Diplomatic visits – especially when they involve the head of state – are usually micromanaged to an almost unbelievable degree. Protocol is delicately handled, attention is paid to phrasing – even to whether a leader prefers to talk business over food, and what they like to eat.
By the time world leaders appear together in front of the media on such trips, they are usually putting on a co-ordinated show, trying to show what they have accomplished and what great friends they are – and agreeing to push any differences under the carpet for now.
And then there is whatever the hell just happened between Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on Friday. The Vice President tore into Ukraine’s President in full view of the world’s media, accusing him of campaigning for their opponent, of organising “propaganda tours” for Western politicians, and of committing the sin of ingratitude.
Trump first watched impassively and then launched into similar lines of argument against an embattled Zelensky. As Trump asked him who was “holding the cards” at the moment, the Ukrainian leader – whose countrymen and women were fighting and dying against Russian aggressors even as the meeting took place – was desperately trying to make the point that none of this is a game to him.
The United States has fallen out with its allies before, sometimes in spectacular fashion. It humiliated Britain and France over the Suez Crisis, but only after both nations engaged in an invasion it had specifically vetoed over a fabricated pretext. Americans ate “freedom fries” for a time after France condemned its invasion of Iraq in 2003, but official relations stayed cordial, if frosty.
All of which means the public degradation of Zelensky – the head of state of an allied nation, during a time of war – is simply without precedent in American history. Never before has an American president allowed an allied president to be spoken to in that room in that way as the world’s press watched, let alone joined in himself.
After the shock – and the shock in embassies across the world is very real indeed – will come the ramifications. Donald Trump’s stated aim is to negotiate a peace treaty which both Russia and Ukraine are willing, if not exactly happy, to sign. This peace is supposed to guarantee an independent Ukraine, out of which America can extract mining rights, and which can trade peacefully with Europe, even if it cannot join Nato.
Allowing JD Vance to monster Ukraine’s President publicly, with a barrage of talking points familiar from both Kremlin media and right-wing US TV hosts, does nothing to accomplish those goals. This did not have the feel of a carefully stage-managed row in pursuit of a greater purpose. It just looked like petulance.
Donald Trump had reportedly nearly cancelled Zelensky’s visit on at least one occasion this week, with only the personal intervention of France’s Emmanuel Macron persuading him to keep the meeting.
It was hoped Zelensky could charm Trump to some extent, convince him that the minerals deal he had coerced out of Ukraine was a major victory and that Trump would say something which suggested the US would act as the guarantor of any peace deal it negotiated.
After the Oval Office debacle, European leaders are likely to wish the visit had been cancelled after all. Ukraine’s security position is not as fragile as some imagine: it receives weapons and money from Europe, and while defending its territory will be harder and bloodier with less US support, Russia will not win overnight. The facts on the ground don’t change all at once.
But this unprecedentedly awful meeting does serve as yet another grim wake-up call for European leaders ahead of their security meeting in London this weekend. Just as Macron and Starmer were congratulating themselves on their textbook visits – and hoping something resembling normality might be salvaged out of Trump’s second term – it has all come crashing down.
Donald Trump has just reminded the world there is no such thing as business as usual any more. The world’s greatest superpower will humiliate a wartime ally in public, for almost no good reason. It is for the rest of the world to work out what on Earth they can do about it.
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