How Trump has fixed a price for America’s goodwill – Firstpost

February 28 on-camera Oval Office showdown between US President Donald Trump and his Ukraine counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy has caught the world unawares; weekend developments later may have shown that the former may after all have his way on the endless war in Europe.

The 19 leaders, including Canada’s Justin Trudeau, possibly the odd man out in what essentially was a European conclave, are now talking not about backing Ukraine to fight Russia to the very end, but about a ‘peace plan’ that would convince Trump, instead, to take charge of negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war, from where he had left after their summit talks at Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a fortnight back. Or, so it seems.

The US side, that is, President Trump and his VP, JD Vance, seemed to have done a dress rehearsal of their side of the meeting with Zelenskyy. It was full of the Trump brand of optics, where Vance provided the ammunition for Trump to take charge and fire from all barrels at the hapless visitor, who did not have a deputy of any kind to shout back from his side. The Ukrainian ambassador to the US was as shell-shocked as the world that was watching the show live.

A consummate actor that he is, Zelenskyy did not leave anything to chance—or, for Trump alone to retain the limelight. After all, he too could do with some free media time, which would have also been the ‘peak hour’ where all it mattered. He gave back, word for word, body language for body language. After all, he too had a war-weary population back home to convince that he was still leading them to victory or an honourable truce and not an outright surrender after all the sacrifices that they had endured through the past three years.

It is anybody’s guess if a nominated deputy to an elected president had near-similar authority and power as the latter, but to Trump’s ‘rust constituency’ nearer home, Vance proved to be a ‘worthy successor’, whenever, however. The way he tore into Zelenskyy, forgetting the protocol that he was only the vice president and not the president of the US, and the boss was sitting there in front, did not matter to him.

And like in a practiced orchestra, Trump kept silent throughout Vance’s slight of Zelenskyy to the point of asking the latter to ‘thank the US’, before taking over himself. For a time in that brief exchange, the two-on-one slanging match looked as if the American team was winning. Zelenskyy’s voice was feeble in comparison, and his demeanour was also not to the known Trump standards. Yet, he fought and left without losing a point.

Coalition of the Unwilling

Before Zelenskyy’s meeting with Trump and after the latter’s announcement about ending the Ukraine War following the Riyadh meeting, European allies of the US were upset with Washington. They openly called for support for Ukraine to continue the war the same way they had armed their enemy’s enemy from within. None of them talked about Trump’s continuing declaration that Ukraine cannot join NATO, which rather was Russia’s immediate provocation to commence the war that Putin had hoped to win in three weeks but could not come anywhere near the goal even after three long and painful years.

Before the 19-leader meeting hosted by British Prime Minister Keith Stramer at London’s ‘Lancaster House’, Stramer and French President Emmanuel Macron, who too attended the European leadership conclave, had met with Bush in Washington to argue Ukraine’s case with the American leader. Macron sort of sounded moderate after the meeting, but the same cannot be said of the British Prime Minister, traditionally the most dependable trans-Atlantic ally of the US through the past decades after the end of the two Great Wars of the previous century. Rather, the US was often seen as testing its geo-strategic and geo-political ideas with the UK before putting it before the rest of Western Europe, or NATO, as the case may be.

If someone on the Ukrainian street thought that the rest of Europe was meeting in London, first to denounce the American duo and then pledge continued support for their president to pursue the war with greater vigour and vitality than any time in the past, it’s not to be. What started off as a meeting of the ‘coalition of the willing’ rather ended up as a ‘coalition of the unwilling’. By the very coinage, the coalition as originally talked about did not have a place for the US after it had made its position on the war and peace clear.

But what flowed out of Lancaster House was a four-point peace plan that sought to persuade Zelenskyy to fall in line with their US ally (and leader) without anyone promising anything substantial to Kyiv in return. Zelenskyy, for his part, also promised that he was ready to sign the minerals pact with the US, which is of greater importance to Team Trump than even ending the Ukraine War, so to say.

The coming days will show how European leaders will approach the issue and also approach Trump to convince him to take over from where he had left unilaterally. At the end of the day, it was as if European leaders did not resent ending the war, but only Trump’s unique style of deciding for others, deciding for the world without any consultation with anyone. Habitually he has taken note only of adversaries, be it Russia or China, and is ready to talk to them, negotiate with them, despite threatening them with more sanctions and more tariffs. He has no time or energy for America’s trusted allies. This is a lesson they all are learning the hard way.

The last time he was president, he wanted Europe and South Korea to pay for American military assistance of whatever kind. This time, it would seem, he has upped the ante in favour of peace—and has fixed a price for peace through America. One of them is that nations and groupings have to behave as if they were vassal states of the US. This is so after Trump had openly sought to acquire Canada, Mexico, and Greenland, with or without a price tag attaching to them. It may work with his raw constituents, but how many veterans in his Republican Party approve of his ways and waywardness outside the domestic circuit of electoral politics in 21st-century America?

