Friday’s Oval Office meeting between US President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was unprecedented, and not in a good way, for the United States, Ukraine, Europe’s future, and America’s global credibility.

Speaking with Kelly Evans on CNBC’s The Exchange as the meeting transpired, I said that it was “highest-level geopolitics as reality TV.” It all would have been so very entertaining, if the stakes weren’t of generational importance. That seemed to have been lost in the room where it happened. 

Others will write about how Zelenskyy should respond now and what mistakes he, Trump, and Vance might have made. It’s uncertain now whether the Ukraine-US link is irrevocably broken (I hope not) and whether Kyiv and Washington can find their way back to a critical minerals deal that had been mostly negotiated (I hope so).

As British Prime Minister Keir Starmer convenes eighteen European leaders in London on Sunday, the larger and more significant question, just forty days and forty nights (why not pick a biblical framing?) into Trump 2.0, is this: What does the Oval Office bust-up tell us about what pundits already are framing as the Trump World Order? We all sense something has dramatically changed in Trump’s transformation of how the United States views its global role. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s move this weekend to order up to three thousand additional troops to the US southern border, including twenty-ton Stryker combat vehicles, provides further evidence, but of what exactly?

Since the inauguration

Those paid to think great thoughts are at pains to describe what’s unfolding in some understood analytical construct.

I’m reluctant to do so myself yet, as I don’t think Trump himself thinks in a deeply philosophical way about global order. It’s also far from certain that he can sustain his current course of domestic disruption and international change.

Conversations I had this week with three significant Trump campaign donors, who understandably spoke anonymously, underscored a growing concern among Republican ranks about the early chaos they discern in the administration’s actions.

They all mentioned how optimistic they had been a month ago, ready to do anything to support Trump’s pro-growth and deregulatory agenda. Now, they told me, they and other business leaders are slowing investments, rethinking the timing of acquisitions and initial public offerings, and withholding public support. They are also expressing concern to GOP senators and House members and individuals close to Trump.

They worry about federal layoffs, some with national-security consequences, which could build an anti-Trump constituency among hard-working, patriotic, effective federal workers. They also are concerned about Trump’s announced tariffs and threats of future ones, which they say have already driven up their costs and fueled inflation. And they don’t believe Trump’s advisers have yet dared to share with him the extent of the economic harm such policies could cause.

Markets, which are said to be Trump’s scorecard, are skittish. In February, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 fell by around 2 percent, while the Nasdaq Composite lost 4 percent. In contrast, European markets rose moderately in February, and, following a surge of optimism about Chinese startup DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence model, the Hang Seng Index ended the month up more than 13 percent.

“Wouldn’t it be ironic if the 2025 Trump trade was an anti-Trump trade, buying stocks in the places President Trump targets?” wrote James Mackintosh in the Wall Street Journal on Friday. “This year, Canadian, Colombian, Mexican, European, and Chinese technology stocks are all outpacing the S&P 500, the dollar is down and the Magnificent Seven big tech companies—five of whose CEOs stood behind the president at his inauguration—have stopped leading the US market up and turned into laggards.”

Trump World Order 101

As I wrote from Dubai in mid-February, geopolitics traditionally has been about three-dimensional chessboards and calculated moves by skilled statesman and diplomats, who achieve sometimes marginal and sometimes significant gains. This approach was embodied by long-time (and now late) Atlantic Council board members Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. 

Today, that chessboard is toppled, and readers should be wary of anyone who claims to be certain where the pieces will land. But with that warning, here are some initial musings about the Trump World Order worth considering as the future takes shape. 

Writing in Foreign Policy, author and thinker Robert D. Kaplan calls Trump “ahistorical,” ready to cast off the long-accepted foreign policy traditions, forged through World War II and its aftermath, that made the United States the world’s preeminent power.

The United States was a country with leaders, by and large, ready to make sacrifices, however imperfectly, that they hoped would be for the sake of a better world. Most significantly, writes Kaplan, US leaders were out to “achieve the Wilsonian ideal of establishing a bastion of freedom and democracy in a large part of the European continent.”

Trump is “unappreciative of the postwar saga of the West,” Kaplan writes, and thus the US president has no intellectual starting point that would lead him to embrace, emotionally or intellectually, Zelenskyy’s existential battle for freedom, which is so consistent with what the United States has supported for the past eighty years.

Writes Kaplan: “NATO is a mere acronym to him, not a connotation of humankind’s largest ever military alliance, which emerged out of the struggle against Nazi fascism.”

