Deciphering the American Scream

THE LIPS SAID IT, the mind read it. Some hours after war broke out in the White House in the name of peace, a lip reader deciphered what Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky muttered under his breath during the game-changer meeting with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance on Friday, February 28: sukya blyat. This is an insult in Russian.

It would have been so much more dramatic if I could claim that my source was the CIA or FSB, the current incarnation of Russia’s KGB. Alas, the information was freely available in last Sunday’s edition of the London Times. The venerable British paper, now terribly modern, reported the meaning of the Russian insult in two words. The first was ‘bitch’; the second an option beginning with ‘f’ followed by three asterisks.

Trump and Vance did not need the services of any lip reader. They perceived attitude, disrespect and insolence from a man whose country had received more than a billion dollars a week, without conditions, as a gift, for the last three years. Trump, a firm believer in the dictum that seekers (‘beggars’ is too harsh for geopolitics) cannot be choosers, erupted. The lava has already singed Europe. It could scald NATO if not checked. Donald Trump was not created by God for nuance. He says what he thinks, and he thinks what he sees.

A whisper that has grown into a murmur across Washington suggests that this volcano of Mount Rushmore was triggered by Democratic Senators who advised Zelensky to provoke Trump. Bad advice. The Democrats probably thought that an apoplectic Trump would self-destruct. Instead, Trump has destroyed the façade that American support can be taken for granted. For the three years of this war, Democrat President Joe Biden had let Zelensky believe that dollars roll on the highway to Kyiv from a bot­tomless treasury. Nothing walks for too long on a one-way street.

What has become muted in the drama is that for the first 40 minutes the conversation was cordial while aides waited elsewhere to sign an agreement on Ukraine’s mineral mines and then enjoy a sumptuous lunch. (Trump does not give his guests hamburgers.) Zelensky crossed his arms, a gesture of ob­duracy if not hostility, when Vance suggested the Ukrainian leader had been insufficiently grateful to America and disrespectful to its president.

Lunch cancelled. End of gravy.

As former American Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had famously suggested during the long Iraq conflict, there were known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Someone forgot to give Zelensky a brief on known knowns. It is absolutely known that Ukraine cannot fight Russia without American money, weapons and indeed Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites which provide communication for Ukraine’s forces.

Zelensky needs guns. His European champions send Tweets. He needs troops; he gets hugs. America keeps Ukraine on the battlefield. If European politicians and British newspapers had divine power, Zelensky would get the Victoria Cross for war in the morning and the Nobel Prize for Peace in the eve­ning, but newspapers have nothing to lose but their circulation and gasbags nothing to lose but their voice.

Zelensky’s shoulders must be dripping saline with Europe’s crocodile tears. The new advocate of such lachrymose diplomacy is British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, just recently introduced to foreign policy. Even Starmer admitted, amidst the ballyhoo, that sending European troops to Ukraine without an American security blanket would be “folly”.

If Ukraine gets American security, what does it need European troops for?

The weekend conference hosted by Starmer in London at Lancaster House was sleight-of-hand. The frontline Baltic states were absent. They know that the price of bogus belligerence is paid by those vulnerable to geography, not those who spout ideol­ogy in conferences and find ingenuous reasons for keeping their troops out of battle. Italy broke rank with the ghost warriors Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron.

What stopped Starmer and Macron from sending troops to Ukraine three years ago, particularly when the Russian advance faltered and their intervention could have made a difference? Putin was vulnerable when he failed to win a quick victory. Instead, there was much schoolboy cheering from the sidelines of London and Paris: you die, we throw our hats into the air.

What stopped Europe and America from sending troops to Ukraine when masked Russian soldiers took control of all strategic areas in the Crimean peninsula on February 27, 2014, and then formalised the annexation with a referendum on March 16? David Cameron was in Downing Street. Barack Obama, always full of homilies and half-smile piety, was in the White House. What did they do? Nothing. Why does the current strident commentariat, bristling from every pore, never mention 2014? Would it have been equally forgiving if Trump had been president in March 2014 instead of Obama?

Vladimir Putin knows from experience that talk of Ukraine’s sovereignty is hot air. It was abandoned by Obama. If Ukraine was semi-sovereign in 2014, why should it be fully sovereign in 2025? And if 2014 needs to be reversed along with 2022, then is NATO ready for war against Russia?

Impotence stopped Ukraine’s European allies three years ago.

Where is Ripley’s Believe it or Not! when you need it? This illustrated panel, now unfashionable probably because bizarre has become the new normal, became an addictive section of popular newspapers soon after it began life in the New York Globe in December 1918. Time for revival, beginning with this story from the Sunday Times of February 23, 2025. In 2014, Ursula Von der Leyen, current president of the European Commission and then defence minister of Germany, sent German troops on a NATO exercise with broomsticks painted black because they did not have rifles.

