The now customary refrain of those trying to engage with President Donald Trump has been to ‘take him seriously, but not literally’. The Academician Josep M.Colomer expounded on the theme in an article for the ‘Fair Observer’ website.
“To try to foresee the next four years with US President-Elect Donald Trump, we should remember what we learned during his first presidential term: It is a mistake to take him literally and mock him because he is not serious in his bravado. Better the other way: Take him seriously, but not literally. Trump’s advantage is that he is not guided by rigid ideological principles, in contrast to the bellicosity of both the “neocons” and the “woke,” but is open to pragmatic transactions — always, of course, if they satisfy his vanity or his business. Another advantage of his, paradoxically, is that there will be open results due to his incompetence and disorder.”
For those objecting to this analysis from a left-wing academic, a similar line was deployed by Nigel Farage a few days ago on GB News.
“Do I agree with every single word the president says? Look, the old saying, and it’s true. You should always take Trump seriously, but not necessarily always take him literally.”
Yet last night’s diplomatic disaster in the Oval Office, when Trump and his Vice-President J.D.Vance berated President Zelensky, a man whose country is currently engaged in an existential struggle with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, probably should have been foreseen given Trump (and indeed Vance) has been expressing antipathy towards the Ukrainian cause for years.
Trump really should have been taken literally.
Last year, as Republicans in the U.S.Congress held up desperately needed aid for Ukraine, the journalist Veronika Melkozerova wrote an article for Politico entitled ‘Why Donald Trump hates Ukraine’ where she posits that the root of Trump’s contempt for Zelensky and the Ukrainian cause goes back to ‘Russiagate’ and the subsequent investigations which culminated in the Mueller report)’.
“Trump hates Ukraine,” said Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-American businessman who once served as a fixer in Ukraine for Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and later turned against the former president. “He and people around him believe that Ukraine was the cause of all Trump’s problems…
It began when Russiagate started,” Parnas said, referring to allegations of Russian election hacking that would eventually lead to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. “People in Trump’s campaign told him that it was Ukrainians not Russians meddling in the elections.”
Trump’s election victory was marred by accusations, later confirmed by U.S. intelligence agencies, private intelligence firms and federal investigators, that Russia had hacked the emails of the Democratic National Committee, the party’s strategic and funding arm, and released them in 2016 to discredit Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Trump has consistently promoted a conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine that performed the hacking, in order to frame Russia, and that the country was still concealing a server with the data.”
Trump’s relationship with Zelensky and Ukraine was further soured when, during his first term, he made a ‘perfect’ phone call to the Ukrainian leader pressuring Zelensky to open an investigation into Joe Biden (his then putative opponent in the 2020 election). Trump attempted to condition American military aid on the opening of this investigation, and the revelation of the call led directly to his first impeachment.
For someone whose vindictiveness is legendary, Melkozerova’s article concisely lays out the root cause of his personal animosity, but Ukraine also has had the misfortune of being at odds with him ideologically, and it is a truly sad state of affairs when a nation which aspires to join the west as a liberal democracy is considered to be ideologically at odds with the American President.
Trump’s affinity for autocrats is at this point well known. He prefers working with leaders unencumbered by checks and balances or the rule of law at home, whose swaggering machismo and often unbridled nationalism seem to appeal to him and whom he apparently wishes to emulate. He has far more time for them than other democratically elected leaders who are answerable to their electorates and who are invested in the existing global political architecture.
Which is another point of divergence.
Trump does not care for international law, the rules-based global order or something as amorphous as ‘shared values’. Trump sees these concepts, and the international organisations which exist to support them, as the rest of the world treating the United States as Uncle Sucker. He even articulated a belief that the EU was formed to ‘screw the US’ (which happily ignores its existence as an organisation determined to avoid the resumption of war to Europe by facilitating peaceful co-operation. Trump favours a solipsistic interpretation wherein the sole prism to judge the EU is on how he perceives its impact on the US). Trump instead favours a more transactional approach, wherein American support may be forthcoming but only if there is something in it for the United States. Ukraine’s initial pitch, of standing in defense of that rules based order that the West is supposed to represent, which Ukraine aspired to join, may have been enough for someone like Joe Biden to offer unqualified support but nowhere near enough for Donald Trump, who desired something more tangible than concepts he clearly holds in contempt.
