A lot of people are
seeing the bust-up in the White House last week as having been deliberately
planned in advance by Trump and Vance, with the intention of humiliating
Zelensky. I’m not so sure; that would require a degree of planning and
forethought which is certainly beyond Trump – this is a man who can’t stick to
a script when it’s written out in front of him, let alone when he has to
remember it – or Vance, whose general ignorance of history and geography seems
to be matched only by his innate nastiness.
Even if they had fully
intended to find a way of delivering a humiliation, did they really intend that
the outcome would be a total breakdown of the relationship, or did they simply
assume that Zelensky would cave in and show his subservience? One of the
attributes of bullies is that they invariably assume that people will do as
they are told, and are always surprised – not to say angered – when they don’t.
And Zelensky’s quiet attempts to push back certainly escalated Trump’s anger.
The one thing that I do believe is that Trump really wanted that deal on
minerals. He may not care about Zelensky or Ukraine, but he really does care
about money and about further enriching US billionaires. It's increasingly
clear that Trump and Vance – the latter possibly even more than the former –
believe that the US has the right to do as it wishes and that lesser states (everyone
except Russia, apparently) should bow down before them. They don’t care whether
people like them or not, only whether they are obeyed.
Putin has produced a
range of ‘justifications’ for his invasion, and amongst them is the idea that
the Ukrainian regime was a client state of the US and that the regime in
Ukraine was a puppet installed and operated somehow by the CIA. The behaviour
of Trump and Vance suggests that they have, in a sense, bought in to that
narrative, and genuinely believed that they could dictate to Ukraine. Their
belief in their own absolute power to dictate what happens outside their own
borders received a nasty jolt on Friday, and a man who holds grudges (and Trump’s
grudge against Zelensky for not digging up dirt on the Bidens is probably a
significant part of the cause of last week’s events) is likely to become even
more unpredictable as a result.
The question is what
happens next. No matter how much we admire the way Zelensky stood up to the
bully, to say nothing of Ukrainian courage and resistance, no lover of peace,
and no true friend of Ukraine, should seriously be urging them to fight to the
last Ukrainian against a numerically superior force. If Trump really does ‘turn
off the tap’ of supplies of armaments, it’s hard to see how the European states
can make up the resulting shortfall. We might wish it were otherwise, but Trump
is actually right in saying that Ukraine is in a bad place right now. Unless
other countries are going to come directly to its aid militarily – which seems
as unlikely as it is undesirable – then a peace deal of some sort has to be
negotiated. Trump is clearly the wrong person to broker such an agreement, but
who and where is the right one? Even if Sir
Starmer and Macron can devise a peace plan, will Trump accept anything that
doesn’t give him what he wants?
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2 comments:
Your heading askes aa good question.
My chums in low places is the US tell me over the last few days ,that the media- take is vastly different from what we are being fed here.
The global strategic aim of Donald John is to delink the Russia-China relationship as they ( quite rightly) see China as a greater threat with a massive industrial base to conduct a long war. The Russian economy is smaller than Italy’s , but it is structured around a war economy plan but is under stress, and will not last another year.
Based on that Russia must be spoken to and accommodated.
I have not seen the full meeting ,but what analysis I have read states the first forty minutes went well, until Zelensky told J C that he had ‘not been there’- implying that your views are no value. Not a good move when you are talking to a country that has given $200 Billion, and you know they are on to you. Little Zelinsky’s name came up in the Pandora Papers that exposed offshore banking some years ago and I think he has been a very naughty boy. I see the press are labelling him as a ‘billionaire’ ,if he is he did not get there on the salary he earns.
I observe Keir Rodney has cut the overseas aid and ploughed the money into defence. Not one University has rioted as one would expect, and no big demonstrations planned. Funny that!
Spirit,
I can understand why Putin and his enablers would want to portray Zelensky as a billionaire, but it's a story which has been fact-checked several times, including here for example. I think Forbes might be a rather more reputable source than some of the pro-Kremlin sources seeking to undermine Zelensky.
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