Five Dispassionate Ways of Looking at Today’s Oval Office Blow-Up

By Daniel Drezner, Professor of International Politics at The Fletcher School

Informed readers are no doubt aware that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s White House meeting with President Donald Trump earlier today did not go very well. According to the New York Times’ Peter Baker:

President Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Friday in an explosive televised Oval Office shouting match that ultimately blew up plans to sign a rare minerals deal and signaled a dramatic break in relations between two wartime allies.

In a public confrontation unlike any seen between an American president and foreign leader in modern times, Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance castigated Mr. Zelensky for not being grateful enough for U.S. support in its war with Russia and sought to strong-arm him into making a peace deal on whatever terms the Americans dictated.

The televised portion of the Oval Office meeting lasted nearly 50 minutes, but the fireworks really got going in the final seven minutes or so. Here’s the relevant video from the BBC:

Everyone and their mother has asked me in the ensuing hours what I thought about this particular blow-up. That has been a difficult question to answer. On a gut level, it was nauseating. Watching the president and vice-president of the United States acting like petulant six-year olds demanding that their poorer friends say “thank you” for being invited to their nice house was both unsurprising and repugnant.

The thing is, when you’re a distinguished professor of international relations you are being asked for more than a gut-level response. So, to be more dispassionate about it, I have one big takeaway and a bunch of smaller observations.

First, my big takeaway is that this meeting revealed that Trump believes he needs to be nice to Vladimir Putin but not to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. At the very outset of the video above, Trump says, “you want me to say really terrible things about Putin and then say, ‘Hi Vladimir how we doing on the deal?’” It’s not an entirely unreasonable position! After that, however, Trump proceeded to say really terrible things about Zelenskyy to his face no less — while evincing zero concern about whether doing that would upset any deal.

The U.S. president clearly believes that the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must — and Russia is strong and Ukraine is weak and vulnerable to U.S. leverage. One can fairly challenge both Trump’s worldview and his read on the global distribution of power — but this is clearly what he believes.

Read the full post here.

(This post is republished from Drezner’s World.)