A Fiasco in the Oval Office The dressing down of a besieged ally might be ‘great television.’ But it’s terrible for the United States. Eli Lake
https://www.thefp.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
On Friday the world witnessed one of the most astonishing spectacles in White House history.
American presidents have surely dressed down besieged allies behind closed doors; never before has it happened on live television. This break with any prior presidential diplomacy must be seen to be believed.
What unfolded between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance turned into a political Rorschach test.
For Trump’s base, the 50-minute exchange was proof positive of America First foreign policy—an ungrateful freeloader gets upbraided by the populist tribune.
For Americans who still cling to the now unfashionable notion that the international system should be ruled by rules and not might, Friday’s incident was a horror.
From the perspective of Europe, it’s the beginning of the end of the Trans-Atlantic alliance.
To recap, after agreeing under pressure from the White House to sign a rare earth mineral deal, Zelensky came to Washington with the intention of repairing his strained relationship with Trump, inking the deal, and convincing the U.S. to keep the weapons flowing to his war effort.
The meeting was intended to be a photo-op before the real discussions behind closed doors—and it began on a cordial note. Trump praised Ukraine’s soldiers. Zelensky politely showed Trump photographs of Russian atrocities.
But then Vance laid a trap. Or at least deviated from the diplomatic niceties. He explained that Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, thumped his chest and talked tough but never engaged in diplomacy with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. “The path to peace and the path to prosperity is maybe engaging in diplomacy,” he said.
Vance, in this case, was not a reliable narrator of recent history. Biden hosted a virtual summit with the Russian leader at the end of 2021. Biden also waived sanctions on the construction of a second gas pipeline between Russia and Europe in the months leading up to the war. Before Putin invaded, Biden tried for nearly a year to dissuade him from doing it.
Nevertheless, the smart thing to do at this point would have been for Zelensky—who desperately needs America’s military support—to nod politely and let it go.
That’s not what happened. Instead Zelensky felt the need to correct Vance in front of the press. Big mistake. And to do it all without an interpreter, another big mistake.
“Can I ask you?” he said.
“Sure. Yeah,” Vance responded.
“We had conversations with him, many conversations,” Zelensky said, speaking of Putin. He reminded Vance that he signed a ceasefire with Putin after he was elected in 2019. But Putin broke his word. “He killed our people and he didn’t exchange prisoners,” Zelensky said. “What kind of diplomacy, J.D., are you speaking about? What do you mean?”
“I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that is going to end the destruction of your country,” Vance replied. He was just getting warmed up.
“Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media. Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you guys have man-power problems. You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict.”
From there it went from bad to worse. It’s difficult to choose the most uncomfortable moment, but perhaps it was when, in the course of a retort, Zelensky observed that even America’s military has problems in war, but that the United States is fortunate to be buffered by two oceans. “You don’t feel it now,” he warned. “But you will feel it in the future.”
Zelensky was trying to make the point that appeasement leads to further conflict. But Trump interpreted it as the Ukrainian leader telling the United States that it was weak. “You don’t know that. You don’t know that,” Trump said. “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel because you’re in no position to dictate that. We’re going to feel very good and very strong.”
It devolved further from there. At one point, Trump, raising his voice and wagging his finger, said, “You’re gambling with World War III. And what you’re doing is disrespectful to the country, to this country.”
At the end of the fiasco, Trump said: “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out. And if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty.”
Before dismissing the press corps and kicking Zelensky out of the White House, Trump observed that the last 40 minutes had made for some “great television.”
It certainly had. And that’s the only good thing one can say about the entire meeting.
One image of Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington with her head in her hands captures the entire debacle.
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Trump’s handling of Zelensky thrilled the America First camp.
David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto czar, and an influential foreign policy voice in MAGA land, summed it up when he posted: “Every other President would have just sat there and taken the insolence. President Trump defended the country’s honor and stood tall for peace.”
What was astonishing was how the spectacle left even some of Ukraine’s most stalwart defenders siding with Trump.
Marc Thiessen, a longtime foreign policy hawk with the Ukrainian flag in his handle on X and a fellow at the center-right think tank AEI thought the incident was “entirely Zelensky’s fault. Trump greeted him graciously, was ready to turn the page. . . And Z comes in and gets into a fight in public? I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”
But blaming Zelensky for poor diplomatic tactics—and he deserves blame—only gets us so far.
The vastly more important question is why Zelensky was baited in the first place.
What exactly was Vance trying to accomplish? It’s impossible to know what was in the vice president’s head. But it’s reasonable to assume that he believed a fight with Ukraine’s embattled leader was good politics—for the base and perhaps also for the president.
Ukraine, after all, played a supporting role in the Russiagate scandal that Hillary Clinton’s campaign manufactured in 2017 and was cynically and credulously pursued by the FBI, even after its investigators found there was nothing to the theory that Trump and his campaign had colluded with the Kremlin. And Zelensky’s trip to the US in the middle of election season, which included a speech alongside Kamala Harris and a trip to a munitions factory in Pennsylvania, didn’t help his popularity among Republicans.
Vance and his circle represent a real and growing constituency in the Republican Party. They believe that the days of American global hegemony are long over and that the country needs to accept the new reality of a multipolar world. For this crowd, the humiliation of Zelensky must have felt sweet.
But that feeling is fleeting. As Zelensky tried and failed to explain in the Oval Office, if Russia swallows his country, America will find itself with an even stronger foe.
Trump is now openly talking about cutting off his supply line, an invitation to the rapacious Putin to complete his war aim and extinguish Ukraine altogether. Russia could not be happier: “The insolent pig finally got a proper slap down in the Oval Office,” tweeted former Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. You can comfort yourself with the notion that Trump is playing four dimensional chess, or you can notice that the party that started the war in Ukraine is cheering.
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