Those who prefer television might want to check out a great classic of the medium, a masterpiece of political satire that raises an intelligent laugh 45 years after being produced by BBC: Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. No historian has narrated the story of faded power as effectively. Turn to Season 2, Episode 1 of Yes, Prime Minister.

The theme still ricochets across front pages. Defence spending. Or non-spending.

In 1980 Britain had 400,000 men in uniform, with 20,000 stationed in north England. Today, the British army is down to 74,296 men and women, including 4,244 Gurkhas, the smallest in two centuries (British colonies had their own armies, loyal to the crown). Once the arithmetic of essential deployment is done, Scotland Yard may have more to contribute to Ukraine in its war against Russia than the once-mighty British army.

Starmer, who has discovered his inner Flashman, has increased defence spending from 2.3 per cent to 2.5 per cent of GDP, or one-fifth of 1 per cent of GDP. You wouldn’t quite see the numbers that way if you heard the manufactured applause around the decision. In truth, Starmer is helpless. He did not start defence casuistry. Nor can he tax the British public to send money for an overseas war, if he wants to survive.

Europe has been cannibalising the American economy for more than seven decades to pay for its security, while giving lectures from a high pedestal. Germany, to its credit, does not lecture. But that does not change vital statistics. If they start now, it will take Germans 10 years to turn broomsticks into guns. Americans know this. Trump is reflecting American anger at being taken for granted. America pays for nearly 70 per cent of NATO’s budget. Trump is tired of freeloaders. He has been insisting for years that Europe should spend 5 per cent of its GDP on its security. Europe has pretended it is deaf. If Europe had spent 5 per cent, Russia might have felt more secure in Moscow than Kyiv.

Trump was more conciliatory towards Macron and Starmer, but they too got a taste of the new power in the House. The Tele­graph’s caustic Madeline Grant was brutal in her description of the Trump-Starmer meeting: “A fireside chat, of sorts, followed. Actually the fire wasn’t on and they didn’t really chat at all. The PM gave off the air of a nerd trying to cosy up to the school bully. The president’s monologues were occasionally punctuated by rather pathetic squeaks of agreement from Starmer.” Starmer, she writes, looked more like he was passing a gallstone than making conversation while Trump indulged in a stream of con­sciousness commentary about those he liked: Vladimir Putin, King Charles, and Starmer’s wife Victoria.

The surprise is that Europe should be surprised by Amer­ica’s demand for accountability. Maybe they no longer read history written by Americans. Neither Woodrow Wilson nor Franklin D Roosevelt considered themselves isolationist, but both evaded Europe’s “world wars” until convinced that American interests were at stake. Roosevelt provided aid, but did not join the war against Hitler’s destructive fascism until Japan’s egoistic blunder, the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan won Pearl Harbor and lost the war.

Dwight D Eisenhower, who led the Allied war effort, taught Britain and France their limits in 1956 when in conjunction with Israel they tried to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt. He switched off American support. Deflated Britain and France, rulers of mighty colonial empires, collapsed. Has Trump signalled a Suez moment?

Listen, or else.

Hyperventilist Steve Bannon described the Zelensky confrontation as “ten minutes that changed the world”, which is an exaggeration if only because the world has been changing with­out America’s permission for a while. But those 10 minutes changed Europe. The events of Friday, February 28, 2025 will seed a library of books.

Peter Mandelson, who can hear things more clearly because he now lives within audible distance of the White House, told Zelensky on March 2 to give “unequivocal” support to Trump’s demand for minerals, declare a ceasefire, and defy the Russians to follow. He was being kind to the man in civilian fatigues who requires a radical exit from an existential dilemma. Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was less circuitous. Ukraine, he said, would need a new leader if Zelensky doesn’t listen.

It has only now begun to register with various principals that inbuilt into Trump’s demand for Ukraine’s minerals is an iron-clad security guarantee. An American president may evade a direct response when an ally is invaded, but no American president can ignore an attack on Americans and American interests. The presence of American investors in Ukraine is ipso facto a security guarantee.

Trump supporters are calling it a brilliant bit of chess. There may be an element of post-facto self-congratulation in that surmise. But it is undeniable that the pieces are in place on the chessboard. There is only one move left, however long that takes to negotiate. Ceasefire. Peace, well described as a chimera, will take longer, if it ever comes.

Donald TrumpEuropegeopliticsNATOUS-UkraineVolodymyr Zelenskyy