History Proves Donald Trump Could Dump Ukraine

Ukraine and America: A Strained Partnership Comes Into Focus 

Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, badly needs to examine that history and do so quickly.

Even before Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election, there were growing signs that Zelensky was becoming an inconvenience, if not an albatross, to the United States and at least some of Washington’s NATO allies. The Alliance’s strategy of using Ukraine as a proxy in a war to weaken Russia was not faring well. Moscow’s forces continued to bleed Ukraine badly as hopes for an eventual victory by Kyiv became ever more illusory.  

Nevertheless, most NATO governments, including Joe Biden’s administration in the United States, still clung to the rationale that the war was severely damaging Russia’s economy and isolating the Kremlin in the international community. The bulk of the evidence, though, indicated that the economic damage to NATO’s European members was worse than the negative impact on Russia, and that the Western bloc was the faction that seemed increasingly isolated internationally. Grumbling among the voters in several European countries grew louder, and governing coalitions crumbled.

A White House Meeting for the History Books 

Trump’s electoral victory has produced other indications of trouble for Zelensky. Although the Trump administration concluded an agreement to purchase rare earth metals and other natural resources from Ukraine, Trump also has made it abundantly clear that he wants the Ukraine-Russia war to end quickly.

His initial approval of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin while ostentatiously excluding both Ukraine and its European supporters from such negotiations conveyed an implicit message that he considered Zelensky a largely irrelevant player and a potentially annoying obstacle to peace. The atmosphere became even more tense with Trump’s subsequent angry depiction of the Ukrainian leader as a “dictator” who had foolishly “started” the war with Russia. 

Although Washington then briefly reduced its vitriol and hostility toward Kyiv, that rapprochement ended acrimoniously on February 28, during Zelensky’s meeting at the White House with Trump and Vice President J D Vance.

A furious Trump accused the Ukrainian leader of engaging in irresponsible actions that gambled with triggering World War 3. Trump then abruptly ended the meeting. That episode is the clearest signal yet that the new U.S. administration believes that Zelensky has lingered well beyond his “use by” date. 

How U.S. Clients Become Former Clients: A History 

Matters usually have not turned out well for U.S. foreign clients who don’t heed expressions of dissatisfaction coming from Washington.

South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, was a case in point. He ignored increasingly pointed warnings from John F. Kennedy’s administration that the sight of demonstrators being beaten and Buddhist monks self-immolating on the streets of the capital, Saigon, was not playing well with the American press or public. With Washington’s apparent blessing, the South Vietnamese military staged a coup that overthrew Diem and left both him and his brother (the power behind the throne) as gruesome corpses. 

Subsequent South Vietnamese leaders played a smarter game. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, President Nguyen Van Thieu obediently followed the twists and turns in Washington’s policies, although he sometimes voiced polite complaints.

Even when the United States finally grew weary of its futile crusade in Southeast Asia and withdrew its forces, Thieu remained compliant.  When the United States hastily abandoned its South Vietnamese client in the spring of 1975, the ousted president escaped with the departing U.S. forces and enjoyed a luxurious retirement in London and later in New York, reputedly funded in large part by financial aid that Washington had lavished on Saigon over the years.

Washington’s last political client in Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, achieved a similar lucrative exit as a reward for his loyalty and obedience. Just days after Ghani fled his homeland in August 2021, allegedly with a helicopter stuffed with more than $169 million in cash  the former Afghan president emerged in his new safe haven: Dubai. Cynics might suggest that the money actually consisted of wealth looted from the Afghan people. In any case, Ghani lives comfortably today in the United Arab Emirates.    

The fate of other former U.S. clients is far less appealing if they disobey Washington or get greedy. Panama’s dictator, Manuel Noriega, learned that lesson the hard way. Noriega received generous support from the United States throughout his tenure as the country’s de facto ruler beginning in 1983, and he served as an important asset for the CIA. But reports began to surface late in that decade that he was simultaneously accepting money from Fidel Castro’s communist regime in Cuba. President George H. W. Bush did not react placidly to such revelations. In December 1989 he deployed U.S. forces into Panama to overthrow Washington’s disloyal client.  

Those troops captured Noriega, brought him to the United States, and turned him over to the criminal justice system to face trial on drug-trafficking charges. Noriega was convicted on those charges and sentenced to 40 years in prison. Although U.S. authorities later reduced that sentence to 17 years and returned him to Panama, he was promptly extradited to France and spent the rest of his life there in prison until his death in 2017. His fate was a graphic, textbook example of what a discarded U.S. foreign client can expect if that person dares anger the U.S. government.

What Happens Now to Ukraine? 

Zelensky’s fate remains to be determined. However, his brash insistence that the United States and NATO continue their blind support for his regime is unlikely to be sustainable. 

Even if Trump hungers for access to Ukraine’s (apparently exaggerated) mineral wealth, such greed will not necessarily translate into continued backing for Zelensky as the country’s leader.  Washington’s new foreign policy team may well desire to have a more pliable client in Kyiv—one who will accept the reality that Ukraine must give up its ambition to join NATO and be willing to cede most, if not all, the territory that Russia has seized since 2014. 

The Trump administration wants the West’s proxy war against Moscow to end, and it will have little patience with a client regime in Kyiv that seeks to thwart that larger objective.  If he is wise, Zelensky will see the handwriting on the wall and make a graceful exit.  The alternative course for discarded U.S. clients is most unpleasant.

Dr. Ted Galen Carpenter is a contributing editor to 19FortyFive and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and the Libertarian Institute.  He also served in various senior policy positions during a 37-year career at the Cato Institute. Dr. Carpenter is the author of 13 books and more than 1,300 articles on defense, foreign policy and civil liberties issues.  His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).