I’m a conservative who supports Donald Trump’s agenda, and also someone who opposes Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression against Ukraine and wants to see Ukraine win. But I’m not freaking out over Volodymyr Zelensky’s disasterous Oval Office meeting with Trump.
It’s like media and political observers who have been watching Trump for close decade are still flabbergasted when Trump does Trump things in a Trump way. Trump works on persuasion and negotiation framing and pursues a tit-for-tat game theory strategy: Cooperate with him and he’ll cooperate with you, attack him and he’ll attack you. Given those parameters, Zelensky played things exactly wrong.
The meeting between President Donald Trump, VP J.D. Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was nothing short of explosive, fantastic, and satisfying. So much so that America collectively need a smoke afterward.
The Democrats, however, seem to think Trump just beheaded a statue of Apollo and now the gods will be wrathful.
But besides watching an entitled brat of a world leader get raked over the coals by the guy from The Apprentice and a hillbilly millennial, Zelensky’s strategy was a head scratcher. Perhaps he was so used to American politicians who were willing to lay themselves down into puddles, so Zelensky wasn’t ready to talk to two dudes who don’t feel the need to perform for the media, which Vance seemed hyper-aware of, and pointed that out to Zelensky.
Perhaps he thought America owed him one, and thus his smug attitude, but as Bonchie noted in his article, this wasn’t wise:
Trump has never accepted the idea that Ukraine is doing the United States a favor by fighting Russia as a way of justifying unlimited aid. Perhaps Joe Biden found that argument persuasive, but Joe Biden is not in office anymore. Russia is not going to invade the United States or any NATO country (if for no other reason than a lack of capability), and using that as a type of blackmail for support was never going to play.
Actually, if Putin had succeeded in gobbling up Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (NATO countries all) would have become targets. The mauling Russia has received in Ukriane put that off the table, especially with Finland and Sweden now in NATO.
And herein we find the trump card that Trump had on Zelensky… you know, besides the money the world’s most successful beggar came to get.
Trump’s negotiation strategy vastly differs from many other American leaders, especially those on the Democrat side of the aisle. Despite Trump’s reputation as a rough-around-the-edges man whose political charm is far divorced from what people expect after watching The West Wing too much, he is a master negotiator.
Even when it comes to our enemies, Trump is not going to negotiate from a position of bad faith. He sees everything as a businessman would. There are no friends or foes while at the table, just good deals and bad deals.
I thought The Federalist CEO Sean Davis put this very well in a post he made on X:
Trump doesn’t bad mouth anyone who comes to the negotiating table in good faith. Ever. It’s a near-cardinal rule of negotiations for him, and a major reason he’s been such a successful dealmaker.
If you refuse to negotiate, he will trash you. If you lie or negotiate in bad faith, he will trash you. He has zero interest in allowing empty moralizing to get in the way of a deal that he wants.
He has done this his entire career, in business and in politics, and it’s fascinating to me how many people who think of themselves as smart and savvy are incapable of seeing or understanding this dynamic.
The key here isn’t just that Trump is holding the cards and that Zelensky needs him — not the other way around — it’s that Trump is negotiating from a fortified position of “America first.” Everything at the table is subject to that one point, and if anything drifts away from that, then Trump pushes back and pushes back until he’s all the way gone from the table.
Zelensky acted like a petulant child who showed no respect to the country that had given him the money for his war while trying to secure more, and Trump saw no value, not in the war, and not in Zelensky’s disrespect. As such, there was no deal. Moreover, Zelensky attempted to pressure Trump into capitulation through our own media, which was a costly mistake. Trump is not beholden to the American media as other leaders are.
Here’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio explaining how Zelensky screwed up in even blunter terms:
Clearly Zelensky screwed up. Ukraine needs America a whole lot more than America needs Ukraine. Europe’s help has been valuable, but they can’t supply Ukraine with Patriot missiles, HIMARS, and a dozen other high tech items from America’s vast arsenal that have been absolutely essential for fighting Russia to a standstill.
As incompetently as Russia has run this war, Ukraine has not made notable gains in taking back its occupied land since the Kharkiv Counteroffensive in 2022. Though Ukraine has considerably degraded Russia’s logistics, energy and industrial infrastructure, and the Kursk offensive has captured Russian land and tied up forces that can’t be used elsewhere, it hasn’t launched a real counterattack to recapture Ukrainian land since 2023. A stalemate that continues to destroy what’s left of Russia’s Soviet stockpiles is still helping NATO, but doesn’t do anything to advance Trump’s other foreign policy goals for America.
