Fireworks in the Oval Office

By now you know most of the facts. The Ukrainian president was supposed to sign a deal to share the nation’s rare earth minerals with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Kiev. 

When the Trump administration sent Bessent to Kiev, the Ukrainians refused to sign. And treated him badly.

Then, the Ukrainians were going to sign the deal in Munich with Marco Rubio and JD Vance. Again, they did not do so, but insisted on having a grand  signing ceremony at the White House. Before the blow-up between Zelensky and Trump, all was in order to facilitate the signing.

It did not happen.

And yet, consider this. Before the fateful meeting with President Trump, President Zelensky met with a group of Democrat politicians. 

The group included:

… Anthony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, Susan Rice, and Alexander Vindman. [They]  advised Zelensky to reject Trump’s deal in violation of the Logan Act.

The Logan Act prohibits private citizens to conduct foreign policy. The important point here is that Zelensky was primed to reject the deal with Trump, doubtless because the Democrats had told him that he could get a better deal, one that contained security guarantees.

Everyone knows that including the United States in a rare earth minerals deal would have provided something like security guarantees. Asking for more, and doing so in public was clearly a deal breaker.. It would have scuttled the deal, and thus depriving Donald Trump of a victory.

Zelensky allowed himself to be manipulated by leftist politicians who did not really care about Ukraine.

Mollie Hemingway offered a commentary about the performance:

 I think their goal was to have a wonderful performance by Zelensky, an angry Trump appearing to scuttle the deal, and the support of the neocon portion of the GOP to start applying pressure on Trump to have US Troop commitments as part of the "security guarantee." It was a set-up, in Susan Rice's interesting choice of words. Instead, Zelensky had one of the worst stage performances of his acting career, and Trump was statesmanlike (against all odds) throughout. Zelensky followed Team Obama's advice to be hostile to a tee, but it didn't land how they thought it would. Surprisingly, one of the most important aspects of it not working out might have been Lindsay Graham's reaction. Had he and other neocons thought Zelensky was being reasonable, Trump would be having to fight (even moreso) the neocon portion of the GOP in addition to Team Obama's dirty tricks. Even the "conservative" neocon pundits on TV last night were admitting Zelensky had royally messed up. 

Ian Miles Cheong describes the lost deal.

Trump was pursuing a policy of strategic ambiguity with the Ukraine minerals deal. There wouldn’t be a concrete security guarantee but Russia would know better than to attack de facto American resources in Ukraine. It really was that simple. It would’ve ended the war. Russia would’ve been able to agree to it, keep the territory they’ve already fought and bled for, and save face.

Victor Davis Hanson offers a footnote:

Zelensky could have accepted a draft peace deal signed in the first month of the war, the Istanbul Accords, under which Ukraine would have kept all of its territory in exchange for neutrality. A deal now will likely be modeled on Istanbul but require Ukraine to recognize realities on the ground (ie loss of territory). Acknowledging that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have died only to get a worse deal may be too bitter a pill for Zelensky to swallow, now or ever. 

In the matter of public opinion, the anti-Trump forces have seized the moment to insist that Trump made a grievous mistake, and that he was a Russian stooge.

The public did not see it quite that way:

More people now think the U.S. is helping Ukraine too much—up from 7% to 41%. 

On top of that, trust in Zelensky fell from 72% to under 48%

Batya Ungar-Sargon elaborates:

62% of Americans found Zelensky's behavior offensive. Trump is an extremely unifying president if you tune out the noise coming from the elite punditry/foreign policy/expert caste. The American people are done with the mass fleecing of the post war international order.

As a coda, this comes from John Kass, a description of Zelensky:

He boasted, he insulted, he gestured like a stupid, pushy, peasant in a bazaar haggling over the price of vegetables, like a greedy turnip merchant. And he got his ass kicked out of the White House."

Zelensky was offended at the notion of striking a cease fire deal with Moscow. He believed that we could not count on Putin to keep his word.

And yet, on two occasions leading up to the Oval Office blow up, Zelensky himself had gone back on his word to sign the deal. Now, he has aligned himself with his European allies, the better to impose a deal on the American president.

Obviously, this is not going to work. NATO depends very largely on American money and American arms. The assembled European leaders will not be able to survive without America. They know it and they are trying to take charge of the situation. Good luck with that.