A Diplomatic Dust-Up for the Ages

The writer is in Australia.

With President Donald Trump’s re-election and his well-known views, Europe and Ukraine faced an in-tray from hell. Yet, their shock at the implosion in the Oval Office last week is more an indictment of their impuissance than any perfidy by Trump. President Volodymyr Zelensky’s history lessons to Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance reeked of condescension to his moneybag-in-chief. The hunter, not the prey, gets to write the story of the hunt. As Thucydides noted long ago, notions of right and justice only govern relations among equals. For others, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.

The sight of Zelensky in his battle dress attire even in the most formal settings has also been a regular turn-off. He should always have restricted this performative gesture to when he is in his own country. The insistent demand that all other countries must bend their foreign policy interests to support Ukraine or else they are complicit in Russia’s evil has been no less of an irritant. Maybe the adulation with which he has been showered has led him to believe the myth of his own heroic status. Hopefully the Trump-Vance confrontation will have registered some home truths and help to rid him of the sense of entitlement of indefinite US assistance.

The world will take some time to come to terms with the fallout from the disastrous Oval Office optics. As a student of diplomacy, joint editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy, and one-time senior UN official, I’ve never known anything like it. But we are neither part of Europe nor an extension of it. Instead we are located below the equator to the southeast off the Asian mainland. Australia’s chief strategic threat is not Russia but China. Yet so much of horrified Australian commentary has echoed European talking points that don’t reflect our strategic vulnerability down under.

Consider just two events from last week in our own immediate neighbourhood. First, Australia and New Zealand (NZ) were blindsided by a number of deals that the Cook Islands signed with China covering deep-sea mineral exploration, infrastructure, ship-building, tourism, agriculture, technology and education. Remember, the tiny Pacific Island country is in a ‘free association’ relationship with New Zealand, its people are NZ citizens and it benefits from NZ assistance in defence and foreign affairs. This was followed by the fiasco of a Chinese naval task force sailing around Australia and conducting live-fire drills without the customary advance notification to Australian authorities.

Put aside the by now typical and bumbling ineptitude and dissembling by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. The more serious import is the signal of China’s intent to become a blue water naval force with the will and ability to project power over long distances. China has historically been a continental and not a maritime power, unlike the US whose navy took over the historical role of the Royal Navy in underwriting the security of the seas worldwide as a global public good. China’s rapidly modernising naval battle force has grown steeply from 255 ships a decade ago to 400 today. By contrast, it seems to take Australia a decade to agree on the need for and terms and composition of a committee to explore a major defence procurement decision, only to then have a successor government overturn that decision. Little wonder that Australia must counter China’s 400-ship fleet with a puny fleet of 16 ships: the smallest and oldest we’ve had in decades.

China’s naval strategy has also undergone a reorientation from area denial to hostile powers to an assertive posture built around an expeditionary strategy utilising new bases and port access rights around the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Australia is exceptionally vulnerable to hostile threats to its sea lanes of communication and embarrassingly ill-prepared with military assets and strategic reserves for a sustained forceful response to threats on the open seas.

We have depended on the US alliance for our security during and since the Second World War. The US has become an overstretched superpower no longer able to police all regions of the world. Unless someone can offer a convincing case to a rightly sceptical American and global audience that Uncle Sam can continue to deal with all threats simultaneously, it makes strategic sense for Trump to try and offload the burden of addressing Ukraine to Europe, or else to end the war on the best terms available and escape the trap of the sunk cost fallacy.

Elbridge Colby, nominee for Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, tweeted on December 16th that the US “needs to face the fact that we can’t do everything in the world. And that we are way behind on the primary issue facing the country from a geopolitical perspective which is China dominating Asia and we are not gaining in Asia by spending in Ukraine”. Would any Australian serious about our strategic dilemma disagree?

To return to the right royal diplomatic dust-up involving Trump, Zelensky and Vance, Ukraine and NATO – meaning the Biden administration in Washington as well as the European powers – have lacked any discernible strategy for either victory or peace. Nor have they articulated an exit strategy from the grinding and mutually hurting stalemate. As Marco Rubio said on a subsequent appearance on ABC News’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, “Wait and see after ‘another year of death’ is not a plan.” Hence Trump’s message to Zelensky on his Truth Social platform after the meeting collapsed into acrimony: “Come back when you’re ready for peace.”

