Last week, during a press conference in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance excoriated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not sufficiently showing gratitude to the U.S. The entire affair was shameful, but it could potentially cause European leaders to step up their own support of Ukraine, which would be a positive and perhaps unintended consequence.
Trump hosted reporters Friday to commemorate the signing of a treaty with Zelenskyy to provide further military support. The agreement came more than three years after Russia launched a full-scale invasion that has killed more than 100,000 soldiers and civilians, and more than a decade since Russia seized broad swathes of Ukrainian territory.
But before the deal could take place, the meeting fell apart—seemingly at the instigation of Vance, who interjected that Zelenskyy was “disrespectful” and said, “You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict.” This seemed to set off Trump, who charged that Zelenskyy was “gambling with World War III. And what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country…that’s backed you far more than a lot of people said they should have.”
The meeting ended shortly thereafter, with no agreement signed. Trump later posted on Truth Social that Zelenskyy “disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace.”
It’s entirely possible that this was a negotiating tactic, although given that the dustup came at the end of the meeting and only when Vance interjected, it seems more likely Trump was simply reacting in the moment.
The entire episode was disgraceful, as the leader of the world’s most powerful army let himself get spun up about whether a beleaguered nation’s president had sufficiently supplicated himself. On Monday, the New York Post reported that Trump is considering whether to cut off all future aid to Ukraine.
But European leaders have stepped in and reaffirmed their commitments to supporting Ukraine against further Russian aggression. If Europe takes a more active role in facilitating its own defense and that of its neighbors, it could represent an upside to the embarrassing display in the Oval Office.
“You have full backing across the United Kingdom, and we stand with you, with Ukraine, for as long as it may take,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer told Zelenskyy on Saturday, the day after the ill-fated meeting with Trump.
To date, the U.K. has committed £12.8 billion ($16.3 billion) to Ukraine—60 percent of it in military support. Over the weekend, the country announced an additional £2.26 billion ($2.87 billion) loan to Ukraine, to be repaid from “the extraordinary profits generated on sanctioned Russian sovereign assets held in the EU.”
“This funding will bolster Ukraine’s armed forces and will put Ukraine in the strongest possible position at a critical juncture in the war,” U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves said. “It comes as we have increased our defence spending to 2.5% of GDP [gross domestic product], which will deliver the stability required to keep us safe and underpin economic growth.”
This move reflects a greater sentiment among European countries—especially, though not exclusively, those closer to Russia—to spend more on their own collective defense and that of their nearby neighbors. “This is the time for Europe to step up,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys told Politico last week. “It’s not just about the frontier nations—we can be in wartime soon, and we can’t just be looking at one country and complaining about it.”
“We need higher expenditures on defense in every [E.U.] member state,” added Poland’s Undersecretary of State for European Union Affairs Magdalena Sobkowiak-Czarnecka. “It’s not only because of the potential peace talks, but there’s also a feeling that Europe needs to have its own agenda and not be surprised by other partners in the world.”
Notably, Poland—which lies just on the other side of Ukraine from Russia—is currently the only NATO member state that spends more on its defense as a share of GDP than the United States.
As J.D. Tuccille wrote last month in Reason, since Russia’s 2022 invasion, “European countries gave somewhat more than the U.S.” to Ukraine, “but Europe emphasized financial and humanitarian aid, so the U.S. has offered slightly more military assistance.”
If European nations choose to take up more of the share of their own defense, it would be a positive (and perhaps unintentional) result of Trump’s chaotic foreign policy.
Trump has signaled repeatedly that he wants to end the war, though his negotiating style would indicate that he doesn’t particularly care who wins or loses.
“We must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last month at NATO headquarters in Brussels before negotiations had even begun. Further, he added, “the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.”
Any negotiated end to the conflict will involve a certain amount of push and pull from each side. But Hegseth effectively conceded two of Russia’s biggest requests—they get to keep the land they took, and Ukraine can’t join NATO—before the parties had even met.
In that vein, initial negotiations took place in Saudi Arabia between Russia and the U.S., excluding Ukraine. “It is critical that any negotiations to end the war are not happening behind the backs of the key parties affected by the Russian aggression,” Zelenskyy said. “You cannot make decisions without Ukraine on how to end the war in Ukraine.”
Two U.S. officials told NBC News the U.S. was simply meeting with Russia first and would meet with Ukraine separately, on the same terms. But when asked about the purported snub, Trump took a different tack.
“Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years,” he told reporters. “You should have never started it.” In other words, Trump accused Zelenskyy of starting the war—a war that began when Russian troops marched into Ukraine across three separate borders, including from territory it had seized from Ukraine eight years earlier.
Trump’s story, that Ukraine is to blame for the war, bears no resemblance to reality, though it does reflect the Russian government’s version of events.
The following day, Trump doubled down, calling Zelenskyy “a Dictator without Elections” who “has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died” in a post on Truth Social. (Zelenskyy declared martial law in 2022 after hostilities broke out, and Ukrainian law prevents the country from holding elections during a national emergency. As Lee Reaney and Joel Wasserman wrote in Foreign Policy, “Voting in the middle of the Russian invasion is legally and practically unworkable.”)
Trump’s public posture is disgraceful, painting the aggrieved as the aggressor in a decidedly one-sided conflict. But if Trump’s unhinged rhetoric convinces Europe once and for all to take up a greater share of its own defense and that of its neighbors, then it could be a positive outcome.
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