to increasingly engage with Moscow, starting with excluding Ukraine from peace talks in mid-February, followed by voting along with Russia and North Korea against a European-backed United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s aggression, and culminating by stopping weapons delivery and intelligence support.

Such a chain of events highlights how a change of a great power’s foreign policy could affect the overall security environment. In fact, United States-Russia-Ukraine relations underline the growing unpredictability of the current geopolitical trends and the future of alliances and strategic partnerships.

The shift in US foreign policy will eventually impact regional stability, sooner rather than later.

The first and immediate implication has been apparent in Europe, where the European Union announced a plan to provide up to 150 billion-euro loans to support its members boost their armed forces and defense industries as a response to the US decision to freeze all military aid to Ukraine.

The EU’s move to ramp up its military force for deterrence, while also supporting Ukraine, underlines its strategic anxiety on the current geopolitical reality and how US-Europe alliance would look like.

Similar concerns also applied to US allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific. Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, the Quad (Australia, India, Japan and the US) is likely continuing to be the front face of the US security and defense strategy in the Indo-Pacific, while questions could be directed to the role of AUKUS (Australia, the United Kingdom and the US) and whether Canberra could still count on Washington to support the former’s China strategy.