Great powers, including the US, pursue an imperial and not ethical foreign policy. Trump’s art of the deal always has been to ask for everything, judge the point at which the other party has made his final offer and then take what he can get. Mix and match the two sentences, and we can better understand what Trump is doing on Ukraine. It is not for the President of Ukraine to lecture the US President, Vice President and Secretary of State on their burden of a globe-spanning train of interests and values, nor where each one should be ranked in the hierarchy of foreign and defence policy goals. Especially in front of the rolling TV cameras. Given his known volatility, Trump managed to temper his visibly growing irritability for quite some time.

Complaints about Trump upending the international order substitute a fantasy vision for reality. The rules-based liberal international order did not stop the incomprehensibly barbaric and depraved Hamas attack on Israel in 2023, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, China’s creeping militarisation of the South China Sea, US invasion and conquest of Iraq in 2003 and numerous other examples of great powers behaving badly.

Successive US Presidents have demanded burden-sharing by NATO partners but been ignored. A BBC breakdown of military aid to Ukraine from January 2022 to December 2024 inclusive shows the US gave $69 billion worth and the rest of NATO combined – with a greater population and GDP than the US – $57 billion. An analysis from the Kiel Institute looked at the total of military, financial and humanitarian aid and concluded that Europe had provided more than the US, $139 and $120 billion respectively. But Trump is correct in the claim that the US gives considerably more than the Europeans in the form of outright grants.

The astonishing public spat in the White House on Friday and the roll call of European leaders lining up in support of Zelensky demonstrates the reality of donor dependency. Europeans must believe they are entitled to US security subsidies in perpetuity while they indulge their luxury beliefs. As Lord Palmerston famously said, a nation has neither eternal allies nor perpetual enemies, merely eternal and permanent interests.

For Australian interests, prioritising China is the great imperative. The Ukraine war pushed Russia into a de facto ‘no limits’ alliance with China, reversing the singular achievement of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger more than 50 years ago. The Wall Street Journal reported on February 21st that one major calculation behind Trump’s embrace of Putin is “a strategic desire to drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing”, both of which have long been trying to curb US dominance of the international order.

An apocryphal story has Churchill saying, “You can always rely on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” In point of fact this seems to be a variation of a remark by former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban affirming his “conviction that men and nations do behave wisely when they have exhausted all other possibilities“. For three years Zelensky and NATO have done everything to resist and repel the Russians from Ukraine but in the process ceded yet more territory. Trump, who in his first term famously became the first President in office in recent memory not to begin a new war, is trying to put a halt to the meat grinder of a war.

Trump made it clear during his unscripted spray at Zelensky that he takes offence at being portrayed as a Putin stooge. He sees himself rather as a peacemaker and dealmaker in the middle of a war that has the potential to trigger a third world war. He took issue with Zelensky’s demands for the US to condemn Putin as the warmongering aggressor with the caustic comment that he couldn’t “say really terrible things about Putin and then say, ‘Hi Vladimir… How are we doing on the deal?'” He noted that Putin is as passionate in his hatred of Zelensky as the other way round. The conflict resolution literature has long noted that mediators should avoid public scoldings of any conflict party in order to retain access to the ears of all.

Similarly, it is easy enough to denounce Trump’s coerced minerals deal as an example of bullyboy neo-colonialism. Yet, half the revenues from developing the mineral resources were to have been paid into a jointly owned fund that would invest in the country’s “safety, security and prosperity”. This would give the US a material stake in a peaceful future with secure borders for Ukraine. Instead of formal US security guarantees to anchor a new peace agreement, a joint US-Ukrainian (and European?) resource development corridor in eastern Ukraine could function as a de facto commercial tripwire should Russian troops cross it.

As always, only history itself can answer whether Trump ends up on the right or wrong side of history.

Ramesh Thakur is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and Emeritus Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, the Australian National University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.