Trump Transactions Spell Trouble for Transatlantic Pacts

The bullying of Zelenskyy flies in the face of decades-old alliances between the US and Europe. A quick history tour shows what their unravelling might mean for the world

- MANISH TEWARI

The second Trump administration is holding a gun to Europe's head. In mid-February, Donald Trump's deputy J.D. Vance cocked it with an acerbic address at the Munich Security Conference. At the month's end, Trump pulled the trigger in the Oval Office by publicly badgering Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose country has been resisting Russian aggression for a straight 36 months.

Done in front of TV cameras, it left the impression that it was a carefully choreographed ambush designed to send out a message that the new US regime cared little about either the transatlantic military alliance or the Anglo-Saxon construct that underpins the shared cultural mores of substantial parts of North America and Europe.

The encounter dishonored and disregarded both the Budapest Memorandum of 1994—whereby the US, Russia, and the UK had committed to protecting and preserving the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons—and the Minsk accords of the past decade.

Beyond the abject revulsion the joust generated lie some hard new realities that should make other nations wary of the new philosophy underlining the Trump-Vance foreign policy disposition. It can be summed up with one word—transactionalism. Trump is moving the US from being a nation that prided itself on exceptionalism to one that embraces abject transactionalism.

The insistence that Ukraine give up half its mineral wealth to pay for the American military and diplomatic support, coupled with Elon Musk's threat to shut off the Starlink terminals providing critical communication support to the Ukrainian war effort, are telling examples of arm-twisting a nation that's fighting with its back to the wall. "You hold no cards," as Trump kept repeatedly yelling at Zelenskyy.