On Friday, the world witnessed President Donald Trump, aided by Vice President JD Vance, verbally attack Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, in front of television cameras.
Was this another of Trump’s vaunted “madman” moments, where he tries to act unpredictably as a way to make credible threats?
The answer is no. Trump’s Oval Office meltdown – which Americans should view as a major turning point in U.S. foreign policy – was the culmination of Trump’s longstanding foreign policy views.
When we observe events like Trump’s verbal attack on Zelenskyy, it is tempting to treat them as a surprise because they depart from the norm. And what Trump did to Zelenskyy was shocking and in no way diplomatic.
But Trump’s words and actions – including asking Zelenskyy to leave the White House without signing the minerals agreement Trump had been touting all week as a first step toward a peace deal – reflect his longstanding foreign policy views.
In that sense, it was the real Donald Trump who sat in that Oval Office chair.
We know Trump has three core foreign policy beliefs
As I found in the research for my book Leaders at War, leaders come into office with the core beliefs that shape how they look at the world and take in information about current events. Those beliefs are very, very “sticky” – they tend not to change much over time.
Despite all the noise and real chaos Trump has engendered in both his presidential terms, there are a few core tenets he has returned to again and again in the foreign policy realm.
As I wrote just before the 2024 election, Trump has three remarkably consistent core beliefs.
Thomas Wright identified these views in an article published a year before Trump’s January 2017 inauguration. Trump thinks alliances are a rip-off for the United States; he dislikes multilateral trade deals; and he admires dictators.
Start with alliances. For example, Trump has long viewed the NATO alliance with disdain. During the 2016 campaign, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that Trump would probably have advisers who would see the value of NATO – and that proved true, to a point. But Trump also reportedly said he wanted to withdraw the United States from NATO….
On trade, Trump has made clear he means to impose major tariffs beyond those he enacted during his trade war with China. In a recent interview, Trump said “the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff. It’s my favorite word. It needs a public relations firm”….
And on his third core belief, admiration for dictators, Trump has been even clearer about his desire to emulate strongman tactics if he returns to office. During the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly suggested that he would use the U.S. military against his domestic enemies – or what he has called the “enemy within.”
In his first term, Trump did not succeed in many of his goals – and many Republicans in Congress were still willing to call him out. In his second term, Trump has pursued the same goals. But this time, it is clear he will not allow anyone to stand in his way, and very few Republicans are interested in doing so anyway.
Trump has already taken actions on all three fronts since his second term began just weeks ago. He has begun a cycle of tariff threats with allies and with China. He sent Vance and newly installed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to Europe, where they made clear in startling speeches that U.S. security guarantees to Europe, much less Ukraine, were in serious jeopardy.
And Trump called Zelenskyy a “dictator” while saying repeatedly that he thinks the West is to blame for a war that Putin started. Trump also sent a high-level delegation to Riyadh to meet with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov for the first time since the war began. With no Ukrainian or European representation, the bilateral meeting legitimated Russia and gave Putin a major (un)diplomatic victory.
Flattery and deals can’t change Trump’s core beliefs
How does all of this help us understand what just happened in the Oval Office?
The coordinated diplomatic charm-and-deals offensive that Zelenskyy, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer attempted in their visits this week was worth a try. Flattery and bilateral negotiating can gain countries some tangible benefits or help them avoid bad outcomes. For example, Starmer may have at least temporarily avoided the worst of Trump’s tariff onslaught by handing Trump a letter from King Charles III that included an invitation for a second state visit.
But Macron’s and Starmer’s trips to Washington also showed the limits of personal interaction and transactionalism with Trump. They escaped without a major diplomatic incident, but neither got what they really came for: security guarantees for Ukraine. Given Trump’s enthusiasm for the minerals deal, originally proposed by Zelenskyy, the hope was that their visits might set up a positive outcome for Zelenskyy’s White House visit.
Those hopes ran straight into Trump’s true views on Ukraine and Russia.
Trump was never going to back Ukraine
Zelenskyy was not going to get security guarantees from Trump, at least not now, on his turf, on camera, if ever.
