Showdown At The Oval Office
Trump refuses to give Zelensky a warranty on The Deal
Yeah, I saw the whole thing. But it seems like somehow I didn’t see what everyone else saw.
I need to recap my perspective on the Ukro-Russian War, and my view of the origins of the conflict, which has not changed. I viewed it as an avoidable conflict, and also one that was predictable, given that so many chances to address the underlying issues were overlooked, hand-waved, squandered. To me, the Russian invasion was predictable, given the lack of serious attention to the underlying tensions. But that does not mean that I think it was justified. Putin viewed Ukraine’s increasing tilt toward NATO and the EU as a potential national security threat, but it wasn’t an imminent one. Russia was the aggressor nation. My inclination toward pacifism means that I view war as most often the result of a cascade of failures, an avoidable tragedy. But my pacifism is not absolute. I don’t view a military conflict settled by one side running out of ammunition as Peace. So as long as the majority of people of Ukraine are willing to resist, I support their struggle.
Now, three years into a full-scale condition of protracted hostilities, the attempt to resolve that conflict is riven by splits even within the coalition ostensibly allied against Russia. And what I witnessed at that Oval Office meeting was the result of a mutual failure to communicate honestly and openly, or to even enunciate an overlap of shared viewpoints on the conflict.
This dissonance has been exacerbated by the press commentary in the aftermath of the breakdown of amicable relations between Zelensky and US administration headed by Trump. One side is lauding Zelensky as a courageous champion of Ukrainian sovereignty against the pressure by Trump to capitulate. The other side is excoriating Zelensky as intransigent and disrespectful of the nation that has done so much to enable the effective defense of Ukraine on the battlefield, and of the national leader who was within reach of achieving an effective peace plan for Ukraine.
I’m inclined to side with Zelensky. But I also think that he’s been laboring under some severe misconceptions, including illusions about what Ukraine is in a position to obtain from a peace agreement with the Russians. The dismaying thing for me is to find that neither Zelensky or Trump seems to have had a common grasp of the specific terms at issue in order to reach agreement on Trump’s proposal for US access to Ukraine’s resource trove as a beneficial means of reaching a productive agreement with Russia. It’s like the two parties were talking past each other, and only hearing what they wanted to hear. Yet somehow both Zelensky and Trump appeared under the impression that the deal was all but sealed, with only one minor detail to be agreed upon that could easily be settled at the public Oval Office meeting!
That “minor detail” turned out to be the matter of Security Assurance to Ukraine by the US, in return for the US receiving a massive resource trove as a windfall in exchange for the US working out a deal with Putin. National Security assurance, not “security” in the sense of Ukraine offering its mineral resources as financial collateral. That’s a pretty basic sticking point, if left unresolved. And every time Zelensky pressed Trump on that question, he dodged it. The result was analogous to witnessing a prospective used car buyer who had been through all of the camaraderie and soft-selling routine with the salesman, all ready to sign the contract—except for one thing: this vehicle has a warranty, doesn’t it? And that’s when it all fell apart.
I’m not sure who had the idea to do that last-minute negotiation on the fine print in public, exactly. But I have a hunch it was Trump, based on the comment he made just before breaking off the public meeting entirely. It looks to me as if Trump thought that the public meeting would add pressure on Zelensky to sign off on the deal. Trump was calculating that since the US, as he explicitly said more than once, “held the cards” that would bring Russia to the peace table, that Zelensky would understand that his role in “the deal” was basically to cede all of his agency to Trump and the new US administration—the government of the nation “in Ukraine’s corner.” Meanwhile blasting the Biden administration as every kind of stupid and incompetent and incapable of doing anything other than dragging out the Ukro-Russian War. A war that would never have happened if Trump had won the election. (Subtext: if Trump hadn’t been robbed of winning by Democrat election fraud. Because Trump is bent on getting that narrative confirmed as the verdict of history.)
