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THE world sat spellbound watching as a shouting match erupted in the Oval Office on live TV, with the US president and his guest the Ukrainian president speaking over each other in a rising decibel exchange, triggered by the remarks of the finger-waving US vice-president.
If the world needed any evidence that 105 years on, Trump policies today were little different to the agenda that propelled Warren Harding (trade, tariffs and not much else, multilateralism included) into the White House in 1920 and marked the start of the US ‘isolationism’, it came in abundance in the two presidents’ meeting with J.D. Vance acting as the ‘catalyst’.
For, it was Vance who provoked the Ukrainian leader to fall into the trap set for him. Yes, it may have seemed a spontaneous spiral, but to me it was scripted. Scripted to play to the MAGA gallery which, as the US right-wing media reaction demonstrated, lapped it up, loved it because it’s been told it has been paying for a meaningless war.
While Europe (the newly born leader of the ‘Free World’), sprang vocally to Volodymyr Zelensky’s defence, with leaders ranging from Keir Starmer to Emmanuel Macron to Pedro Sanchez to Donald Tusk to many others making clear their position in public declarations, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who has called Trump his comrade-in-arms, was the solitary voice of dissent.
He wants to run US government and policy as a ‘transactional’ private sector CEO.
While those who voted for Trump saw their leader walking the talk, Europe which was always punching above its weight in terms of seeking an expansion of Nato further to the east of Poland into Ukraine was now closing ranks, having been ditched by the US.
Europe’s desire to see Ukraine in Nato was not matched by its defence spending and would always have to be reliant on the US to foot a big part of the bill. So far US leaders have happily picked it up through their extraordinary defence budget. But Trump says no more.
He wants to run US government and policy as a ‘transactional’ private sector CEO and has repeatedly asked why the US should foot the bill for, inter alia, Europe’s security when there is a huge deficit at home. Trust Trump, of course, to exaggerate, even lie and cite spurious figures such as the over $350 billion for the Ukraine war effort so far with the actual amount nearer $185bn.
French leader Macron reached out earlier this week gently to touch Trump’s arm and point out with a smile that Europe has paid some 60 per cent of the war’s cost when the US president was again trying to make his MAGA voter believe he was the only one paying for it.
Even then, few world leaders have what it takes to say to the US the price it’s paying is for its imperialist, hegemonic policies because it wants to dominate the world militarily so as to shape it in line with its capitalist ideals. Macron was sitting in the same Oval Office chair in which Zelensky found himself at the weekend.
The Trump-Vance-Zelensky blow-up came after several days of Trump denigrating the Ukrainian leader, calling him a dictator whose popularity rating was down to 4pc (another lie) and who now needed to pay the US back via a $500bn rare earth minerals deal.
Despite this several days long baiting, Zelensky arrived in the US to sign the deal. In return, he wanted ironclad security guarantees. Trump was only willing to say ‘well our presence’ (in the mineral exploration projects) would ensure peace. And that Vladimir Putin understood this.
This did not seem enough for Ukraine and may have been the reason the trap was sprung, mainly to tell the US public how adamant Zelensky was not to make any ‘concessions’ and how ‘disrespectful’ he’d been to the US leaders, White House and Congress.
This was the spiral which the world watched live. A provoked Zelensky lashed out and then the fallout, according to US media reports, led to him being asked to leave the White House with the deal signing, joint presser and lunch cancelled.
Soon afterwards, US Congress veteran Republican Lindsay Graham, a staunch Trump ally, also harped on the ‘disrespect to the US’ tune, even calling for Zelensky’s resignation. Against this backdrop, whether a deal could still be salvaged is not clear; more significantly, neither is whether this meeting will once more lead to US isolationism.
The last time the US came out of its post-World War I isolationism was with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour during World War II. Will it take another Pearl Harbour for MAGA supporters to realise that the world today is even more interlinked via the US-pushed globalisation than it was back then?
Or will something else dictate the course of history? In the immediate short term, for example, will Zelensky buckle and agree to a deal on Trump-Putin terms which basically accept the status quo in Donbass and also the Russian annexation of Crimea?
For someone like this columnist, whose faith has been shaken, more or less shattered, by the ‘democratic West’s’ endorsement of the denial of Palestinians rights and more recently the Gaza genocide, it may be easier not to be too concerned by these developments.
It would be easy to pass this off as a fight between supporters of those responsible for the denial of Palestinian rights, occupation of their land and worst of all their dehumanisation. But would that be too simplistic, even dogmatic?
The only redeeming sign in all of this is that Trump has once again signalled his aversion to war. He has always been warm and understanding towards Putin; so much so that he is now suggesting he’d be prepared to ditch Zelensky. Will his aversion to conflict also translate into restraining Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel? I know you’d say if wishes were horses.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, March 2nd, 2025
