For the better part of a week, President Donald Trump’s opponents have been misrepresenting what happened in his excruciating Oval Office meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, called the argument a “calculated political ambush” by Trump and Vice President JD Vance on Zelensky. The take from Susan Rice, a member of former President Barack Obama’s inner circle, was, “There is no question that this was a set-up.”
But if you watch the whole meeting, you see it was rather obviously not a set-up. The Left’s partisan assessment is utter borscht.
The meeting collapsed when Zelensky used a Vance comment to a reporter about diplomacy as a cue to denigrate, even mock, Trump’s effort to end the war, including by talking with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Ukrainian leader had by then been contradicting Trump for about 10 minutes on various subjects, snapping at the hand that has fed him $120 billion over the past three years. It was grating.
His on-camera relitigation of Putin’s perfidies, evidently to undercut Trump’s approach, made Vance finally snap and reprimand him for disrespect and ingratitude. Even after that, Trump tried to calm the atmosphere but eventually lost his cool, barking, “You don’t have the cards.”
All three men are to blame. Trump should have called the photo-op to a close rather than let it disintegrate as it did. Vance should have restrained himself. Zelensky should not have arrogantly goaded his hosts. It was crystal clear, however, that neither Trump nor Vance intended the breach in relations. It is less clear that Zelensky didn’t want that, although he probably hoped a debate while the world was watching might nudge Trump into agreeing off the cuff but on the record to a stronger U.S. security “backstop” for a peace deal.
A characteristically left-biased aftermath story arrived this Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal, which is lamentably accelerating its descent from reliable news reporting. Referring to the “no cards” comment, it reported that European allies saw Trump “siding with Russia,” which is a true representation of distortions emerging across the Atlantic. But it then immediately adopted Europe’s position as its own, reporting “the U.S. president’s embrace of Russia” as a fact.
But events are moving too fast for the legions of Trump-hating opinion formers, and they cannot keep up. Trump cut off military and other aid to Ukraine to turn the screws on Zelensky so he would return to serious negotiation under Washington’s auspices. This was backed up Monday evening by Vance, who said a U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal would be the strongest deterrent to Putin’s aggression. By Tuesday, the Ukrainian president said on X that he was “ready to sign it at any time and in any convenient format” because it was “a step toward greater security.”
The probability remains, as before the Oval Office debacle, that Trump and Zelensky will sign an agreement that is far from an “embrace of Russia” but creates a partnership with Russia’s enemy to exploit commercial opportunities together. Only time will tell, but probably not very much time.
Trump’s detractors miss no opportunity to express hostility toward him and engender it in others, even at the cost of misleading readers and viewers. It must give them psychic satisfaction, and sometimes as a perceived political advantage, to paint a picture of “Russia collusion” when what Trump is, on fair analysis, doing is putting himself in the morally ambivalent position of neutrality between the warring nations so he can coax them into negotiations, end hostilities, and save much blood and treasure.
Trump has hinted that he’s prepared to do more than the bare bones he will put in writing to backstop a peace deal. He is trying to finesse matters so all parties know there will be more heft behind any peace deal than is said explicitly. That would allow Putin to save face more than any of us would like, but it is probably the only way to stop the war.
I was one of those who, as early as April 2022, argued that Washington, then under the feckless leadership of former President Joe Biden, should escalate the war and give Ukraine sufficient weaponry to win. But that was nearly three years ago, and the U.S. public no longer has the stomach or readiness with cash for that. The way out now is with a deal.
Trump just may have a way through. But it remains an awful possibility that the maximum he is willing to contribute — a commercial deal, an American presence, and vague suggestions of U.S. military contingencies, not black-and-white undertakings — will not be enough to get Kyiv to sign or for Britain, France, and other nations to commit peacekeeping troops. It’s possible that Trump’s nuances will not get it done.
Finally, if Trump does succeed, he may not entirely like the result. If peace is achieved without a clear U.S. military backstop but with greatly boosted European defense spending and a European armed deployment, it will diminish American leverage over allies on the other side of the Atlantic.
THE TRUMP-ZELENSKY MEETING EXPLAINED
Although Washington has complained for decades, with good reason, that European nations contribute too little to their own defense, Europe’s dependence on America has also been something Washington wanted. He who pays the piper calls the tune. If America withdraws its financial and military presence, it will not be able to boss Europe around as it has in the past.
Will Europe be as amenable to U.S. leadership in the future as it has been in the past? Probably not. It may end up being a case of “be careful what you wish for.”