There is a rule in politics never to ascribe to malignity what one can explain through incompetence and stupidity. This approach has become difficult to sustain in the case of the Trump administration. But there is another possibility: Both explanations operate simultaneously.
This seems to be true of the latest burst of diplomatic activity by the Trump administration. Before focusing on the malice, however, first note the utter incompetence of the Trump team. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, for example, was speaking the truth when he said at the Munich Security Conference that a Ukrainian cease-fire will probably freeze the battle lines and not involve NATO membership. But Senator Roger Wicker, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was equally correct in calling it a rookie mistake to have given away one’s position in advance. Hegseth stumbled through a retraction, but the damage was done.
The only word to describe Vice President J. D. Vance’s speech at the conference is loutish. He meddled in European politics, was patronizing and hectoring, and seems not to have understood that if you are giving a tough message to allies, you need to combine it with an affirmation of the underlying relationship. Dumber yet was his apparent failure, and the administration’s, to recognize that even the United States needs allies, and that the European nations, with all their troubles, are some of the most important ones we have got.
The latest meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, between an American delegation consisting of the secretary of state, the national security adviser, and a special envoy with two experienced Russian diplomats was even worse. It was a meeting about Ukraine without Ukraine—a move calculated to make the Ukrainian leadership less tractable. It was a meeting about a European war not only without Europeans, but without the slightest consultation with them. Instead, the U.S. made concessions to the Russians—promising to let them send intelligence operatives masquerading as diplomats back to their embassy in Washington without extracting anything in return.
The Trump administration seems not to realize that the Russians are the ones in trouble, not us; that they are the ones with a faltering economy, a stalemated war, and more than three-quarters of a million casualties. Most importantly, the administration refuses to see Russia under Putin for what it is: a predatory dictatorship bent on rebuilding an empire on the bodies of its former subjects.
The commentary on the meeting offered by the three Americans who acted as if they intended to be stooges was embarrassing.
Steven Witkoff burbled businessman gobbledygook: “It was positive, upbeat, constructive, everybody there to get to the right outcome, solution-based.” Maybe the right flimflam for a real-estate deal, but not for a discussion with a couple of longtime hoods from Moscow Center who represent a country up to its armpits in the blood of innocents. It was a witless thing to say.
National Security Adviser Michael Waltz seemingly could not speak a paragraph without a grovel in the direction of his boss, President Trump. His assessments were those of a courtier praising a king, not of the representative of the Great Republic conducting affairs of state.
And then there was Secretary of State Rubio, delighted at the possibility of normal relations and exciting economic ties. Not only was this another implicit concession and gift to the Russians—why not extract something for the willingness to restore such ties?—but it was a betrayal of all that Rubio used to say about Ukraine. For that matter, it was a betrayal of the sentiments he used to spill out on the campaign trail when he ran for president, invoking the story of his parents who were refugees from Castro’s Cuba. And here he was cheering on negotiations with Russia, the patron and inspiration of that very regime.
The negotiators displayed mainly incompetence, as well as cringeworthy servility to their master in the White House. Trump’s part, though, was pure malignity. Shortly after the meeting ended, he criticized Zelensky, lied about the latter’s polling numbers, and said, in a particularly callous remark, that Ukraine had had a seat at the table for three years. How being invaded and having your civilians tortured, raped, and slaughtered counts as a seat at the table is beyond understanding.
To be clear, no deal was inked in Riyadh, merely a set of commitments to begin working on ending the conflict in Ukraine without participation by the victims or their neighbors, even though the former are our friends and the latter are our allies. But the way it was done, and the mood music that surrounded it, has to confirm some of the worst fears of friends of Ukraine, and those who believe that the United States should stand for something in this world beyond the crudest kind of self-interest.
But an account of the supposed deal Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent put before the Ukrainians in Kyiv, before the Munich Security Conference, makes clear that the crudest imaginable self-interest is what this administration is all about. As one disgusted British observer commented in the podcast Ukraine: The Latest, the terms were more severe than what was demanded of Germany after its defeat in World War I. Bessent’s offer was an attempt to seize the most productive parts of the Ukrainian economy, permanently—unacceptable and shameful even to have presented.
The Trump administration seems to have some notion of the conduct of foreign affairs as being a set of deals, chiefly with America’s enemies, while administering kicks to America’s friends and allies. As a vision it is, in some reasonable sense of the word, evil. It is also appallingly dumb, and one wonders that intelligent men such as Rubio, Waltz, and Witkoff can bring themselves to articulate the demands that it implies.
Like so much of the Trump administration’s program, this will ultimately end in real disaster for others—quite possibly including the overrunning of Ukraine—and in political disaster for itself. The Biden administration never recovered from the debacle of its Afghanistan withdrawal; Obama from the disappearing red line in Syria; Bush from the mishandling of the Iraq War. At a deeper level, these policies will give aid and comfort to America’s enemies, which will never be partners; shatter the alliances that have made us strong; induce fearful former allies to align with the Chinese and develop nuclear weapons; and demoralize the men and women who have to implement policy.
People like Marco Rubio know better. But judging by the transcript of their CNN interview after the Riyadh meeting, the negotiators are determined to pretend otherwise. The level of sycophancy they show toward the president is shocking, but it conceals another source of future disaster. In this administration, no one will contradict the president, and no one will raise alarms about stupid and immoral policies. It’s a good way to walk into brick walls in foreign affairs, as it is with regards to all manner of other policies. In international politics as in economic affairs, public health, and emergency preparedness, this administration is a set of culpable disasters waiting to occur.
In such a situation the least of our concerns may be the souls of those who have chosen sycophancy despite their better selves and previous service. But they will pay a price. I knew a few of those who served in Trump’s previous term. Many of them ended up psychologically damaged, people who had no doubt once believed in integrity and an idea of America and then sacrificed them. History will treat them with contempt, and more important, they will never be whole again.
During Rubio’s abortive presidential campaign, Trump called him “Li’l Marco,” a put-down typical of someone with the manners of a grade-school bully. It was a reference to physical stature. What this sorry episode reveals, however, is that Rubio really has become small in a much more important sense—and in a way that no earnest television interview or ghostwritten memoir can ever fix .
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