Between personal and ideological animosity, Trump has attempted to force an unjust peace on Ukraine which would see territory surrendered to the Russian aggressor whilst the United States would gorge itself on Ukraine’s mineral wealth. Trump has serially lied about Ukraine since his return to office, one of those lies being that the Americans provided vastly more support to Ukraine than the Europeans did (the totals are in fact roughly equal), and that the Europeans cleverly gave their aid in the form in the loans whereas the Americans were suckered into giving them as grants (a huge proportion of American aid was in fact spent in American factories, employing American workers to build American weapons which were then sent to Ukraine) and he has proven immune to being corrected on these lies as, for example, he simply repeats the discredited $350 billion number so often that it is clear he doesn’t want to be corrected (and provides a textbook example of a ‘big lie‘ in the modern world). The lies are a means to an end, achieving that unjust peace (Trump is said to crave a Nobel peace prize to match the prize given to Barack Obama and may believe this is his way of getting one, which if true would mean that part of his motivations is appeasing his own ego) and essentially shaking Ukraine down for whatever the US can extract from it. Zelensky has proven open to a mineral deal, even one on terms that are incredibly punitive for a state that has been victimised by a much bigger neighbour, but he insisted that it be accompanied by American security guarantees designed to deter Russia from doing what everyone other Trump fully expects Russia to do otherwise; re-arm and in a few years invade again (though it maybe Trump does expect that, doesn’t care and would simply ascribe blame to someone other than themselves for things going sideways. He has form on this, while the Afghnistan withdrawal debacle happened on Joe Biden’s watch and Trump heavily criticised his successor, Trump was the one who negotiated it and did so on terms favourable to the Taliban as he was in a hurry to exit).
Trump does not want to offer American security guarantees to Zelensky though, meaning the deal he has offered Zelensky is of little practical use to the Ukrainian President.
Which of course, all culminated in the spectacle of yesterday where Trump and Vance attempted to strongarm Zelensky in front of the world’s media.
And it being a breakdown casued by ideological divergence is the best reading of yesterday’s events. Some, such Jonathan Chait in ‘the Atlantic’, are arguing that Zelensky walked into a trap with Trump seeking a pretext to abandon Ukraine.
“It was a setup. Trump and Vance appear to have entered the meeting with the intention of berating Zelensky and drawing him into an argument as a pretext for the diplomatic break. Why should anyone have expected anything different? Trump has been regurgitating Russian propaganda, not only regarding Ukraine, since before Zelensky even assumed office. He defended Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2018 (the year preceding Zelensky’s election), has repeatedly refused to acknowledge Russian guilt for various murders, and has even stuck to Russian talking points on such idiosyncratic topics as the Soviets’ supposedly defensive rationale for invading Afghanistan in 1979 and their fear that an “aggressive” Montenegro would attack Russia, dragging NATO into war.”
Which is a reading so incredibly cynical that you cannot help but feel it’s probably correct, given the depressing state of the world at this point in time means that the worst explanations are likely the true ones.
Perhaps our expectations had been raised too high this past week.
We had seen first President Macron of France, and then Prime Minister Starmer of Britain sit in those same chairs early in the week, enjoying highly successful meetings with President Trump. They even got away with gently correcting him on his lies about Ukraine. They were careful to be deferential where required, and to be flattering where necessary. This is realpolitik of course, both countries are desperately trying to keep the United States engaged in the existing international order, which they believe has safeguarded most of the world for nearly 80 years.
Zelensky has a different calculus however. He is not worried about a future hypothetical threat, but an existential one his country has been battling for three years and which is killing his countrymen and countrywomen every single day. He was being pressured into a deal that did not serve the long-term interests of his country, that could see it economically vassalised by one power whilst still open to future attack by the other.
He did the unthinkable in public and in the President’s presence.
He did not bend the knee to Trump.
