Trump’s Oval Office ambush of Ukrainian President Zelensky highlights the unpredictability and volatility of U.S. diplomacy under his second term—an unsettling prospect for China as it prepares for a potential Trump-Xi summit. With Trump emboldened and increasingly unpredictable, China may face new challenges in navigating an engagement with a leader who thrives on disruption.
President Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on February 28, 2025. (Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
America’s China watchers have long complained, and not without reason, that China is hard to understand, but after February 28, 2025, the shoe is on the other foot. One can feel nothing but pity for China’s wide-eyed analysts and America-watchers trying to make sense of the Oval Office meltdown that led to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky being politically ambushed and then rushed out of the White House.
How best to interpret Trump’s rude, bullying behavior?
The incident in which an important White House guest was browbeaten, insulted and shouted at by Trump, with considerable backup from the sycophantic Vance, was televised and quickly went viral on social media. It raises serious questions about where America is right now and where it is going. The bar of common decency has been lowered to a new low.
Is this kind of raw shock and awe treatment now the new normal for diplomatic relations with the U.S. going forward?
U.S. political commentators familiar with China’s recent history are increasingly invoking the Cultural Revolution to describe the irrational factor currently at play in U.S. politics. The comparison applies to flights into irrationality on both sides of the political spectrum, whether it be militant campus demonstrations promoting intolerance or the alteration of the standard language in the process of minting a new kind of political doublespeak. The irrationality also applies to cringe-worthy displays of unswerving loyalty directed at the most powerful person in the room, namely Trump, who is quick to belittle anyone who doesn’t play along.
Intimidation and self-adulation are two illiberal arts that Trump seems to excel at.
Henry Kissinger famously put to use Richard Nixon’s mercurial nature to browbeat diplomatic subjects into submission in what became known as the madman theory.
Kissinger counseled his diplomatic partners not to provoke the unpredictable wrath of his easily angered boss.
The idea was to present President Nixon as being so irrational and so volatile that the safest course of action was to get in line with the U.S. line.
Otherwise, who knows what would happen?
Trump, in keeping with his needy tendency to steal the show in any encounter, and his brusque penchant to appear unremittingly tough in a showdown, is at once easy to trigger and hard to predict, a black box impervious to logical reasoning. He’s a one-man mad man team in action.
U.S. President Donald Trump meets with France's President Emmanuel Macron in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Feb. 24, 2025. (Photo: Ludovic Marin/Pool via AP)
Western leaders such as Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer recently made pilgrimages to the White House, the ostensible center of Western power, if not world power, to defend respective national interests by showing they could “handle” the unpredictable Trump.
Macron chose to be obsequious in manner, stroking the big man’s big ego, playing his part as smooth as an actor would, in order to disarm Trump’s reactive tendency to swing back. Diplomatic historians will argue whether Macron’s visit was a success or failure, but he got a few words in edgewise, and even a factual correction, which Trump promptly dismissed with a wave of the hand, but speaking up quietly might be construed as a small victory in itself.
UK Prime Minister Starmer’s “audience” with Trump also involved a great deal of planning in order that he not be made to look the fool in front of a President whose favorite catchphrase from television days was, “You’re fired!”
The Guardian reported a British official explaining the situation as such: “We’re well prepared but also aware that absolutely anything could happen. Trump is so mercurial…So it’s rather fraught.”
Once such fraught moment was captured during the question and answer session when Trump interrupted Starmer’s response to a question about Canada, a sovereign state about which Trump has repeatedly made the cringe-worthy suggestion that is in need of U.S. annexation.
“That’s enough!” Trump said, shutting up the British Prime Minister mid-sentence and moving on to the next question.
If the stakes are high for putative allies from Europe, who share many common Western values with the U.S. and are presumably good at “reading” Trump, what can Asian leaders expect when they come face-to-face with a chauvinistic “America First” president?
The Oval Office debacle with Zelensky, who held his own in a rather admirable fashion, despite having to fend off a coordinated pile-on by Trump, Vance and pro-Trump reporters in English—in their language, not his—was a failure for U.S. diplomacy efforts and proof, if proof be needed, that Trump is not the master diplomat and deal-maker he pretends to be.
With so immodest a man, it’s all about him and the whims of the moment. This reactive egotism makes for great television, as Trump himself pointed out immediately afterwards, but it also shows the leader of the free world, if such a thing can be said to exist, to be petty, thin-skinned and mean-spirited. If his massive ego is not sufficiently stroked he’s apt to act badly
Most summits are heavy on protocol, pomp and circumstance, allowing for little spontaneity. Even direct diplomatic engagements on the side are bound by convention and mutually agreed upon ways of conducting discourse.
The rulebook has been tossed aside. Trump’s disrespectful and disruptive antics might make for good television, but it’s also a new force to be reckoned with.
Under the spotlight of the world, the U.S. leader acts like the don of a criminal enterprise, eager for fawning compliments from those who want to kiss the ring of power, and dismissing with prejudice, often in threatening tones, anyone who fails to please him for whatever reason.
With a possible Trump-Xi summit under discussion for later this year, China’s diplomatic corps will have to work overtime to get this one right. Previous meetings between the two men are an unreliable guide, for Trump is not the man he was during his first presidency. Now emboldened by a second win, and a lucky escape from assassination attempt, Trump acts as if the world is putty in his hands to shape as he likes. He exudes the cocky confidence of a man who thinks he can do no wrong.
Trump’s antics were disruptive enough the first time around but the collateral damage was minor in comparison to what a vengeful Trump, supported by a rabid, rapid-action team of righteous zealots, is capable of now.
The growling, groveling, unstatesman-like behavior of Vice-President Vance makes Trump’s mild-mannered ex-VP Mike Pence look like a master statesman in comparison. Vance, other than acting as an echo chamber for Trump, had little to offer. He indicated he knew a great deal about the war from “seeing it” on video and though he stopped short of saying he’d been there, he pivoted with an attack, demanding that war-time President Zelensky show boss Trump more respect.
Trump’s desire to leave an imprint on the world, his imprint, should have the world worried. He’s not only shown himself capable of turning rhetoric of “American carnage” into reality by the wholesale gutting of functional U.S. governance, but he’s messing with a fragile planet at a time of great instability and peril.
Whether it be his ruthless betrayal of loyalists who once worked for him, or his sordid revolving door of unqualified personnel hires, or his willingness to exploit the downtrodden while cheering on the bullies, the Trump show makes for indecent diplomacy. He’s discarding decades of courting allies and mutual confidence building, ditching carefully constructed relationships, scuttling peace treaties and revoking commitments. His apparent readiness to throw NATO and Europe under the bus in order to placate Putin for reasons that are still not well understood could seriously trigger a dark age of chaos.
If the White House has had an unusual number of Western leaders knocking on the door as of late, it’s not because Trump is highly admired, but because his sanity is highly in question.
In short, he is a man for whom the madman theory of diplomacy is most apt.
The day President Trump and Vice-President Vance ganged up like crude schoolyard bullies to demean, humiliate and extract concessions from a leader whose nation is crippled by a hostile invasion will not be easily forgotten.