Zelensky was obviously taken aback by Trump’s pitch. Eye-rollingly discombobulated, in fact. And that’s where Zelensky’s cognitive dissonance showed up, it seems: he should have known. Even though he knew that Donald Trump was a different sort of American leader than Joe Biden, he wasn’t ready for him to be that different. Zelensky was apparently taking for granted that he was going to get the same ironclad assurances from Trump that Biden had provided in his term: that not one inch of Ukraine territory would be ceded. Not even the Crimean peninsula. The notion that Biden was shining him on doesn’t seem to have occurred to Zelensky. To judge by everything he said, Zelensky practically seems to think that Russia should be required to pay reparations to Ukraine—and that the Almighty Hyperpower would actually have the power to get that concession from Putin at the negotiating table!
Sadly, that is Magical Thinking. The terrible truth—the one that Trump seems to have been unwilling to impart to Zelensky—is that the absolute best that Ukraine can hope for is to have some sort of UN demilitarized neutral zone in the currently Russian-occupied occupied regions of Luhansk, the Donbas, and Zaporizhzhia, in return for some Ukrainian resource-sharing agreement with Russia—not just the US. With Crimea retained by Russia. But even that is pushing the realistic limit. I don’t know what the previous administration has been telling Zelensky, but he seems to be under the impression that because the war has been so costly in Russian casualties, that Putin will be more inclined to settle for an agreement favorable to Ukraine instead of Russia. That is simply not the way it works. At one point in the Oval Office debacle the large port city of Odessa was brought up—and did Trump ever not want to discuss that part of “the deal.” Odessa is still under Ukrainian control. But it’s all too reasonable to assume that its fate is still in question as a negotiating point, because it’s a certainty that Putin wants it. He’s been involved in a costly war for three years.
The Ukrainians have fended off the Russians admirably. But they haven’t been so successful that they have the Russians pleading to sue for peace in return for retreating to the pre-invasion borders. Ukraine does not have Russia on the ropes. I’m not confident that any amount of military aid will lead to that outcome. The Biden administration has pumped up the Ukrainian cause as the right and moral one for three years. But that isn’t what wins wars. The realpolitik calculation of a peace negotiation at this point is that Ukraine is going to lose territory. I don’t like realpolitik. But there isn’t any other kind.
The only other prospect for Ukraine prevailing in recovering all of its territory is for Zelensky to pull together a coalition of European nations to fight alongside Ukraine. Even if Ukraine can maintain the arms it requires to hold its line from European sources, I don’t think that will lead to pushing Russian forces out of eastern Ukraine. I don’t know what Zelensky was told to expect from the US during the Biden administration, but I have a bad feeling that they weren’t leveling with him all the way in terms of the eventual outcome of Ukraine single-handedly battling the armed forces of Russia.
The problem is that Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have been very honest with Zelensky, either. Trump sounds to me like he wants Ukraine to sign over a treasure trove of mineral rights in return for promise of a quick end to the war negotiated entirely on Trump and Putin’s terms. A treaty negotiation along that line brings up some unsavory precedents. For Donald Trump to try to play that shell game on Vladimir Zelensky, it’s just plain perfidious. And to hear Americans talk about how Zelensky somehow disrespected Trump and Vance, and got owned by The Indispensable Nation in return—that’s just disgraceful.
It’s possible—just possible—that it was Zelensky who waited for a global media spotlight in order to bring up his pressing worries about what the hell Trump was expecting him to sign off on. Hoping that he’d be offered some assurance of a sympathetic, pro-Western, pro-NATO outcome, from the same ally that he had been used to having his back in previous US administrations—at least in terms of materiel and logistical support. Maybe Zelensky had the idea that surely the Trump administration wouldn’t openly sandbag his country right out in the open, with the cameras on. But he found out how Trump sees the world: as the CEO of America, Inc., doing the Art Of The Deal. A very different stance toward international affairs than the historic mission of the US since 1945: holding together a “pro-Western” international community for mutual benefit and the global stability presumed to be derived from that. For Donald Trump, the US is still The Indispensable Nation. But not in that sense. Not any more.