Not an era of war

For their part, Indians can take pride that US leadership at long last has acknowledged and accepted Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s declaration that it was ‘not an era of war’. Modi said it in the context of the Russian leader pursuing the Ukraine war. Now, Trump is saying it to his own nation and its European allies. To be precise, the US, until the other day, was seen as paying Ukraine to fight a shadow-boxing game that the latter did not have a chance to win, only to make a point. At one stage, Putin had openly said that Ukraine was being made to fight other people’s war.

Of course, none of it means that US-India relations are going to be smoother than under Biden now that Modi’s ‘old friend’ Trump is back in the White House. Not one single commentator in India has supported Trump’s F-35 fighter offer to India. It is due to the traditional street sense that New Delhi should not trust the US.

Beginning from the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971 and even earlier, your average Indian still prefers Moscow as an ally, though that position has come under doubt, if not utter cloud, after a weakened Russia having to count even more on China, India’s traditional adversary. But that by itself has not endeared Indians to the US, especially now, given Trump’s ‘unpredictability’, or whatever is understood by the term.

For some more time, the US and Europe are going to be busy with themselves, jointly and separately. Within the US, opposition Democrats have criticised Trump for running down a visiting head of state, an ally (and a front) of the nation. But their voices have not become shrill enough, nor are they being heard enough within the country.

After all, the honeymoon period of Trump 2.0 is still on, and by the time that is over for the American voters to hear out the other side, the pushy president would have gone much faster and much farther. Whether it would be for America’s own good may have to be assessed post facto. Whether it’s good for the world, Trump is not one to be concerned about such trivia, now or possibly ever.

Yet, Trump has put Europe where its leaders, like France and Germany, wanted to put it themselves in the years before the Ukraine War. That was when, together and separately, leading West European nations were looking at a world without as much US influence as now or in the post-war past and were preparing to fill the vacuum that they anticipated would be created in the not-too-distant future, say, 30-50 years hence. It is another matter that possibly owing to the post-election negotiations for forming a new government, Germany’s voice has not been heard in Berlin, Washington, or London, at least for now.

The Ukraine War changed all that. It may have been provoked by Ukraine and prompted by the US without European consent. But once the war was joined, like America’s 21st-century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the allies were left with little option or little space for manoeuvring. Now when the war is likely to come to an end, that too after their US leader had begun acting unilaterally, for them to see the nation often on the other side of the ‘Iron Curtain’ that Washington had drawn for them, be it against Moscow during the Cold War and China since.

All of it provides opportunities and challenges to India. New Delhi negotiated the Ukraine War era exceptionally well, if buying cheap Russian oil and having the West exempt it from their ‘sanctions regimen’ is a pointer. In the UN, too, India managed the early-day crisis extremely well, both in the Security Council and the General Assembly.

In a rare event, India got to chair the Security Council for two months during its elected term, and that was saying a lot. The two-time chance was an accident, yes, but not the way India used it. Hence also the inability of the EU to take decisions independent of the US under its one-nation-one-vote structure, without reference to their history, current status, and fiscal and economic muscle.

Today, when strains have appeared in their ties with the US, European Union Commissioners made their Delhi visit look more important than they might have otherwise considered. They are now talking about fast-tracking the India FTA on which they had sat for years. They are also talking about a defence cooperation agreement with India when theirs does not have a structure, and certainly not infrastructure. The EU has individual member nations’ security apparatuses and defence production industries, nothing more for a European collective, where the US has more adherents than ‘Old Europe’.

It is but a coincidence (?) that India’s Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal flew to the US in the midst of it all, as if New Delhi had taken Trump’s threat of tariff hikes seriously. Already, it has come to mean tariff exemptions by India, thus opening up the country for more American exports in a host of sectors, starting with the lifeline farm sector. It remains to be seen if ’establishment India’ is able to face off Trump’s tariff tantrums, among others, and if External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar, for instance, is pushed to tell Americans that ‘America should stop thinking that America’s concerns are the world’s concerns’, if it came to that. After all, he has been telling Europeans from European soil, at the annual Munich Conclave, year after year for the past three years.

In between, the Trump-Vance show for the benefit of Zelenskyy has a message/threat for other world leaders. They should, internally and inherently, from now on, shy away from appearing with either or both of them even in scheduled on-camera pressers. They now know for sure that Trump wants to take his playing-to-the-gallery act to the world stage, too, and that he and he alone should have the last word and possibly the last laugh, too!

The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.