The appalling squabble at the Oval Office—what one commentator described as “a premeditated, gangster-like ambush”—with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance hectoring Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in full view of the Press, and then accusing him of being ‘disrespectful’ and ‘ungrateful’, has not only put paid to any hopes of an early, US-mediated ceasefire in the war in Ukraine, it has left America’s reputation and credibility, globally, in shreds. Trump has often boasted about his mastery of the ‘art of the deal’, but if this is a sample, it isn’t surprising that he has six corporate bankruptcies to his discredit. The Zelenskyy debacle is a negotiating disaster. Trump had promised an end to the Ukraine war within 24 hours of returning to the White House, but confronted by Zelenskyy on elements of the false narrative Vance was putting forward, simply destroyed all possibilities of a negotiated settlement, humiliating Zelenskyy, openly defending Putin, declaring that the US was simply withdrawing from the role of mediator, and pulling out all support to Ukraine. Hardly an exemplar of the ‘art of the deal’.
The Oval Office spat will substantially escalate the process of destroying the architecture of the US-dominated world order, constructed over 80 years since the end of World War II, which has already come under substantial stress from a rising Axis led by China, as well as numerous lesser contenders in an increasingly multipolar world.
Trump’s rising belligerent and progressively articulated world view can only accelerate American isolation and the long-predicted decline of America’s global power. He has alienated longstanding allies and brought odium to the US by declaring, inter alia, that Canada would become the US’ 51st state; asserting that he would “buy Greenland”, a Danish territory; aggressively pushing a proposal for the complete removal of the Palestinian population from Gaza and the transformation of the territory into the “Riveira of the Middle East”—a proposal for population expulsion that several commentators have noted would constitute a war crime; voting in favour of Russia at the UN and against the Western consensus on the Ukraine war; and a progressive rejection of the US partnership with Europe, on which the entire edifice of the contemporary world order—no doubt with all its inequalities and inequities, but also its relative stability—has been based. Trump thus declared, “The European Union was formed to screw the United States and they’ve done a good job of it.”
Trump has inaugurated a foreign policy of deep disruption, unsettling established equations—as well as basic norms of civil discourse between nations. His strategy appears, essentially, to be, to use the ample US power—economic and military—to bully and browbeat transient concessions from weaker states, with little understanding of the dynamics of the long game, and of the complex underpinnings of strategic power in the arena of international influence, politics and conflict. Crucially, this is far from a considered strategy, and the imagined advantages are likely to be weighed out by the costs in most cases. Indeed, many of the tariffs and renegotiated deals that Trump flaunts bring little real benefit to the US.
While Trump is taking a sledge hammer to the American ‘rule-based order’ of international politics, Elon Musk, on Trump’s behalf, is ripping through governance within America with a chainsaw. Breathtakingly ignorant 20-somethings in Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), are simply abolishing thousands of jobs without the slightest idea of their utility or institutional purpose. The incompetence of these operations was dramatically exposed in the case of the abrupt firing of some 350 employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration, nearly a third of them from a Texas plant engaged in the critical task of reassembling warheads—a decision that had to be quickly reversed once the enormity of the potential consequences was brought to attention. Thousands of jobs have also been cut, among others, from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the US Forest Service without any impact assessment or rational evaluation of operational efficiency. Crucially, moreover, the entire DOGE programme has been riddled with misrepresentation and fraud. A New York Times investigation, for instance, found, among a slew of other irregularities, that the $8-billion savings claimed from a Homeland Security contract on behalf of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement was, in fact, a thousandth of this figure—a mere $8 million.
During the Oval Office altercation, Trump and Vance demanded respect, but Trump has shown little for other countries or leaders. In an age where global influence is everywhere being contested, the US is now being viewed as the most unreliable partner. And for all the claims of making America great again, the reality is that the quality of governance in the country— which has been declining steadily over decades—is likely to plunge drastically under Trump’s second and visibly frenzied term.