Clearly the Trump Administration is unhappy with the stalemate of the war, and it is naive to think that the United States would be willing to underwrite the continuance of the war for tens of billions of dollars indefinitely. Just as clearly, Zelensky took the wrong approach and made several blunders dealing with Trump.
I am optimistic that Zelensky and Ukraine can change their approach and come to an agreement with the Trump Administration. But that agreement will have to be on Trump’s terms, not Zelensky’s.
Tags: Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Military, Russo-Ukrainian War, Ukraine, video, Volodymyr Zelensky
Zelenskyy is little more than a front man for Andriy Yermak and was only allowed to rattle off talking points. Hence, no negotiations were possible in the White House.
Since the Russians broke the AFU attack on the Surovikin Line in 2023H2, Ukrainian strategy has been reduced to attempting to slow down the Russian counteroffensive. Even their Kursk Oblast adventure did not deter the Russians. The Russians know well the history of Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein.
President Trump is trying to save the Ukrainians from catastrophe, but the Ukrainians seem to believe that they can involve NATO troops and/or receive massive shipments of wonder weapons for the win. Neither is likely to happen.
Yermak is the key player here. He has to come to Washington and negotiate with President Trump, in private.
We need Russia to come to us rather than China. Russia needs help against likely Chinese encroachments in the Russian Far East. What will the Chinese rename Vladivostok?
Russia and Ukraine are both about bled out from this war. You’re correct that a Russia offensive on the bordering NATO countries is now beyond the Russians’ capability. Likewise, they can’t defend their far east either.
Trump sees the bigger Great Game here. V only sees loss of his territory.
interesting times.
I commend Donald Trump for trying to broker a deal that would end the stalemate that exists between Ukraine and Russia but his calculations need to consider an inherent asymmetry: Vladimir Putin is willing and able to pay a much higher cost for the Donbas than Ukraine can afford.
As such, Zelensky is incentivized to “borrow” assets from wealthier nations at rock-bottom rates to offset this disadvantage.
Normally, the lender would require collateral to secure the loan. In this case, the collateral would seem to be be rare earth materials. But Zelensky has to get more than a “market rate” of return for this asset because Putin is willing to pay way more for Ukrainian territory (in blood and treasury) than can be justified in purely economic terms.
To break this deadlock, Zelensky will have to “return to the table” with a sweeter offer. He ought to be able to leverage Ukrainian drone development as a bargaining chip in addition to selling the mineral rights that were originally on offer.
This is a high price to pay but unless the Europeans will come to Ukraine’s aid with free money, it seems the only way to “outbid” Putin.
The 2025 U.S. Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summaries report there are no economically viable rare earth deposits in Ukraine. The entire “save rare earths in Ukraine from Russia” meme was a NATO propaganda fraud to reinforce American support for Ukraine.
Whitehall: No need to wonder, the Chinese already have a name for Vladivostok:
“The Chinese name for Vladivostok is 海參崴 (Hǎishēnwǎi), which translates to ‘sea cucumber cliffs.’”
“The Chinese name for Vladivostok is 海參崴 (Hǎishēnwǎi), which translates to ‘sea cucumber cliffs.’”
Prior to 1860, Outer Manchuria (which includes Vladivostok) was generally regarded as Chinese. Qing China ceded Vladivostok to Russia in 1860 by ratifying the Treaty of Aigun, under protest. It is still a hot button issue in China.
The President of the Republic of China (Taiwan) Lai Ching-te has stated that if PRC’s claims on Taiwan are genuinely about territorial integrity, then the PRC should first take back Outer Manchuria.
“The entire ‘save rare earths in Ukraine from Russia’ meme was a NATO propaganda fraud to reinforce American support for Ukraine.”
So is Trump being swindled through the delusion belief that Ukrainian mineral rights will repay US war loans or is he deliberately running a scam to cheat the Ukrainians?
“You’re correct that a Russia offensive on the bordering NATO countries is now beyond the Russians’ capability. Likewise, they can’t defend their far east either.”
Russia could defend Vladivostok at the cost of ending their “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine. This would require them to inaugurate a “We Have Always Been at War with Eurasia” campaign but this is an easy policy shift for a cunning KGB Colonel like Vlad.
In light of the shocking revelation that Ukrainian rare earth assets are a swindle, I propose an alternative offer to Ukraine as a means of repaying their war loans.
In exchange for a 99 year lease of Crimea for the establishment of a US naval base in Sevastopol, the US Treasury will pay the war debts of Ukraine and extend them a 20 year line of secured credit.
Not only would this “tripwire” serve to discourage any future Special Military Incursions, Donald Trump would be able to satisfy his territorial ambitions of gaining a naval base that would substitute for the one Greenland denied him.
It’s a Win/Win, winning bigly, baby!
