I.

“You’re not in a good position,” President Donald Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when they met in the Oval Office at the end of February. “You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards.” But what kind of cards? Trump is preparing to deal Zelensky a terrible hand. Zelensky must accept unconditional negotiations with Vladimir Putin and relinquish any hope of recovering his country’s stolen territory. He must accept that Ukraine’s sovereignty is at an end—that the country will never be allowed to decide upon its own alliances or international political and economic arrangements. And he must turn over hundreds of billions of dollars in natural resources to the United States in return for vague security assurances that Trump has shown no inclination to honour.

Despite all this, Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance spent the last ten minutes of their meeting in the White House berating their beleaguered guest. Vance jeered that Zelensky was being “disrespectful” when he asked why the administration thought Putin would keep his promises in the absence of security guarantees. “You should be thanking the president,” Vance retorted, “for trying to bring an end to this conflict.” After the meeting, the Trump administration ejected Zelensky and his diplomats from the White House before suspending military aid to Ukraine and then cutting off intelligence-sharing.

This lamentable episode was the clearest example yet of Trump’s America First doctrine in action. Over the past decade, Trump’s worldview has variously been described as nationalist, transactional, populist, and nativist. There’s some truth to each of these descriptions, but they fail to capture what the world has witnessed in the early days of the second Trump administration. For instance, what transaction is Trump trying to conduct with Ukraine exactly? He wants US$500 billion in natural resources, but he initially presented this as compensation for support the United States has already provided. And he hasn’t offered any concrete security guarantees (probably because he doesn’t want to have to enforce them). He simply wants to strong-arm Ukraine into submission, which isn’t a transaction at all.