Opinion Showdown in White House, a world made smaller

One of the key tenets of diplomacy is that differences between countries and leaders should be dealt with in private and agreements signed in public. This is necessary to ensure and protect room for manoeuvre for all players. On Friday, at the Oval Office in the White House, however, the opposite was on display: The differences — political, geopolitical, personal — between US President Donald Trump and Vice President J D Vance, on one side and Ukraine’s embattled leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the other, were aired in full global view. The agreement on providing the US access to rare earth minerals is now on the back burner. The meeting, which saw Vance and Trump attack the Ukrainian president for “not saying thank you” and all but bullied for “not having the cards”, is important for its implications for the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and broader European security. It is also an illustration of a more fundamental disruption, in the Trump era, of diplomacy-as-usual.

The speed with which Trump has upended Washington’s positions on Ukraine and diminished the transatlantic alliance has left many stunned. Clearly, the US’s external orientation is now visibly informed by Trump’s domestic political compulsions. The attack on Zelenskyy reiterated issues that have become part and parcel of the Trump-Vance camp’s appeal to the MAGA base: That the American taxpayer is subsidising Ukraine’s war and Europe’s security. In this anti-interventionist pitch, Zelenskyy has been painted as a prime antagonist. It also appears that Trump is willing, if not quite ready, to pull the plug on US support in the continent. This rapid unsettling of the transatlantic alliance, in place since World War II, has placed Europe in a profound crisis. Soon after Zelenskyy left the US, a summit-level meeting of European leaders was held in London, in which UK PM Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron spoke of an alternative peace plan for Ukraine, which they will present to Washington. Another “special summit” for “Ukraine and European defence” is to be held in Brussels on March 6. Two things are clear from the reactions in Europe since the Trump-Zelenskyy meeting fiasco. First, Europe must be ready to do more of the heavy lifting with Washington threatening to withdraw from its role as a security provider. Second, for all the voices in support of Ukraine and Zelenskyy, Europe realises that it still needs the US for any peace plan to succeed.

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The public attack on Zelenskyy and its aftermath is an indication that international relations are going through a churn in both form and substance. Given that the US continues to be the pre-eminent economic and military power, leaders and diplomats must now learn to deal with the volatility and politicisation of inter-state ties. In Europe, the task appears to be one of developing a new architecture for how it approaches the world and its place in it — the US may no longer be “everywhere” on the global stage to back it up. It must find ways to engage with Russia on its terms and more broadly, make its agreements with other powers even as it tries to keep the channel open across the Atlantic.