On the Kowtow
Ukrainians at the court of Emperor Trump
I was in the pub when President Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy met with US President Donald Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance in the Oval Office on 28 February 2025. I took a few hours out from the endless horror show of the news cycle to enjoy an afternoon in the weakly warm sunshine with friends. Sadly, the current pace of events waits for no man and his pint. It was only late last night that I caught up with the breaking news.
The footage speaks for itself. Trump and Vance shouted down and humiliated the Ukrainian president in public, throwing him out of the White House. I won’t patronise readers by adding anything to what people can watch for themselves. Who is to blame and what will be the result is now a matter for public disputation, although I fear it is the Ukrainians who will ultimately pay the price.
At a very minimum, it was an unedifying spat which revealed the widening gap between Washington, D.C. and Kyiv. Europe will scrabble to catch up, and doubtless Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is laughing to himself in his underground Bondian lair.
As a historian of European diplomacy, I might add that this situation is exactly why you should employ professional diplomats to negotiate and not rely on summitry. But the general confusion between diplomacy and summitry, as set out by Harold Nicolson in 1939, continues to beffudle the ill-informed.
Instead, the budgets of Foreign Ministries are being reduced, as are those of the organs of Soft Power in favour of military budgets based on meaningless percentages of GDP. To paraphrase Rosa Brooks, “everything has become war, and war has become everything, everywhere, all at once”. The narcissistic, shallow, and short-term foibles of politicians are best kept in check when dealing with ‘rules based international order’. It seems we’ve yet to learn this ‘lesson from history’.
The historical hot-takes have started up: Winston Churcill wore a boiler suit to the White House, and Trump’s bullying was akin to that suffered by Czechoslovakia's President Emil Hácha in Berlin in March 1939. The obsession among numerous commentators for contrasting recent events in Ukraine with 1930s Czechoslovakia is fascinating, but most of these comparisons fall apart on closer examination.
For what it’s worth, my mind was instead drawn to the meeting of the British Ambassador, George Macartney, 1st Earl Macartney, with the Chinese Emperor, Gaozong of Qing, in 1792. An event detailed in Stephen Platt’s wonderful book Imperial Twilight.
Of course, the question is, and I am not sure I quite yet know the answer, who here is the Emperor and who the Ambassador, and who ‘should’ have kowtowed to whom. Who now is the rising power and which the declining? In the short term, the British paid for the Ambassador’s refusal to prostrate himself before the son of heaven, but in the longer term, this event was to mark the beginning of the end of Chinese dominance over its lands.
I have no idea how this will play out, but I suspect we should all prepare for the option we dislike the most.