Zelensky-Trump clash at White House sparks global rethink by US allies

As they watched Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky evicted from the White House last week after an unprecedented live televised quarrel with US President Donald Trump and his vice president JD Vance, some of America’s closest allies began to swiftly reappraise decades of foreign and defence policy.

It was a process that accelerated this week as the US suspended military aid and intelligence support to Kyiv, reportedly turning around US transport planes  in flight and reducing Ukraine’s early warning of Russian drone and missile strikes.

A mineral deal between Washington and Ukraine appears to remain theoretically on the table, particularly after a written apology from Zelensky was read by Trump in his March 4 address to the two houses of Congress.

That deal, however, appears to lack solid security guarantees while transatlantic relations look significantly damaged. European leaders are scrambling to gauge to what extent they can fill the gap to keep the Kyiv government fighting while racing to build up their own defences.

Late on Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron said the world had become more “brutal” and peace in Europe was no longer guaranteed, announcing talks to use France’s independent nuclear deterrent to better protect the continent.

More broadly, US long-term partners who have barely questioned their closeness to Washington and dependence in the areas like weapons systems — nations such as Britain, Japan and Germany — are tearing up such assumptions.

“We may be in the same situation tomorrow,” an MP from Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party told news agency Nikkei, referring to Ukraine’s abrupt loss of US strategic support.

“That's why Japan cannot ignore Ukraine, and why it needs to strengthen its defence capability.”

In mainland Europe, leaders appear to view the schism with Washington as long-running if not permanent. Those concerns look like overcoming decades of inertia to prompt a reworking of EU budget rules to enable significant rearmament.

That in turn looks to be producing something of a tussle between individual nation states and the European Commission over where power and decision-making lie.

The discussions got under way in earnest on Thursday at a EU Union summit, with nationalist Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban perhaps predictably throwing grit into the works by suggesting he might veto key decisions.

If European nations are going to take entire responsibility for arming Ukraine, they will also have to make tough choices about what weapons to send to Kyiv and what to keep for their own defence.

Ukraine is desperate for air defences, but so is the rest of Europe, and it does not yet build its own anti-aircraft missiles, or enough artillery shells and drones.

“The West seems to be reorganising itself and the security architecture it created in the most painful way possible,” former RAF Air Marshal Edward Stringer said on social media platform X.

However, how much more painful it might get is hard to say.

On Thursday, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen vocalised publicly the worry many European officials have voiced more privately for months: that a swift end to the war in Ukraine might see Russia rearm quickly and either attack that country again or another Nato nation.

Britain has pointedly not joined European criticism of the US president. The UK is in the final stages of a strategic defence review that had been expected to endorse Britain’s long-running partnership with Washington to use US Trident missiles for Britain's nuclear deterrent.

If the trends of the last week continue for longer, the wisdom of that may be questioned even by traditionally pro-US opposition Conservative MPs. For all that, however, most nations hope to avoid overly upsetting the Trump administration.

In the short term, it is seen as wildly unpredictable. Ahead of Trump’s speech to Congress late on Tuesday, some online rumours suggested he might announce the signing of the mineral deal with Ukraine while others suggested he might pull the US out of Nato altogether.

The main foreign policy development touted in his March 4 speech was the imposition of previously trailed tariffs on multiple nations including China, Canada and Mexico, and renewed determination to take control of Danish territory Greenland for the US “one way or the other” and the Panama Canal.

Britain and France are talking about the prospect of a European force to stabilise and protect Ukraine if and when a peace deal is signed. The London summit appeared successful in restoring a battered Zelensky’s spirits and teasing out a written apology to Trump from the Ukrainian leader.

Within Ukraine, however, one analyst described the mood as “pessimistic”.

The fact European nations have kept twinning criticism of the Trump administration with what sometimes feels awkwardly like demands for the US to deliver “backstop” security guarantees is clearly infuriating Trump and those around him.

Overall, most US allies expect a long-term trend towards greater US isolationism.

The greatest driver of that has arguably been Vance, and that appears to have often been deliberate.

His speech to the Munich Security Conference last month had raised some hackles, as did his needling of Zelensky at the White House and criticism of the UK during Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s visit that same week.

Most provocative of all, however, was his dismissal of talk of European peacekeeping on Tuesday in which he described contributors to the suggested force as some “random country that has not fought a war for 30 or 40 years”.

He was swiftly forced to deny he was referring to Britain or France, which have  fought extensively in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations, including with and for US-led coalitions. But the damage from his utterance appeared lasting.

As vice president, Vance has a strong chance of being the Republican candidate at the next US election in 2028 as Trump cannot seek a third term under the US constitution.

With the Democrats in disarray, Vance might emerge the victor. Should he serve two terms in office, that could see him dominating US foreign policy for more than a decade. He has made more of a splash in the past few weeks than most vice presidents have managed.

At the swearing-in of Trump’s pick as defence secretary Pete Hegseth, Vance made it clear he would be particularly reluctant to deploy US troops long-term to protect allies in future.

More broadly, under Trump the US looks set to pull funding from some long-term areas of defence, including army troop formations that would fight in Europe, in favour of ships for the Pacific, unmanned systems, a renewed focus on US border security and a missile defence shield called the “Golden Dome” that would protect against foreign ballistic missiles.

In the longer term, the focus on border and missile defence — coupled with Trump’s hope of expanding US control to Greenland and the Panama Canal — all appear to speak to a US refocusing on its immediate homeland defence and much less on protecting allies.

For all the short term focus on Ukraine, in the longer run it is what is happening in Asia that may be more dangerous and important.

“If war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we are ready to fight until the end,” China's foreign ministry said in a statement.

It described the US blaming China for the fentanyl drug crisis as a “flimsy excuse” and warned of “legitimate and necessary” countermeasures. US law enforcement said most fentanyl is made in Mexico but from Chinese ingredients.

In more normal times, comments such as this might have received more media coverage.

Taiwan, increasingly threatened by a Chinese military that US intelligence said has been ordered by President Xi Jinping to be ready to invade by 2027, seems particularly in the firing line.

At his confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill earlier this week, incoming US under secretary of defence for policy Elbridge Colby warned of a “dramatic deterioration of the military balance” with China. He suggested Taiwan, which spends about 3% of GDP on defence,  should be spending at least 10%.

In the past, Colby, who has for years advocated pulling US resources from Europe to confront a rising China, called for Taiwan to be given security guarantees.

He said he had shifted the approach because of the worsening strategic situation, implying if Taiwan could not defend itself, the island might have to be abandoned.

“I've always said Taiwan is very important to the US, but it's not an existential interest,” he said, adding the real priority was stopping China dominating the entire wider region.

Successive US administrations have long maintained what they termed “strategic ambiguity” over whether they would fight for Taiwan, with Trump's predecessor president Joe Biden by far the most assertive in recent history that the US would fight for the island. Getting a similar certainty from the Trump administration appears a lot less likely. The president has explicitly ruled out revealing his hand.

On Monday, Trump met with CC Wei, CEO of the world’s largest manufacturer of hi-tech chips, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, to celebrate the movement of some manufacturing and potentially research to Arizona. Trump said the move would “diversify to a very safe location” in a way that would have “a big impact if something should happen” with Taiwan.

That will not have allayed worries on the island or elsewhere that “something” might be coming, either under the unpredictable administration or a more isolationist successor.

Reuters