Meeting in Washington that ended the script

The meeting in Washington that was meant to seal the agreement between the United States and Ukraine collapsed in front of the cameras on 28 February, and the collapse had the particular quality of events that the participants did not plan and the coverage could not quite follow. The scheduled ceremony, the signing of the minerals agreement that had been negotiated for weeks, did not take place; the Ukrainian delegation left the building without the signature and without the lunch; and the accounts of what happened in the Oval Office, delivered by the officials and the journalists in the room, described an argument that had been building for weeks and that the cameras finally caught. The breakdown was the most dramatic moment in the war’s diplomacy, and the drama was the point: the two countries’ readings of the war had finally been said aloud.

The substance of the argument, reconstructed from the accounts, was about the terms of the peace rather than the terms of the deal. The American president, in the accounts, insisted that the security guarantees that the Ukrainians sought could not be taken for granted, that the American commitment was conditional on the gratitude and the concessions that the negotiating style demands; the Ukrainian president insisted, in the accounts, that the guarantees were the point, that the country’s independence was not a bargaining chip, and that the American pressure was being applied to the wrong party. The exchange, the accounts agree, was heated, and the heat was the revelation: the two sides’ positions, which the diplomacy had kept in the decorous language of the statements, were stated plainly in the room, and the plain statements ended the meeting.

The reaction to the breakdown was the part that the coverage spent the night assembling. The European capitals expressed their support for Ukraine with the speed that the event demanded, and the support was the reminder of the coalition that the war had built; the markets, in the session that followed, priced the uncertainty that the breakdown had created, with the European defence stocks rising on the expectation of the rearmament that the moment implied; and the political reactions in Washington, from the allies of the administration and the defenders of Ukraine, drew the lines that the year’s politics would follow. The event was a diplomatic rupture and a political event at the same time, and the two dimensions cannot be separated in the analysis that will follow.

The consequences of the breakdown will be measured in the weeks and months ahead, and the measurement will begin with the question of whether the meeting can be repaired. The minerals agreement, the original purpose of the visit, remains unsigned, and the negotiators on both sides will have to decide whether the deal can be separated from the argument that accompanied it; the security guarantees, the deeper question, will be renegotiated, if they are renegotiated, in the context of the exchange that the cameras captured. The European leaders’ emergency consultations, announced within hours, signalled the direction that the diplomacy will take: the Europeans, the analysts note, will move to fill the gap that the American posture has opened, and the movement will be the year’s largest shift in the war’s politics.

The meeting that ended the script will be remembered as the moment when the war’s diplomacy lost its decorum, and the loss, on reflection, was overdue. The positions that the two presidents exchanged in the room had been exchanged, in the careful language of the statements, for three years; the meeting’s contribution was to say them plainly, and the plain saying was the truth that the diplomacy had been managing. The negotiations over the war will continue, with the Europeans now carrying more of the weight, with the American administration’s posture now tested against the consequences, and with the Ukrainian position now defined, for the countries watching, by the argument that the cameras recorded. The script was lost; the negotiations were never going to follow one anyway.