Everyone lost in the Battle of the Oval Office

Now, the dust has settled — for the moment at least — here are three thoughts on the spectacular and disturbing clash in the Oval Office in late February 2025, between Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance.

Don’t let this become another alibi for allied lassitude.

We’ll get to the Oval Office spat in a second, but there’s a bad tendency on the other side of the pond to fixate on every move of Trump and the MAGAs. Doing so is so much easier than focussing on what we are prepared to do. We don’t control U.S. policy. And no, arranging endless summits is no substitute for confronting hard choices. Declaring that “Ukraine must be sovereign and whole” and “there must be U.S. security guarantees” for the settlement to be acceptable is like declaring that Luton must be Premier League champions. Those demands will not meet with Russia’s consent, especially now that it has large sunk costs to justify and redeem. Insisting otherwise is magical thinking. 

Neither we nor America are prepared to intervene directly and fight Russia in and for Ukraine, so there is very little chance of Russia being routed and evicted. They are going to hold on to some territory, bloodily stolen. If you can’t accept that, make the case for direct intervention. In the meantime, we are likely to be dealing with a conflict that won’t conclude with Ukraine on a path to NATO membership, that will be lacking U.S. security guarantees, and that won’t have U.S. backing for a reassurance or peacekeeping force. We can’t know yet whether Washington’s sidelining and disregard for Kyiv will translate into a similar posture towards Finland or the Baltic States or NATO Europe as a whole. But we are on notice. 

Trump and Vance were odious. Zelensky was imprudent.

Two tall men at the reins of a superpower publicly humiliated a shorter man leading an embattled and shattered country fighting for its life. They did so partly because they are imperial bastards, and partly because Zelensky unadvisedly tried to relitigate their differences in public. A clash that ought to have happened behind closed doors instead became an undignified scene that endangered Ukraine’s cause and reinforced the growing impression that the United States is a chaotic, dysfunctional state.

If you watch the discussion in full, it was tense until the final moments when it erupted. It erupted when Zelensky replied — as a possible interruption — to Vance’s statement about this President’s switch to “diplomacy” as an alternative American approach, and in contrast to Biden’s years of high-minded speeches accompanied by attritional war. Zelensky rhetorically asked Vance how “diplomacy” was supposed to work this time, when Russian had serially violated ceasefires and agreements before.  

Now, Zelensky has a point on the substantive issue. Vance invokes the term “diplomacy” like a magic word, like a certain type of Democrat congressman circa 2007 during the Iraq crisis, who hasn’t thought deeply about how negotiations are supposed to hold and create lasting peace. For diplomacy to have a chance of working, or working well enough to create a barely acceptable outcome Ukraine and the U.S. can live with, Russia must be made to feel coercive pressure that it is not currently feeling. 

Yet Zelensky chose to advance his criticism in the glare of the cameras. He had also chosen recently to campaign on behalf of Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris and specifically attacking Vance. And he had also spent years, to be blunt, warning and browbeating the west that all of its help wasn’t enough and calling for ever more direct intervention. He had unfortunately reinforced a bad tendency for Ukraine to become a partisan issue in America, draping the cause in Blue. Like it or not, when he began disputing the issues to the face of Trump & Vance publicly, he was unleashing their built-up resentment towards him. 

Now, we don’t know whether Vance’s reprimand was rehearsed or premeditated, or whether he was laying traps in order to stage a scene. We don’t know how far the Trump court intended to play to the domestic gallery on the powerful theme of allies/partners’ ingratitude. It’s hard to over-estimate the cynicism of the big beasts of the American political class. 

Until the final stage of the event, Ukraine had some desirable- not satisfactory, certainly not perfect- U.S. commitments on the table. Trump was in-principle favouring the continued supply of arms for an unspecified period. And he was leaning towards placing a kind of commercial tripwire in the country, in land approximating what might look like a DMZ of sorts, which might at least complicate Moscow’s future calculations about trying aggression again. It’s hardly a great outcome for Ukraine, but works better than wholesale American abandonment, a possibility whose odds have just shortened. Zelensky could have held on for a minute longer and gritted his teeth. 

Again, if he had done so, we can’t know what would have happened next. It’s possible that even if he had turned in a perfectly submissive performance, Zelensky and his country would still have met with Trumpian abandonment later. But his behaviour in the room in that hour was within his control. He could have emulated British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who grasped the hard truth that the Trump court expects the leaders of lesser powers to behave like grateful, deferential supplicants. Instead, he put being right above being effective. History is not always kind to that choice.

Third, the incident in the Oval Office was unusual in its theatricality, not in its substance.

Donald Trump is not the first U.S. president to remonstrate and coerce smaller powers brutally. His novelty is to do so in full view of the world. Recall that he also confronted German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the NATO summit of July 2018 over its energy dependence on Russia, and criticised her country likewise before the General Assembly of the United Nations. Trumpism represents not only a determination to make alliances matters of payment for protection, but to do so theatrically. It is a kind of “showbiz” transactionalism. As he remarked to bring the Oval Office scene to a close, “This is going to be great television.” 

Let us, though, not draw the conclusion that coercion, threats of abandonment and the exertion of hierarchical strength are aberrations in foreign policy. American leaders, like the leaders of most great powers, exert pressure in unsubtle ways, just usually they do so more privately. President John F. Kennedy bilaterally coerced West Germany’s Chancellor Conrad Adenauer to support U.S. monetary policy with a threat of abandonment. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld threatened that the U.S. would oppose the creation of a new NATO headquarters in Brussels if Belgium went ahead with its war crimes law. President Richard Nixon was less discrete when he threatened to cut U.S. forces in Europe over a lack of economic and political cooperation, speaking to an executive club, but it was nothing like the Trump/Vance display. The coercion was real. Trump and Vance ramp up the humiliation. 

The wiser criticism of Trumpian coercion is not that America should only reassure and support allies and partners, and not exert pressure. Indeed, the U.S. would be well advised to exert more pressure more often, where its client states take its largesse and flout its will, from Cairo to Tel Aviv to Riyadh. Instead, it is to speak more softly, at least in public, while still brandishing its big stick. Zelensky did not have to relitigate the issues in the Oval Office, but Trump and Vance did not have to pile on like a pair of incensed frat house seniors. Doing so may have attracted applause amongst the constituency of Americans who are fed up with Zelensky’s backchat. It did not, however, project an image of self-confident power. It conveyed brittleness and narcissistic insecurity. Russia could only have taken heart and become even more reluctant to make concessions. China would feel more than ever that its time has come.