At a press conference this past week that foreshadowed the Zelenskyy showdown, Trump himself proudly boasted, “My administration is making a decisive break with the foreign policy values of the past administration and, frankly, the past.”

So, if that past doesn’t provide his moorings, what does?

Alex Younger, the former chief of British foreign intelligence service MI6, said in a much-noticed exchange last week on BBC’s Newsnight, “We are in a new era where, by and large, international relations aren’t going to be determined by rules and multilateral institutions. They are going to be determined by strongmen and deals.” 

Younger, quoted in Ishaan Tharoor’s compelling Washington Post column, notes that that’s a mindset Trump shares with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

If you agree with Younger, then it’s easier to fathom why the Trump administration so easily set aside all post–World War II tradition at the United Nations last Monday by voting alongside Russia, North Korea, Belarus, and, as Tharoor puts it, “a clutch of West African juntas.” The United States joined this unsavory group in voting against a resolution condemning Russian aggression on the third anniversary of Putin’s illegal, unprovoked war on Ukraine.

The Wilson Center’s Michael Kimmage, a historian and Russia scholar, writes in the newest issue of Foreign Affairs: “In this geopolitical environment, the already tenuous idea of ‘the West’ will recede even further—and consequently, so will the status of Europe, which in the post–Cold War era had been Washington’s partner in representing ‘the Western world.’” 

Like Younger, Kimmage sees the Trump World Order as a throwback favoring nationalist strongmen, like Putin, Xi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Zelenskyy, by this measure, doesn’t make the Trump table, despite his wartime heroics. This means that the Ukrainian president can be dismissed, as he was by Trump on Friday, as a poker player without the right cards.  

“They are self-styled strongmen who place little stock in rules-based systems, alliances, or multinational forums,” writes Kimmage. “They embrace the once and future glory of the countries they govern, asserting an almost mystical mandate for their rule.”

One helpful recent reference Trump has made to history has been his admiration for William McKinley, the twenty-fifth US president, who served from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. Trump appears to admire this little-remembered president for his realignment of the Republican Party, his economic nationalism (read: tariffs), and his territorial expansion, including the annexation of Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and Hawaii.

If Ukraine fails

Back at the World Economic Forum, in the first days of the Trump administration, I observed that Trump was as much a symptom as a driver of our times. The post–Cold War period, I wrote, is giving way to “global fragmentation, protectionist trends, greater instability (including wars in Europe and the Middle East), and a rising tide of government involvement in picking winners and losers.” As Nir Bar Dea, CEO of Bridgewater Associates, told me then, “What people in Davos understand is that, today, what’s in this one person’s mind will be massively important.”

With every new day in his second administration, Trump becomes less symptom and more driver. Friday morning, I was ready to declare on CNBC a stunning reversal of Ukraine-US relations, from Trump’s declaring Zelenskyy a “dictator” and embracing the murderous autocrat Putin to Trump’s signing a long-term investment in a free Ukraine’s future. The Atlantic Council’s John Herbst, a former US ambassador to Ukraine, shared that assessment.

Was that wishful thinking?

I’m not ready yet to join the parade of pundits declaring the demise of Ukraine, the end of the transatlantic alliance, or the beginning of an American strongman. I’m not ready to accept a United States that would abandon Ukraine in its existential struggle, which is as much in the United States’ interests as it is in Ukraine’s.

What’s clear to me, however, is that it’s time for those around Trump who believe in Ukraine and in the United States’ transatlantic mission to argue their case strongly, before defeatist punditry becomes unfortunate reality. 

The Wall Street Journal, in a powerful lead editorial on Saturday, wrote that the point of what it called the “Oval Office Spectacle” was supposed to have been “progress toward an honorable peace for Ukraine, and in the event the winner was Russia’s Vladimir Putin.” Continued the editorial board, “Turning Ukraine over to Mr. Putin would be catastrophic for that country and Europe, but it would be a political calamity for Mr. Trump, too.”

A free Ukraine has always been about more than Ukraine, just as a free West Berlin was always about more than Germany during the Cold War. If Ukraine fails, everything the United States achieved through World War II and the Cold War to create a freer, more prosperous, more secure, and more democratic world is in jeopardy. 

One can only hope that the next episode in this geopolitical reality show produces a plot twist that puts the United States, the transatlantic community, and a free Ukraine back on course.

Trump loves to confound critics who underestimate him. This is still his script to write. Here’s hoping the “ahistorical” president seizes the historic moment.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

Further reading

Image: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy meeting with US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance in the Oval Office of the White House.