Trump’s rage led to the collapse of the prospective mineral deal, Zelensky being told in no uncertain terms to leave the White House and a full blown crisis in the transatlantic Alliance with the vast majority of European states backing Zelensky (Viktor Orbán being the usual dissenter). The bonhomie of the Macro and Starmer visits has already faded. Instead, as European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said in the linked politico article…
“Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader. It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.”
Former French foreign minister and possible future French presidential candidate Dominique de Villepin was interviewed in an article in the Guardian and he laid out the stark choices ahead for Europe.
“We now have three illiberal superpowers: Russia, China and the US,” De Villepin says. “America can no longer be considered an ally of Europe.” But he warns that the US will not prosper in this disordered, survival-of-the-fittest world it is creating, “because they will be completely isolated”.
Whilst De Villepin is probably right that many Americans will live to regret the long term implications of Trump’s actions, it doesn’t change the fact that urgent action on European security can no longer be put off. The French have seemed somewhat ahead of the curve rhetorically on the need for European independence (if not entirely in practice) as this article in Politico posits…
“France wasn’t wrong. It was just early.
In 1956, as U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower dramatically forced Britain and France to back down from a military intervention to regain control of the Suez Canal from Egypt, French distrust of America started to simmer.
While Eisenhower had helped lead the 1944 liberation of France from Nazi Germany, during Suez he worked with the United Nations behind European countries’ backs to impose a ceasefire, leaving Almost 70 years later, Eisenhower’s Suez maneuvering is inextricably linked to current French President Emmanuel Macron’s long-running, so-far unsuccessful push to wean Europe off the American military support that has underwritten the continent’s security since World War II ended.
“The leaders of the Fourth Republic deduced that the Americans could not be counted on, and decided to start developing France’s own nuclear deterrent,” said Yannick Pincé, a historian at the Ecole Normale Supérieure’s Interdisciplinary Center for Strategic Issues in Paris.
“It was a traumatic experience for the French elite, that our allies could abandon us,” Pincé added.
The cornerstone Macronian concept of “strategic autonomy” — investment in a credible, self-sufficient European defense so the continent can militarily take care of itself without America — is now set for its moment under the microscope. Disruptive U.S. President Donald Trump has seriously undermined the transatlantic relationship and the NATO military alliance, while aligning with a bellicose Russia.
Though most of France’s European allies rely on America’s almighty military and nuclear umbrella, Vladimir Putin’s menacing specter on the EU border and Trump’s warmth toward the Russian dictator are sparking questions about U.S. dependability — and eliciting new answers.”
The article goes further back and references the prescient thinking of Charles DeGaulle.
“Trump’s bombastic return arguably vindicated long-standing Gallic warnings — dating back to the legendary General Charles de Gaulle — about the risks, and strings, attached to U.S. dominance.
France’s most revered politician, de Gaulle led the French resistance against Adolf Hitler’s Nazis in World War II, then became the father of France’s Fifth Republic upon his return to power in the late 1950s.
De Gaulle’s relationship with the U.S. was complex, characterized by loyalty in key moments but also a lack of trust dating back to World War II as allies struggled to agree on the architecture of France’s liberation and even mulled an occupation…
A decade later, in one of Paris’ most dramatic standoffs with Washington, de Gaulle famously withdrew France from NATO’s integrated command, leading to the removal of U.S. military bases and troops from French soil. Paris continued to ramp up its atomic program, gaining its own nuclear weapons and developing a powerful defense industry with few ties to the U.S.”
As with Britain’s membership of the EU, history has once again conspired to prove DeGaulle right. And now what?
These past few weeks have demonstrated that the world most of us knew is likely gone. Even the best-case scenario for those who believe in the transatlantic alliance, that Trump will be succeeded by a committed Atlanticist dedicated to rebuilding what Trump has destroyed, recognise that what Trump is destroying will not easily be rebuilt.
We seem to be returning to a world where the strong do as they will and the weak suffer what they must. That’s a tragedy, but also a reality, and there is no point in clinging to the past. Europe has to figure out how it is going to stand up for the values it believes in and it has to figure out how to support Ukraine in a world where the US leadership is more interested in cozying up to Vladimir Putin than defending democracy.
Europe has to figure out how to be strong.
I’m a firm believer in Irish unity and I live in the border regions of Tyrone.
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