Trump has personal animosity toward Zelenskyy because of his 2019 phone call with the Ukrainian president that led to Trump’s first impeachment. But the circumstances of that shakedown, in which Trump asked Zelenskyy for damaging information on Joe Biden in exchange for sending congressionally authorized military aid, had its roots in Trump’s core beliefs as well. In his first term, Trump felt able to put that kind of pressure on Zelenskyy – whose country Vladimir Putin had already invaded in 2014 – because he admired Putin and did not view support for Ukraine as central to America’s national interest.
Trump’s verbal assault on Zelenskyy in the Oval Office was far from a moment of unpredictability. Instead, it was Trump’s true beliefs coming out into the fore. And the video of the full meeting makes clear it was not just the result of his personal animosity toward Zelenskyy. In fact, a large portion of the meeting was remarkably cordial. Zelenskyy said “thank you” at the outset, offered to share drone licenses with the United States, and suggested that if Trump could bring peace, he would belong on the Oval Office wall alongside paintings of great presidents. Trump actually complimented Zelenskyy’s wartime attire after one of the hand-picked reporters asked if Zelenskyy would ever put on a suit.
But when Zelensky expressed fear that Putin would violate any deal, Trump’s true beliefs came to the fore. With no advisers to restrain him – Secretary of State Marco Rubio, once a staunch supporter of Ukraine, shrank into himself on the couch, looking very much like a diplomatic cardboard cutout – Trump said what he really thought. As Ezra Klein put it, Trump is “disinhibited” now. That doesn’t mean he’s unpredictable; on the things he cares about, it means he’s able to say exactly what he thinks, and can do what he’s always wanted to do.
In all the noise of Trump’s often-chaotic foreign policy, he consistently returns to his three core beliefs. Expecting him to change them in his second term, at age 78, is folly.
What happens now?
Zelenskky will now go to London, where Starmer will gather European leaders for a summit planned before both men visited Washington.
What Zelenskyy endured in the Oval Office has brought one benefit: Trump has answered definitively the lingering hopeful questions like “can NATO limp along?” or “will Trump grudgingly support Ukraine?”
No and no. The liberal international order – which was never fully liberal, international, or orderly – is over. It is up to Europe to try to make something out of this moment.
We also know what is unlikely to happen: GOP pushback. Republican members of Congress are already heaping praise on Trump and Vance for looking tough and standing up for American interests. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), once part of a duo with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that pushed for American intervention to promote democratic values abroad, called for Zelenskyy, a democratically elected leader, to step aside.
There is real debate to be had on how much and for how long the United States and Europe can support Ukraine and how to bring the war to an end honorably and durably. But GOP endorsements of Trump’s moves are a sharp departure even from the GOP of Trump 1.0, which did push back on his pro-Russia policies.
It is possible that some U.S. officials will resign in protest over what happened today. In prior presidencies, perhaps even including Trump’s first administration, that would mean something politically. But in Trump’s second term, resignations simply serve the Trump-Musk plan to gut the federal government. So Trump may welcome resignations in protest as a badge of honor, and they will impose no political costs on him.
Leaders matter
In the first Trump term, many domestic and international factors constrained Trump. Sometimes his advisers constrained him, and sometimes brute facts like geography prevented him from shaping events. Michael Horowitz and I, both authors of books about how leaders matter in war, wrote several articles for Good Authority about why international and domestic factors mattered more than Trump in his first-term dealings with North Korea and Iran.
But it is very, very difficult to imagine any U.S. president other than Trump doing what he did to Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. Yes, many presidents before Trump had exhorted Europe to do more for its own defense. Yes, the trends have been clear for a while. But Trump and his advisers’ words and actions over the last 2 weeks, and especially during the hour that Trump and Zelenskyy spent in front of the cameras in the Oval Office, have ruptured U.S. relations with Europe, realigned the United States with the murderous dictator of Russia, and above all, likely abandoned Ukraine to its fate.
International relations scholar Robert Jervis, who saw the importance of leaders at a time when it was deeply unfashionable to write about them, wrote a very useful article entitled, “Do leaders matter and how would we know?” Jervis pushed himself not to fall into the trap of seeing one’s favorite theory confirmed everywhere, and he wrote about how we would know if leaders did not matter.
Trump has not always been the driver of events. But we will likely look back at February 2025 as a clear demonstration of how one individual can dramatically change the course of international politics.
