US President Donald Trump’s Oval Office outburst at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is symbolic of a world order changing before our very eyes.
Earlier in the week, we considered the shocking scenes in the White House, when Trump and vice president JD Vance turned on Zelenskyy.
Zelenskyy met Trump, Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in response to Trump’s scheme to extort half of Ukraine’s future mineral extraction out of Zelenskyy, under the threat of withdrawing support for its defensive war against Russia.
Ukraine has been fighting for its very existence against a Russian invasion that began just over three years ago. To date, the Western alliance, which includes the 32 countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, has been firmly behind Zelenskyy, backing Ukraine with war materiel, money and other forms of aid.
Budapest Memorandum
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine was, for a time, the third-largest nuclear-armed power in the world. It agreed to surrender its nuclear weapons in 1994 in return for security guarantees from the US, the UK, and Russia, in an agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum. China and France later also joined the agreement.
That agreement prohibits the signatories from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine. The violation of this agreement by Russia in 2014, when it invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimea, motivated and legitimised assistance to Ukraine on the part of the US, UK and France.
Flattery game
Zelenskyy’s mistake in the Oval Office was that when reporters raised the question of security guarantees, he departed from prior advice that the meeting was supposed to be a dog-and-pony show to stroke Trump’s ego, and not a forum to answer media questions openly and honestly.
He didn’t play the flattery game, which more skilful politicians use to such great effect to curry favour with Trump. Witness the Golden Age Act, introduced by some obsequious Republican lackey to place Trump’s spray-tanned visage on the US $100 bill, the Joint Resolution tabled by another fascist toady to allow Trump to run for a third term, the House Resolution introduced by a servile sycophant to have Trump added to Mount Rushmore, and the move by yet another fawning flatterer to make Trump’s birthday a national holiday.
Flattery is one of the two levers that operate Trump. (Money is the other.)
Zelenskyy thought it was about the issues, and foolishly expressed his justifiable distrust of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s need of firm security guarantees as a condition of any future ceasefire deal.
Where the world stands
Until a week ago, it was hard to know exactly where the world stood. Trump would routinely reverse course – one day accusing Zelenskyy of being a dictator and starting the war, only to deny having said any such thing days later.
When Zelenskyy left the White House without a deal, however, the world realised where it stood. When tariffs against Mexico and Canada went into effect with no good justification*, the world realised where it stood. When Trump directed the CIA to cease sharing intelligence with Ukraine, and suspended all military aid to the country, the world realised where it stood.
These actions, and the attempt to lay claim to Ukraine’s mineral wealth, arguably constitute violations of the Budapest Memorandum on the part of the US. The extortion of Ukraine’s minerals also violates the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which declares agreements procured by coercion, threat, or the use of force to be void.
Trump overturned the chess board.
A rift
That a rift was forming between the US and Europe had been clear for some time, and crystalised at last month’s Munich Security Conference, where Vance hypocritically berated European leaders about values like democracy and free speech, and said he was less worried about authoritarian states than Europe’s supposed “threat from within”.
Yet for months, foreign leaders kept holding out hope that Trump was just posturing and threatened allies as a crude negotiating tactic. It has now become clear to everyone that Trump is deadly serious both about “very dumb” economic policies (to quote Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau), and about burning bridges with America’s one-time Western allies.
It is now clear that Trump, and by extension, America, cannot be trusted. It can no longer be depended upon to uphold the post-war rules-based international order.
The right thing
It does not count as a vindication for Trump that Zelenskyy buckled and sent a letter to Trump in which he expressed his willingness to return to the negotiating table, and that Trump claimed Russia, too, is “ready for peace”.
Of course, Zelenskyy would want to avoid having to sacrifice almost half of Ukraine’s support and the backstop of a nuclear umbrella. Nobody needed a demonstration that Trump could wield raw American power.
Everybody knew that he could bully Zelenskyy into “making a deal”, however unfavourable it might be to Ukraine.
Nobody was surprised when Putin declared himself “ready for peace” on terms that he had worked out with Trump long before Zelenskyy was even invited to the discussion.
The world was waiting to see if Trump would do the right thing. World leaders wanted to see whether America still merited the mantle of moral leadership to which it once laid claim.
It is now clear that it no longer does. The legal norms and universal principles that governed international relations for 80 years have been ripped up. We have entered a new era of rivalry among rival great powers, in which national interests take precedence, principles no longer matter, and might makes right.
Playing cards
It cannot be denied that Trump – to adopt his card-playing analogy – played directly into Putin’s hands.
“The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations,” Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary for the Russian government, told Russian state television. “This largely aligns with our vision.”
Former Russian president and current deputy chair of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, put it bluntly: “The Trump administration no longer wants to feed the Nazi mutt in Kiev. The flea-ridden dog was picked up by a decrepit Europe, joyfully exclaiming ‘My doggie’! It’s no use, the mad parasitic dog is dangerous. So, better to put it down quietly, without any suffering.”
“It hurts to watch it unfolding,” Volodymyr Dubovyk, the head of Odessa National University’s Center for International Studies, told the Kyiv Independent. “We can scrap everything that we previously knew about U,S. foreign policy.”
