The Trump-Putin Axis came fully out of the closet today.
The new U.S. administration has clearly embraced what might be called a “mob boss” foreign policy—because of the criminal pasts of the men who are leading it and because of the tactics they appear to favor.
In an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Donald Trump and his dangerously ill-informed yes-man, JD Vance, the U.S. president pressed for a deal to squeeze mineral assets out of Ukraine in exchange for some ill-defined level of continued support for that country that could only be described as extortionate.
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Then, when Zelensky failed to fall to his knees and kiss the hem of Trump’s garments in thanks, both Trump and Vance began to try to bully Zelensky in the most thuggish and repulsive way imaginable.
It was an ugly display of foreign policy crudeness, the likes of which we have never seen in the White House. It is tempting to call it inept. But it was not. It achieved precisely the goal that Putin and Trump had long sought, to produce a public break between the United States and Ukraine that would directly and meaningfully support Russia’s illegal, brutal conquest of its neighbor.
Trump and Vance, however, were rebuffed by Zelensky in important ways. When the Americans sought to perpetuate lies that have been a staple of Kremlin propaganda and Trump campaign speeches, Zelensky stood up to them. He refuted the idea that Ukraine provoked Russia’s invasion.
He rejected the ahistorical nonsense that Putin only invaded Ukraine because he sensed former President Joe Biden’s weakness. He reminded those viewing the encounter on U.S. national television that in fact Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 (a point on which Trump embarrassingly tried to correct him) and that the war raged for all four years Trump was in office the last time. He pointed out that he sought a diplomatic solution only to have Putin violate the terms of deals that had been struck.
With each correction Trump and Vance grew more furious and out of control. Trump vainly tried to intimidate a man who has stood up to far worse since he assumed Ukraine’s presidency. Vance criticized Zelensky for not thanking Trump publicly for…well, for what?
Trump has made it clear that he would stop U.S. support for Ukraine and that he was sympathetic to Putin, a man who has sought both to deny Ukraine’s right to exist and to wipe the country from the map.
Unsurprisingly, Zelensky was not cowed by the two-bit goons who confronted him. At the same time, while the meeting went off the rails and Trump undoubtedly felt he had done well for his audience in Red Square, Zelensky made it clear how much the world had changed since Trump has taken office.
The incident sent a message to European allies that they would have to assume a new role in their common defense now that the U.S. administration had so clearly switched its allegiance from the Atlantic Alliance it had built and led for the past 80 years to a monstrous dictator who has sought to destroy that alliance, and the United States itself.
That’s right, Trump and Vance are leading the first openly and aggressively anti-U.S., anti-Western, anti-democracy foreign policy in American history. (Russians loved what they saw, with Putin ally and former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev writing on social media, “The insolent pig finally got a proper slap down in the Oval Office. And @realDonaldTrump is right: The Kiev regime is ‘gambling with WWIII.’”)
While some of the most extreme MAGA Republicans on Capitol Hill issued statements in support of the Trump-Vance performance, there was deep consternation, anger and despair not only from Democrats but also from GOP Russia hawks. Liz Cheney, for example, rightly stated “History will remember this day.”
It is surely one of the darkest days in the history of American foreign policy.
Further, while some on the right may be quietly cheering this new era of mafia-inspired testosterone-poisoned non-diplomacy, it would be a mistake to think of the Don in the White House as the Don Corleone of U.S. foreign policy. Considering where he gets his ideas and talking points and whose interests he serves, Trump is more the Luca Brasi of Putin foreign policy. Moronic muscle. An ignoramus with nukes.
But for all the embarrassment we feel at our president, we should not lose sight of the hugely embarrassing and damaging performance of JD Vance. Vance, like Trump, had virtually every fact wrong. Furthermore, he was completely out of line addressing a foreign head of state as he did, especially one who is one of the genuinely great heroes of our era and who has been fighting courageously not just on behalf of his own people, but in defense of the ideals and interests of the U.S. and our long-time European allies.
Trump thinks he humiliated Zelensky. He did not. He humiliated the United States of America. In addition, he put us all at greater risk of further conflict in Europe by encouraging Putin.
Mob boss foreign policy will not work. It has not worked for Putin, whose violent forays have proved a disaster for the Russian military, the Russian economy, and for Russia’s international standing.
And it will not work for Trump despite his many years emulating American mobsters like John Gotti and surrounding himself with mob lawyers in mob-infested industries like gambling and real estate.
Trump is a paper tough guy. That was never more clear than on this infamous last Friday in February, when Trump revealed his decision to ally the United States with the most nefarious global criminal of our generation, Vladimir Putin, and to declare himself a lieutenant to the monstrous criminal enterprise on which Putin has focused throughout his two decades of dictatorship in Russia.