“So is Trump being swindled through the delusion belief that Ukrainian mineral rights will repay US war loans or is he deliberately running a scam to cheat the Ukrainians?”
Trump and the American public are being lied to by European scientists who are attempting to manipulate public opinion here. Their lies have been regurgitated by NATO, the IC, and the press. When you ask where the deposits are, you are informed that their locations and sizes are “classified”.
Not certain Trump actually believes these lies. He may be trying to flush out the liars by forcing them to an agreement. The falsity may be why the Ukrainians are skittish about actually signing an agreement.
I have been making the point for a while that The Middle Kingdom, faced with replicating the scale of the D-Day invasion of Europe to enter a fight-to-the-knife on a little island in the face of the U.S. and resurgent Pacific allies, might instead decide to look north to all those Siberian resources that they could walk past the much-diminished Formerly Red Army to claim, asserting their historical rights as they so like to do.
Every single thing about this is wrong.
Zelensky is not going to submit because he knows doing so means systematic massacres. If the Russians could not make him submit for the past three years, the idea that Trump can do so by yelling at him is too stupid to be laughable.
Trump is indeed a businessman. That’s why he’s uniquely incompetent and engaging in unparalleled stupidity here. War is not business. You don’t “make a deal”. If someone launches a war and it works out, they will launch another one. The only way to prevent that is to make the outcome so negative they convince themselves not to do it again. “Making a deal” means rewarding the war and encouraging another one. Anybody who knows anything about war understands this. Trump does not, which is why he has chosen the worst possible approach – one that cannot possibly succeed no matter what he does.
Putin will take Trump’s deals, laugh in his face, and do whatever the hell he wants. He has violated every single agreement he has made since he gained power. He’s not going to stop just because it is Trump he’s dealing with.
Zelensky’s questions were completely reasonable, the product of seeing how things actually work when life and death confront you every single day. This attitude that he is somehow entitled is something only American delusion could produce, resulting from living in a continental bubble of security for more than a century.
You simply do not understand reality, you do not understand what you can and can not enforce, and this is a world-historical disaster.
@FM
>might instead decide to look north to all those Siberian resources
Boomer meme.
China has not spent the past 20 years building a navy larger than the USN and shipbuilding capacity 230 times that of the USA to invade Siberia.
Stop engaging in wishful thinking.
It doesn’t matter why somebody started building a force twenty years ago. What matters is what the Chinese can buy with the currency they have. And while Taiwan has a certain glow to it from both wealth and the near-monopoly on high end semiconductor manufacture that brought them so much of that wealth, eastern Siberia keeps getting cheaper as Russian manpower and materiel continues to be ground up in Ukraine.
It’s not as if China doesn’t have Arctic ambitions. Mind, it’d also be two nuclear powers in a direct dustup… which is almost certainly one of the reasons the Chinese don’t talk about that particular reconquest. The US hasn’t been willing to call Taiwan an independent nation for half a century; why would the Chinese expect them to be under the US nuclear umbrella?
As for wars, they only end in two ways: deals or extermination. Unless you’re expecting one of Ukraine or Russia to exterminate the other, the war ends in a deal.
Complaining that, eventually, one of the parties will break the deal is besides the point. All deals are eventually broken; the point is that your position gets better while the deal lasts.
Imperial Germany has not spent over twenty years building a massive big-gun blue-water Navy, and manned them with all those men needed elsewhere, to keep it sitting in port except for one brief inconclusive foray into the North Sea, then turn around and go back to port.
Great Britain has not spent all that money, and manned them with all those men needed elsewhere, on a big-gun Royal Navy to keep it sitting in Scapa Flow waiting for the Germans to come out.
Yet that’s what happened. Best laid plans and all that. Yet the one caused the other.
The PLAN built their Navy to use it to counterbalance the U.S. Navy. The PLA rocket forces built all those missile fields and ICBMs to counterbalance the U.S. (and to a lesser degree, legacy Soviet) ICBM arsenals.
They are paying the entrance fee to the big leagues of international relations, so they can pursue their national aims.
The mineral deal is just a cover so Trump can say we got something in return. He just want to stop paying for the war.
I’m a conservative who feels Ukraine is none of our business, and I’m deeply sorry our neo-fascist globalists and CIA/NATO dupes (controlled by the WEF/Davos scum) allowed themselves to instigate this whole fiasco, starting over a decade ago. We (really they, but they did it in our name and with our money) egged them into teasing the bear, and the bear bit back.
Ukraine has no chance of coming out of this intact. I feel heartily sorry for the Ukrainian people. I just hope their “leadership” and the people that manipulated them can come to great harm.