On June 25, U.S. President Donald Trump held a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, during the NATO summit in The Hague. The meeting seemed to go well. Afterward, Zelensky said that he had pleaded for help defending against intensifying Russian air attacks on Ukrainian civilians. “Ukraine is ready to buy this equipment and support American arms manufacturers,” he said. Trump signaled openness: “They do want to have the antimissile missiles, as they call the Patriots, and we’re going to see if we can make some available.”
On July 1, the Pentagon shocked Ukraine and U.S. allies when it let it be known that it was halting all shipments of Patriot missiles to Ukraine—along with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, artillery rounds, and Sparrow air-to-air missiles of the type used by F-16 fighters. Many of these weapons had already been delivered to forward depots in Poland, just waiting to be moved across the border. So much for Trump’s assurances.
Then, in yet another about-face, Trump suggested yesterday that some defensive weapons might still be sent. Can Ukraine rely on his word? According to media reports, Trump appeared unaware of the Defense Department’s decision to halt aid. So who, precisely, is running U.S. policy on Russia and Ukraine?
Washington’s latest weapons freeze came at a critical moment. Russia has been steadily ramping up its air raids on Ukrainian cities, killing an estimated 1,000 Ukrainian civilians since January. (It should be noted that Russia makes a practice of bombing civilians, while Ukrainian attacks on Russia are almost exclusively directed at military and related industrial targets.) On July 4, shortly after Trump and Putin spoke by phone, Russia unleashed its biggest aerial attack since the beginning of the war, sending hundreds more drones and missiles at Ukrainian cities in a wave of attacks that lasted eight hours. Trump claimed that he was “very disappointed” with Putin’s actions, and they may have played a role in yesterday’s reversal. However, it remains unclear what the deliveries will entail and when they will commence. Until then, more will die as a result of the freeze.
Washington’s repeated halts of aid disregard everything Kyiv has been doing to placate Trump. Under extortionary pressure from the White House, the Ukrainians signed a deal giving the United States broad rights to exploit Ukrainian mineral deposits. Kyiv dutifully signed on to a cease-fire deal proposed by Washington (and which was ostentatiously ignored by Russian President Vladimir Putin). None of it helped. Ukrainian officials have gritted their teeth as Trump and his oblivious envoy, Steve Witkoff, have repeated Kremlin talking points and praised Putin’s character. “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy,” Witkoff recently admitted.
The official reason for the freeze was the Pentagon’s alleged concern that supplies of critical weaponry are running low. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called this argument “fallacious and maybe even disingenuous.” His suspicions appear to have been confirmed by an NBC News report that an internal Pentagon review had concluded that providing weapons to Ukraine would not compromise U.S. military readiness.
Jake Sullivan, national security advisor during the Biden administration, also cast doubt on the excuse, arguing that there are ways to maintain supplies to Ukraine without compromising readiness. “The administration may not want to say it,” he wrote, “but the reality appears to be that the president is winding down U.S. security assistance to Ukraine.” Broader circumstances suggest that Sullivan may be on to something. On July 3, three Democratic senators announced an investigation into the reasons behind the administration’s conspicuous refusal to implement new sanctions on Moscow. Trump still doesn’t want to ratchet up pressure on the Russians. On the contrary: Washington recently paused some of the sanctions imposed on Moscow since 2022, exactly as Putin has been demanding from Trump.
This story has implications that reach far beyond Ukraine. European NATO allies, who worked so hard to ingratiate themselves with Trump at the summit, can’t help noticing his willingness to reverse his own assurances and leave his ostensible partners in the lurch. They saw an equally shocking example of this in March, when the administration abruptly stopped the flow of urgently needed intelligence to Kyiv—in an apparent fit of pique after the disastrous White House meeting in which Trump and his entourage assailed Zelensky for his alleged ingratitude (and for not wearing a suit). Trump has also persistently called into doubt NATO’s Article 5, the alliance’s mutual defense clause, most recently just before the summit, thereby undermining the foundation of the organization’s existence. If you can’t trust your ally’s readiness to come to your defense—or if that decision could be yes on a Monday and no on a Tuesday—you don’t have an alliance.
As things currently stand, the United States is seizing every opportunity to demonstrate its unreliability. Its most faithful partners have absorbed the lesson that promises of support are now contingent, capricious, and in some cases evanescent. Canada, a loyal friend for the past 100 years, finds itself fending off aggressive White House declarations questioning its existence as an independent state. Denmark, which stood by the United States throughout the so-called global war on terror, must contend with a U.S. president who has hinted that he might send his soldiers to conquer Greenland if Copenhagen doesn’t hand over the territory. How strange to be a member of a defensive alliance with a country that has hinted it might attack you.
NATO leaders breathed a collective sigh of relief after they got through their June summit without any major scandals. But they did so at the price of downgrading Ukraine on the official list of the alliance’s priorities. As Atlantic Council senior fellow Torrey Taussig rightly noted, the meeting didn’t address burgeoning doubts about the extent of Washington’s commitment to Europe’s security: “Trump’s second arrival in the White House has ushered in a new era for the transatlantic relationship,” Taussig wrote, “in which Europeans cannot fully trust or rely on the United States.”
And not only the Europeans. Sources have attributed the decision to freeze supplies to Defense Undersecretary for Policy Elbridge Colby, who is well-known for arguing that U.S. defense efforts should be focused on China and that efforts to help Ukraine should be minimized or eliminated. Just a few weeks ago, Colby launched an ominous “review” of the AUKUS pact, a historic Biden administration agreement with London and Canberra to help the Australians acquire their own fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, including by investing billions of dollars in U.S. shipyards. Colby has publicly challenged the deal, questioning, in particular, the decision to sell three Virginia-class submarines to the Australian navy. U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that undermining the partnership would “further tarnish America’s reputation and raise more questions among our closest defense partners about our reliability.” Colby’s review, she said, “will be met with cheers in Beijing.”
That a reputed “China hawk” such as Colby could end up in this position is not as strange as it might seem. The second Trump administration has radically redefined what it means to be an ally of the United States: From now on, Washington’s needs come first. Its friends are there to serve its needs. If they don’t live up to expectations, they will be cast overboard, in blithe disregard of previous promises or agreements.
Washington’s relationships with its overseas security partners have never been simple or linear; one need only recall the Iraq War, when the George W. Bush administration dragged NATO and other allies into a war of choice based on politicized intelligence. But it is hard to think of a previous administration that has treated its presumed friends with such carelessness and contempt as this one.
In the wake of the weapons shipment freeze, Ukrainian foreign-policy expert Oleksandr Kraiev posted a Facebook comment that nicely captures the new dispensation. Ukraine, he noted, had worked hard to do “everything as the Americans wanted”—only to be disabused by Washington’s latest abrupt shift. “It seems that this is a very good lesson,” he wrote, “for Taiwan, for Israel, for Europe, and for all those who consider Trump their ‘partner and friend.’ Very illustrative.” It is hard to disagree.
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