Tag: Zelenskyy

Washington Post, How the Trump-Zelensky Oval Office meeting spiraled into chaos: White House officials were expecting a positive meeting and said they had little reason to anticipate animosity before things deteriorated.

Tom Nichols, It Was an Ambush: Friday marked one of the grimmest days in the history of American diplomacy.

Jonathan Chait, The Real Reason Trump Berated Zelensky: He simply likes Vladimir Putin better.

Rashomon is a Japanese story where everyone gives conflicting accounts of the same event, and all of them, maybe, are inaccurate. I get much the same feeling here. The sources cited here include lots of observations from intelligent, well-informed people—much more well informed, and closer to the center of power, than I am—and yet … the account ts and explanations are markedly inconsistent in important ways. Plus they seem glaringly incomplete. 

One explanation for what happened is that Trump and Vance set up Zelenskyy.

One explanation is that Vance—a declared supporter of Christianist autocracy and an even bigger Putin ass kisser than Trump—sabotaged the signing of a framework deal with Ukraine.

One explanation is that Putin told his boy Trump to back out of the deal that was about to be signed, and that Trump had no choice but to do his master’s bidding. 

But I was particularly struck by the point made by one of the talking heads in the Washington Week video, who reported that in a pre-meeting Trump lashed out at Rubio, Waltz, and his other minions for not making a deal that would give Trump an even bigger share of Ukraine’s mineral wealth. That suggests that what happened was Trump just playing his familiar bullying -bluster-and-bullshit game to sweeten a deal. 

In any event, I don’t think all those talking heads and pontificating pundits are wrapping their heads around the larger context.

Every indication is that Putin doesn’t want to do a cease fire deal, and that he, particularly, does not want to share Ukraine’s carcass with Donald John Trump. 

And, meanwhile, there are the Europeans. Trump thinks he can intimidate them by blowing hot and cold. Will he abide by Article 5? Won’t he abide by Article 5? Will he go to war if Putin attacks Estonia? What about Sweden? If Putin attacks France, how much money will Trump demand in exchange for coming to its aid?

Vance and Musk explicitly say the United States should withdraw from NATO. Trump keeps making that threat. The Europeans, along with Ukraine, are going to have to go it alone, as best they can, because they have no other choice. 

I don’t mean any other reasonable choice. I don’t mean any other choice that they might live with.

I mean literally no other choice at all than to kiss the United States goodbye and go it alone.