US president Donald Trump and v-president JD Vance ganged up in an attempt to humiliate and intimidate a guest, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in the White House on March 28 in an exhibition of bad behaviour and bad faith, with few precedents in the history of diplomacy. The attack provoked Zelenskyy to leave the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue campus in a huff. We shall get to the merits of the case – meaning who should be assigned the culpability for the escalation of hostilities on February 24, 2022. For the moment, let’s focus on Trump and Vance. Trump, who seems to inhabit a planet all his own most of the time, had first begun his disinformation campaign over a week ago, calling Zelenskyy an unelected dictator and accusing Ukraine of beginning the war. On February 18, he’d told Zelenskyy, “You’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it. ... You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.” In the White House, reports say, Trump told Zelenskyy that he wasn’t in a good position and that he was “gambling with World War III,” using rhetoric that smacked of the most despicable kind of brinkmanship. That this behaviour was just an extreme form of bargaining that comes naturally to a crooked businessman became evident when Trump, reportedly, told Zelenskyy that he either make a deal or the US would be out of the peace process. It wouldn’t be very unlikely that the deal that Trump referenced was not just one between Ukraine and Russia but the one that Zelenskyy would have to sign to give the US preferential access to its minerals.

Having recorded Trump’s and Vance’s astonishing act of defenestrating protocol, it is to be recorded that it was not Ukraine that began the war. Russian President Vladimir Putin started hostilities back in February 2014, using the thin and specious argument of helping Russian-speaking people in Ukraine to attack the country and seize territory in the Crimean region. Zelenskyy wasn’t anywhere in the picture. It was the blasé attitude of the US and the European Union (EU) to the blatantly illegal attack on another country’s sovereignty that encouraged Putin to up the ante and invade Ukraine yet again almost exactly a decade later. What Trump is trying to do is clear. First, he’s trying to dismantle the global order as it exists today by refusing to honour the rules that govern it. Second, he is trying to undermine both the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Ukraine is just collateral damage. Finally, Trump is trying to cosy up to a dictator he admires. We can expect him to reach out to other tyrants before his four years are over.