A Ukrainian soldier interviewed for the article was not lost for words: “I’m full of anger,” he told the paper. “America has sided with Russia, North Korea, and Iran, they have chosen the side of darkness.”
Trump’s alignment with Moscow is also calculated to benefit the US economically. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been quoted as saying that “if everything works as planned with the Ukraine settlement, Washington and Moscow could have a beautiful economic partnership on their hands”.
Trump can’t wait to drop sanctions against Russia, in preparation for which he gutted US anti-money laundering laws over the weekend.
Solidarity
European leaders spent the week demonstrating solidarity with Ukraine and support for Zelenskyy.
The next likely German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, told a press conference: “It was not a spontaneous reaction to interventions by Zelenskyy, but obviously a manufactured escalation in this meeting in the Oval Office. We must now show that we are in a position to act independently in Europe.”
Keir Starmer, the prime minister of Britain, said that Europe was at a “crossroads in history”, and that its countries would have to do the “heavy lifting” for their own security.
Speaking to 18 other European leaders in London, he said that the UK and France would lead a “coalition of the willing” to defend Ukraine. The meeting agreed to sustain aid to the embattled country, maintain economic pressure on Russia, ensure that Ukraine was at the bargaining table for any peace talks, that any deal must provide for Ukraine’s sovereignty and security, and that Ukraine must remain sufficiently armed after the war to deter future invasions.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, called it a “watershed moment for Europe”.
At an emergency summit in Brussels on Sunday, European leaders were close to agreeing an €800 billion plan to rearm Europe.
Clear and present danger
“Europe faces a clear and present danger,” said Von der Leyen, “and therefore Europe has to be able to protect itself, to defend itself, as we have to put Ukraine in a position to protect itself and to push for a lasting and just peace.”
In London, she said: “We have to put Ukraine in a position of strength so that it has the means to fortify itself and to protect itself. It’s basically turning Ukraine into a steel porcupine that is indigestible for potential invaders.”
Meanwhile, Emmanuel Macron, president of the only remaining nuclear power in the European Union (now that the UK has left it), has signalled his country’s readiness to discuss nuclear deterrence with its European allies.
The European Union for its part has proposed its own “win-win” minerals deal with Ukraine. The European Commissioner for industrial strategy, Stephane Sejourne, told the Associated Press: “The added value Europe offers is that we will never demand a deal that’s not mutually beneficial.”
Unlike Trump, Europeans are not convinced by Putin’s “peace offensives”. They understand that such overtures are merely strategic diversions, designed to split the Western alliance – an objective Russia now appears to have achieved.
United front
The upshot of all this is that while Europe still hopes to salvage its relationship with the US, it recognises that it might be left adrift without protection in a hostile world.
Trump’s actions have galvanised European leaders, who showed a rare united front in support of Zelenskyy and in defence of Ukraine. They recognise that if Ukraine falls, other European countries would be in the firing line, such as Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, and countries in the south-east of Europe.
There’s a real sense of urgency in Europe to build up a military capability that can replace the projected power of the US. This will turn Europe into a fully independent great power in a way that it hasn’t needed to be since World War II.
I suggested in my previous article that perhaps Trump is playing 4D chess after all. He has often said that he wants Europe to carry most of the responsibility for the defence of both Ukraine and itself.
By turning over the chessboard, he may well achieve exactly that.
A more dangerous world
This is not a good thing. Dismantling the rules-based international order in favour of renewed realpolitik between rival powers will make the world a more dangerous place. It will be a world in which far more is spent on the means of war. Weapons want to be used.
It will give smaller nuclear powers and non-nuclear countries a renewed incentive to pursue their own nuclear arsenals to secure independent means of deterrence and power in a multi-polar world.
By ceding his position as “leader of the free world”, Trump is sacrificing much of the influence the US once wielded in defence of democracy and free societies. He will cede the moral high ground, in favour of a world in which right or wrong no longer matter, international law retreats, and raw power becomes the primary determinant of national success or failure.
He will also hurt the US economically. Free trade and cooperation with allies that are well-disposed to it has long been the basis of America’s extraordinary prosperity. Right now, America is alienating even its closest allies.
Trump is returning America to an archaic, mercantilist vision of self-reliance, dependent on win-lose coercive “deals” instead of voluntary, win-win exchange.
That foreshadows a world in which a more insular, isolationist America becomes both weaker and poorer. It will shrink its sphere of influence, ceding power and influence both to its former allies in Europe and to its traditional enemies.
With Europe more determined than ever to stand alone and defend itself, Trump may well get what he said he wanted. But, as the adage goes, “Be careful what you wish for; you may just get it.”
*As this article went to press, news broke that US import tariffs against Mexico and Canada would again be delayed, several days after they took effect. Earlier, Trump moved to temporarily exempt US automakers from the tariffs, which suggests that someone, somewhere, realises that tariffs are bad for American companies. Trump’s flip-flopping makes banking on his word impossible.
[Image: Ukrainian soldiers compete in the Tanker Olympics task during the Strong Europe Tank Challenge, June 8, 2018. Photo: 7th Army Training Command. Used under CC BY 2.0 licence.]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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