The day the old American order cracked in the Oval Office
CBC
It would take some scrounging around the bottom of the barrel to find a historical precedent for what transpired Friday in the Oval Office.
There simply aren't good parallels.
On live TV, the U.S. president argued with the leader of a friendly nation facing existential peril — then expelled him from the White House and cancelled their lunch.
U.S. President Donald Trump pointed angrily at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and even did a mocking impression of him as a faux-tough guy.
What's the precedent for that? Is it the 1959 kitchen debate — where the U.S. vice-president and Soviet leader sparred on camera? But those weren't allies, and it was a relatively civil debate of ideas.
This wasn't. This turned personal.
To find a precedent, one expert looked back to the defunct Soviet bloc, and how the Kremlin would treat subservient communist leaders.
"How they humiliated them in public. How they bullied them. There has been no precedent in the United States," said Aurel Braun, an expert on eastern Europe at the University of Toronto, calling the meeting "extraordinary."
The catastrophically bad meeting signalled our new geopolitical era — where tributes to allies, democracy and the postwar order are fading in the rear view.
We're seeing flashes of something else ahead: Hard power, wielded by hard leaders, lorded over their neighbours on a scale unseen in generations.
This fundamental turn in U.S. foreign policy played out in real time, on camera. What does this mean for American allies? One senior U.S. senator, