Eastern Europeans are used to betrayal. This was something more
Zelensky's humiliation in the White House has shown Eastern Europe that Trump will punish them for fighting for their own best interests
Watching the unreal debacle unfold in the Oval Office on Friday, in addition to the obvious anger, grief, and disappointment, I had the sense that we’d seen this play before.
Citizens and leaders across Europe’s East certainly have. The last century of the region’s history is nothing if not a history of Western betrayal, during which the interests of global powers won out time and time again over Eastern Europeans’ desires for independence and self-determination. Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement of Hitler in 1938 when he invaded and cleaved off parts of Czechoslovakia, the Allies’ disinterest in taking any concrete action against Germany when it invaded Poland in 1939, the West’s dismissal of the USSR’s re-occupation of the Baltic states in 1944, and Roosevelt’s selling out of the region as a whole to the Soviet Union at Yalta in 1945 were all footnotes in the eyes of Western leaders that inflicted generational trauma on half of Europe — trauma that has never been forgiven nor forgotten.
Shadows of this dismissive approach remain. The countries of Europe’s East continue to be relegated to second-class status in Transatlantic relations, even at a moment when they are arguably more central to Europe’s future than the old centers of power on the continent themselves. Trump has of course readily participated in such behavior — despite praising Poland’s military readiness and voicing his commitment to the country, Trump only spared 10 minutes to meet with Polish President Andrzej Duda instead of the previously agreed upon hour when he visited the US last month.
Nevertheless, with few options on the table, Eastern Europeans, especially those on Russia’s doorstep, have continued to gamble all their chips on NATO — and thus American — security guarantees against Moscow. With the prospect of being left defenseless against Russia after an eventual peace settlement, inclusion within this security umbrella is exactly what Ukraine is fighting for diplomatically now, and was the main point that Zelensky had hoped to clarify at the White House two days ago.
But Friday’s spectacle went beyond just the usual neglect. In publicly degrading Zelensky for refusing to hand over his country’s future to the US with no guarantees of its post-war survival, Trump and J.D. Vance signaled that the defense architecture the US has built for Eastern Europe since the 1990s is not only a burden in the eyes of MAGA, but something the region should be ashamed of. This is the central international implication of the Trump administration’s emergent Nietzschean worldview — that the earth is divided between the weak and the strong, and only states that can fend for themselves deserve the support of the West’s primary hegemon. Either countries individually figure out how to maintain their independence, or they resign themselves to lives as a vassals of the world’s superpowers. And if the US does decide to help a weaker nation at great personal cost to itself, it will come with a heavy dose of scolding for the inconvenience, and colonial-style resource extraction to make it all worthwhile for Washington.
The implications of this approach go well beyond Ukraine, and present a genuine existential crisis for NATO’s East. Eastern European leaders are still publicly in denial about this new American paradigm and are doing everything they can to salvage whatever is left of the US-Europe relationship. But the ground is shifting underneath them at a stunning pace — just today, Elon Musk voiced his support for a US exit from NATO and the UN, not long after Trump waffled when asked whether the US was committed to the security of the Baltic states. What has become clear as day is that after Zelensky, Eastern NATO states are next in line for the chopping block — the only question is how long it will take for a crisis to emerge that will prompt Trump and company to leave them in the lurch.
While the Trump administration has assured Poland in particular that it “deserves” American defense due to its enormous investments in its military, Warsaw has no reason to take any such words seriously given what happened in the Oval Office. Trump has the luxury of saying whatever he wants about Poland in the absence of any concrete reasons to come to its rescue, but if Russia were to threaten the country, Poland may find itself in the same position as Zelensky — lined up against the wall for daring to inconvenience the United States by not waving a white flag in the face of invasion. Moreover, in the absence of NATO collective defense, US commitments to defend Poland and only Poland are meaningless if Warsaw and its European allies would still have to jump in on their own to defend the Baltics or Ukraine from future expansionism by Russia. As I recently wrote in UnHerd, by default, any viable defense strategy for NATO’s eastern wall rests squarely on Poland’s shoulders.
What is perhaps most humiliating about all of this though is a thread that has woven itself throughout Trump, Vance, and Musk’s approach to Ukrainian and European security — that standing up to defend yourself against a dramatically more powerful foe, despite slim odds of success, is a fundamentally irresponsible, stupid, and even cruel thing to do. Even Roosevelt, in his abandonment of Eastern Europe’s post-war hopes at Yalta, never openly degraded the self-defense efforts of Poles, Estonians, Czechs, Serbs, or other peoples fighting to resist German and Soviet efforts to erase their countries from the map.
This was the true takeaway from Friday’s meeting — that with allies like Trump, resisting the primal politics of violence will be punished, and only those who kiss his feet and convince him that they understand his language of overwhelming force will be respected. Within such a diplomatic framework, Eastern Europeans trying to retain their ties to the US out of sheer necessity are deluding themselves. Betting on America has become a fool’s errand, and like it or not, the only ones they can rely on from now on will be themselves.