After five weeks in which President Trump made clear his determination to rule out the traditional sources of power of the United States – his alliances between related democracies – and return the country to an era of raw negotiations between great powers, also left a question in the air: how far would Ukraine sacrifice for his vision?
The remarkable confrontation that occurred before the cameras at the beginning of Friday afternoon from the Oval Office provided the answer.
While Trump whipped President Volodimir Zelenski and warned him that “you don’t have the letters” to deal with the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and vice president JD Vance crossed out the Ukrainian leader of “disrespectful” and ungrateful, it was clear that the three -year war association between Washington and kyiv had become shattered.
It remains to be seen if it can be repaired and if the agreement can be recovered to provide the United States income from Ukrainian minerals, which was the apparent reason for the visit.
But the broader truth is that the poisonous exchanges – transmitted not only to an amazed American and European audience who had never seen mutual attacks as open, but also to Putin and their Kremlin assistants – showed that Trump considers Ukraine an obstacle to what he sees as a much more vital project.
What Trump really wants, said a high European official this week before the outbreak, is a normalization of the relationship with Russia. If that means rewriting the history of the illegal invasion by Moscow three years ago, abandoning investigations on Russian war crimes or refusing to offer Ukraine lasting security guarantees, then Trump, in this evaluation of its intentions, is willing to make that treatment.
For anyone who was listening carefully, that goal was just under the surface while Zelenski headed to Washington for his disastrous visit.
The Secretary of State Marco Rubio – who used to defend Ukraine and his territorial sovereignty, and who is now in favor of Trump’s power games – made it clear in an interview with Breitbart News that the time had come to go beyond the war in order to establish a triangular relationship between the United States, Russia and China.
“We are going to have disagreements with the Russians, but we have to have a relationship with both,” said Rubio. He carefully avoided any expression that could suggest, as he often said as a senator, that Russia was the aggressor, or that there was a risk that, if she was not punished for her attack on Ukraine, she could then attack an Otan country.
“They are large and powerful countries with nuclear arsenals,” he said referring to Russia and China. “They can project power worldwide. I think we have lost the concept of maturity and sanity in diplomatic relations. ”
Trump does not hide his opinion that the system after World War, created by Washington, eaten American power.
Above all, that system valued relations with allies committed to democratic capitalism, even maintaining those alliances that involved a cost for US consumers. It was a system that tried to avoid the monitoring of power by making the observance of international law, and respect for the established international borders, an objective in itself.
For Trump, that system gave the smallest and less powerful countries influence on the United States, letting the Americans pay an excessive part of the account to defend the allies and promote their prosperity.
While their predecessors – both Democrats as Republicans – insisted that alliances in Europe and Asia were the largest force multiplier in the United States, and that they maintained peace and allowed trade to flourish, Trump considered them a bleeding wound. In the 2016 presidential campaign, he repeatedly asked why the United States should defend countries that had commercial surplus with the United States.
In the five weeks elapsed since its second inauguration, Trump has begun to implement a plan to destroy that system. That explains his requirement that Denmark gives the control of Greenland to the United States, and that Panama returns a channel that Americans built. When asked how he could seize sovereign territory in Gaza for his reurbalization in his plan of a “Riviera de Middle East”, he replied: “Under the authority of the United States.”
But Ukraine was always a more complicated case. Only 26 months ago, Zelenski was held in Washington as a warrior of democracy, he was invited to go to a joint meeting of Congress, and Democrats and Republicans alike applauded him for dealing with the shameless aggression of a murderous enemy.
Trump and Vance had pointed out for months that, in their opinion, the American commitment to the sovereignty of Ukraine had come to an end. Three weeks ago, Trump told an interviewer that Ukraine, an ancient Soviet republic who had gladly accepted his independence, narrowed ties with Western Europe and trying to join NATO, “could be Russian one day.”
For the shock of the United States allies, Vance traveled to the Munich Security Conference two weeks ago and said nothing about ensuring that any armistice or high fire would be accompanied by security guarantees for Ukraine, nor that Russia would pay a price for its invasion.
Instead, Vance seemed to adhere to the ascending extreme right party in Germany and his counterparts throughout Europe. Gone was the speech of the time of Biden about staying next to Ukraine “all the time is needed” to deter Russia from any temptation to bring the war more west.
Zelenski saw all this, of course – was also in Munich – but it is clear that he did not understand the collective mood as his European supporters did. While French president Emmanuel Macron and British prime minister Keir Starmer preceded the oval office with elaborate plans to placate Trump and explain how Europe was increasing his own military expense, Zelenski bit the hook, especially when Vance began to make fun of Ukraine efforts for recruiting soldiers.
He became combative and told Trump that the oceans between the United States and Russia would not protect him forever. Trump raised his voice and told the Ukrainian that he would be lucky if he got a high fire, suggesting that any condition – or none – would be better than his inevitable defeat.
“I want to see guarantees,” Zelenski replied. And minutes later, he left the White House, without eating his rosemary chicken lunch and Crème Brûlée, without signing the agreement on minerals and with the future capacity of his country to defend against a renewed Russian thrust to overthrow kyiv in question.
Almost immediately, the world retreated its family corners.
Macron, putting himself on the side of the Ukrainian leader, urged the West to thank the Ukrainians for being the defense of freedom. The Eastern European nervous, headed by Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. But privately, several European diplomats said they thought the damage could be irreparable.
The Russians celebrated their good luck. The former president Dmitri A. Medvedev thanked Trump for “telling the truth” to Zelenski. He urged him to suspend the rest of American aid.
Rubio was one of the first to congratulate the president for putting in his place a man whom the Secretary of State used to applaud in a shirt like a modern Churchill.
“Thanks @potus for defending the United States in a way that no president has had the courage to do before,” Rubio wrote on social networks. “Thank you for putting the United States first.”
Of course, it is much easier to repeat Trump’s favorite slogan, and explode an existing world order, than to create a new one. It took decades to assemble the rules of global commitment to World War II and, with all its defects, the system succeeded in its main objectives: avoid the war between great powers and promote economic interdependence.
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Trump has never explained in detail what would replace these rules, apart from the fact that he would use the military and economic power of the United States to reach agreements, basically an argument according to which to maintain peace is as simple as interweaveing agreements on minerals and commercial pacts, perhaps with some real estate transactions involved.
There are few precedents that suggest that this approach works on its own, especially when it comes to authoritarian leaders such as Putin and the president of China, Xi Jinping, who adopt a long -term perspective when they deal with democracies that, in their opinion, lack the sustained will necessary to achieve difficult objectives.
But, judging by Friday’s exhibition in the Oval Office, Trump seems convinced that, while he is to the helm, the world will be ordered as he disposes.