Drama at the Oval Office as Trump sends countries back to the drawing board

Friday, February 28, 2025 capped a week of high diplomacy at the Oval Office in the White House. US President Donald Trump hosted European leaders Emmanuel Macron of France, Keir Starmer of Britain, and Volodomyr Zelensky of Ukraine. France, the United States, and Britain are permanent members of the UN Security Council, and so is Russia and China.

The three flew to Washington to see Trump and discuss Russia, Ukraine, trade, mineral deals, and tariffs. The main focus was European concern with Trump’s views on how to end the three year old war in Ukraine between Russia and Ukraine in which Ukraine is getting, besides a beating, a lot of money and weapons from NATO countries.

NATO is a military alliance initially created by European powers at the beginning of the Cold War to counter perceived Soviet/Russian threat. Once the Europeans persuaded the Americans to join NATO, they developed dependency on the US on virtually everything ranging from funding, military hardware, and logistics. This dependency became some kind of Euro entitlement on American largesse that was unquestioned until Trump showed up at the White House.

The United States won the Cold War, humiliated the Russians, and disregarded solemn President George H. Bush commitments to Mikhael Gorbachev not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe. It behaved like a modern Rome and considered Russia to be its Carthage. Worrying about the existence of Carthage, Rome had concocted a war to obliterate Carthage because it existed. In his desire to change Russia, US President Bill Clinton ignored the Bush commitment and started sending NATO into Eastern Europe without caring about what the Russians thought or how they might react. NATO also became a post-Cold War expansionist force outside Europe in Libya and Iraq.

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While the humiliated Gorbachev died a miserable man, the humiliation prepared grounds for the rise of Vladmir Putin as a strong man, trying to restore Russia as a great power. Putin drew the line on NATO expansionism in Ukraine, which neighbors Russia, repossessed Crimea, and sent warnings that all was not well. Although many Americans of stature warned against provoking Russia with NATO expansionism, US President Joe Biden ignored them and seemingly encouraged Zelensky to be provocative.

When the war broke out, Biden poured American resources into Ukraine to enable Zelensky to fight and become a hero. Biden, as he reportedly had promised, blew up Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Zelensky, with his military like gear trade mark, became a permanent feature in Western discourses on security in Europe with Russia as the target enemy.

After three years of the war in Ukraine, political dynamics changed the world geopolitical posture. Although Ukraine fought well, it continued to receive beatings, European economies suffered, and questions arose as to whether the war had been necessary. In the process, the New Right made inroads in Western governing organs, stressed isolationist anti-immigrant policies, shook complacent establishments, and seemingly made the old security mind-frames irrelevant. Since its expansionism in Eastern Europe threatened the Russian sense of security that was established in 1945 at Yalta and was reinforced by Bush in order to induce Gorbachev to dismantle the Soviet Union, NATO ipso facto threatened itself.

Trump was the leader of this New Right Movement that questioned the essence of Clinton’s post-Cold War world order and use of the new NATO. His determination to set his own New World Order in place which questions the old security mind-frame makes Europe jittery and led to the drama at the White House.

Trump was first elected president in 2016, mainly against Barack Obama and by being unconventional. The jolted American establishment made a mistake of implying that he had not won fairly and that Putin had probably helped him. When he lost the election to Biden in 2020, Trump claimed the system had rigged him out and vowed to return.

He also questioned the war in Ukraine, dismissed Zelensky as a conman, and committed to dismantle anything associated with Biden. He won overwhelmingly in 2024 and set the process of reversing the perceived Clinton-Obama-Biden world hegemony, called globalization, into motion. His America First agenda included questioning NATO and the war in Ukraine, saying positive things about Putin in Russia, and complaining about trade imbalances in the West. His commitment to end the war in Ukraine, demands that other members pay their fair share of NATO expenses, and consultations with Putin caused panic in Europe and laid the foundation for the dramatic events in Washington.

There followed a week of anxiety among the Europeans about the future of their countries, Ukraine, and cross-Atlantic relations. Germany, the biggest economy in Western Europe held an election in which a New Right candidate, Friedrich Merz, won. Macron of France and Starmer of Britain, Europe’s military and diplomatic power houses, flew to Washington to consult with Trump over trade, tariffs, and most important NATO and Ukraine. Although the meetings were diplomatically pleasant, they hardly changed Trump’s position. Starmer, at his diplomatic best, pampered Trump with an invitation to a second state visit to Britain which Trump accepted. Neither Macron nor Starmer had seemingly prepared Zelensky on the fine art of diplomacy. In his trade mark attire, he seemed rigid and unable to gauge the appropriateness of his responses. Although he was a geopolitical supplicant in Washington, he was combative with a sense of entitlement to US security assistance. He assumed that Ukraine’s offer of rare earth mining rights to the US would clinch American security guarantees against Russia; this was not forthcoming. His rejection of ‘ceasefire’ as a step towards ‘peace’ grated Trump into believing that Zelensky was not ready for peace. The meeting ended badly.

The acrimonious exchanges between Trump and Zelensky at the White House, televised throughout the world, showed that Trump was changing the way the world thinks about security. The Europeans reacted with pledges of increased military aid to and continued standing with Ukraine irrespective of what.

Trump saw things differently and with a Kennedy in his cabinet, he was almost like John F. Kennedy in putting himself in the shoes of the Russians during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. For him, therefore, removing the source of the Russian security fears which the Clinton-Obama-Biden triad had ignored was peace making. He was wiping out the idea that Russia was a permanent enemy of the United States which had dominated the world for over 75 years. Trump has thus sent most countries back to the drawing boards on what the terms security, enemy, or ally mean in the light of their perceived national interests.