Alex Callinicos: What does Zelensky’s humiliation mean?

Starmer and Trump smile through their disagreements (Picture: White House/Flickr

Donald Trump had already turned the Oval Office into a theatre of power. But last Friday we were treated to a display of the brute realities of imperialism.

Usually, an abandoned client’s resistance takes place in private. In 1973, the United States under Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger made a peace deal with North Vietnam. And all Nguyen Van Thieu, the puppet president of South Vietnam, could do was flee into exile.

But Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was puffed up into a hero of the liberal West by Joe Biden and his European allies. It doesn’t really matter whether his very public roughing up by Trump and his vice president J D Vance was a set-up or provoked by Zelensky’s losing his temper. This is what happens when an imperial power decides a proxy is no longer useful.

European governments—even Keir Starmer’s—have rallied to Zelensky. Their strenuous support reflects the anxiety that they too will be abandoned. Friedrich Merz, Germany’s next chancellor, said after he won last week’s election, “It is clear that the Americans, at any case the Americans in this administration, do not care much about the fate of Europe.”

Martin Wolf, arch-apologist of liberal capitalism, went further in his Financial Times newspaper column, “The US is now the enemy of the West.” US international relations academic Stephen Walt was more specific, “Yes, America is Europe’s enemy now.”

Walt’s argument is based on the Trump administration’s support for the European far right, flaunted by Vance in Munich two weeks ago. But that’s not what mainly worries the likes of Merz and Starmer. They fear that Trump will drop the security guarantee the US offers Western Europe through the Nato alliance.

I find this very doubtful. The US isn’t in Europe out of love for liberal “values” and the Mona Lisa. Europe accounts for 21 percent of global GDP. The idea that any US administration would let Russia dominate this key economic region is laughable. Trump will certainly cut US troop numbers in Europe and continue to squeeze more defence spending from his allies. But the Nato command structure gives the Pentagon the great advantage of effectively controlling the continent’s armed forces.

The Trump administration’s attacks on the “rules-based international order” constructed by Washington after the Second World War are designed to give the US greater room for manoeuvre. Secretary of state Marco Rubio spelled it out in an interview last week.

“The big story of the 21st century is going to be US-Chinese relations,” he said.

“But I think having a situation where the Russians are permanently a junior partner to China, having to do whatever China says to do because they are dependent on them, I don’t think that’s a good outcome for Russia and it’s not a good outcome for America or for Europe or the world.”

This confirms speculation that Trump’s courtship of Vladimir Putin is what has been called a “reverse Kissinger” strategy. Nixon and Kissinger in opened negotiations with China under Mao Zedong in 1971-2 to help end the Vietnam War. They also began the process through which China became effectively a US ally against the Soviet Union in the final phase of the Cold War.

Now Trump and Rubio want to isolate China by prising Russia away. Undoubtedly there are tensions arising from Beijing’s encroachments in Central Asia, Siberia and the Russian Far East. Nevertheless, Trump’s ploy is very unlikely to succeed. The common front against the US based on Russian energy and Chinese high-end manufacture is too convenient for both Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping.

Ukraine is an obstacle to the rapprochement with Russia. European military and economic assistance to Ukraine is greater than that from the US. But sustaining the war effort without the Pentagon’s advanced capabilities would be very hard.

In the end Zelensky will cave in or be replaced. In the words of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, “the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.”