It was just another boring Friday afternoon in Washington…. until it wasn’t!
President Trump and Vice President Vance met with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, ostensibly to sign a minerals deal… only to see it all blow up in an unprecedented spectacle of public disagreement. The deal was cancelled. Zelenskyy was kicked out. Diplomacy for a peace deal is in shambles.
That meeting in the Oval Office had one clear winner: Vladimir Putin.
Putin couldn’t have asked for a better spectacle to be made against Zelenskyy. While President Trump was focused on arguing about Russia’s leverage and past grievances (Hunter Biden!, the 51 intelligence agents!, the ’24 election!), and VP Vance wanted more gratitude, Zelenskyy did his best to parry the rapid volley of critical questions and assertions lobbed his way.
But what seemed to trigger Trump and Vance most was Zelenskyy’s correct point that the war began in 2014 and that Putin broke a 2019 ceasefire deal that was signed on Trump’s watch. Zelenskyy pointed that out to show how important real security guarantees are to him for obtaining a durable ceasefire. Yet instead of convincing his listeners, it had the opposite effect.
Now, the question is whether the U.S. will continue to honor our three decade old security commitment to Ukraine (signed in the 1994 trilateral Budapest agreement that got Ukraine to give up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security assurances) or if we’ll pull the plug and watch as Putin takes more land and lives from Ukraine.
But if we do, such a move will not bring peace any closer and will likely imperil our European allies even more, paradoxically leading us to the exact outcome that Trump says he wants to avoid.
Share this post