By Thomas Friedman / The New York Times
What happened in the Oval Office on Friday — the obviously preplanned ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance — was something that has never happened in the nearly 250-year history of this country: In a major war in Europe, our president clearly sided with the aggressor, the dictator and the invader against the democrat, the freedom fighter and the invaded.
You want an analogy? Imagine if when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to the White House earlier this month, Trump and Vance told him that the war with Hamas had gone on too long, too many lives had been lost and it was costing America too much money, so it was time for Bibi and the Israeli people to do a deal with the Hamas aggressor.
Because Russia did to Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, what Hamas did to Israel on Oct. 7, 2023: a surprise invasion, murder and the ensuing sexual violence to wreak destruction on another nation and its society. Trump took Bibi’s side 110 percent against Hamas, and now he is taking Putin’s side 110 percent against Zelensky and Ukraine.
It is hard to express what a break this is in U.S. foreign policy. We have always stood on the side of liberty and those fighting for it around the world. There are times the isolationist forces in our population have held us back and had to be persuaded. There are times when — in support of the larger cause of liberty — against dangerous foes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, we have had to align ourselves temporarily with dictators.
But I can’t think of a single time when a U.S. president declared that the democratically elected leader of a country preserving liberty was a “dictator” who started the war with his neighbor — when it was the vicious neighboring dictator who actually started the war.
If you listen to Trump, everything we have done for Ukraine is pure altruism. We have no actual interests at stake ourselves in its fate or the triumph of liberty there. We have no actual interest in the fact that Ukraine is protecting the European Union; a giant, pro-American alliance of free markets and free people. It doesn’t matter a whit to Trump what happens to the European Union or Ukraine. All that matters is that Zelensky says “thank you” louder for our altruism and that in the middle of his war of survival sign over a generation of Ukraine’s mineral wealth to us.
This is a total perversion of U.S. foreign policy practiced by every president since World War I. My fellow Americans, we are in completely uncharted waters, led by a president, who … well, I cannot believe he is a Russian agent, but he sure plays one on TV.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.
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