Trump vs. Zelensky: The diplomacy of the abuser
Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky were supposed to stage the first step towards a ceasefire negotiation in Ukraine. But the joint press conference ended up becoming in a live televised ambush. The reproaches and public humiliation of the Ukrainian president reflect Trump's diplomacy. The would-be peacemaker, who accuses Zelensky of having provoked the war and calls him a dictator, is offended, however, when the Ukrainian president reproaches him that "there can be no ceasefire without security guarantees."
It is difficult to impose peace by force and, even more so, trying to do so after humiliating the attacked and reproducing the arguments of the aggressor.
But the tension that was experienced on Friday in the Oval Office certifies a deeper and more existential rupture than that of the agreement to take control of Ukraine's mineral resources, which remained to be signed. The televised booing of Zelensky is a resounding warning of the weakness of the European Union and the staging of a transatlantic rift that seeks to redefine not only the future of Ukraine, but the entire security architecture that has marked more than half a century of alliances.
After this intense week of Trumpist diplomacy, and the parade of European leaders through the White House, the EU no longer has any doubt that security guarantees in the new scenario that is beginning to emerge on the Old Continent will have to be redefined without the United States.
Alongside Emmanuel Macron, Trump refused to call Putin an aggressor of Ukraine's territorial integrity and The Frenchman allowed himself to correct, also live, some of the American's inaccuracies or lies. For his part, the British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer has had his own revelation after passing through Washington and has called a summit with a dozen European leaders this Sunday in London to discuss Ukraine's security. What is at stake is the survival of Ukraine and the European Union in the face of a Donald Trump determined to exclude the Europeans from any negotiation, but to transfer to them the burden of the immediate future of the occupied country. And the fact is that Trump's transactional leadership is redefining, from confusion, allies, partners and rivals, at the mercy of a display of power that is exercised exclusively through coercion, sanctions, threats and rewards.
Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev writes in The World that Donald Trump, from his imperial staging and challenge to the established order, is carrying out his own revolution: subverting the separation of powers and realigning the United States with a new global reality.
This new realignment of forces and agendas has also become evident this week at the United Nations after the Security Council managed to approve, for the first time in three years of Russian invasion, a resolution on Ukraine calling for an end to the conflict. The text was passed thanks to a conjunction of interests between the United States, Russia and China, who voted together for the first time in decades, and the complicit abstention of the frightened European members of the Council, who chose not to derail the text.
Despite the delusions of a president who hopes to "be known and remembered as a peacemaker" and who, together with Zelensky, boasts of having "stopped wars that people didn't even know existed," peace cannot be built through humiliation or the forced disappearance of those attacked, even in Ukraine. But Donald Trump's world is defined by force.
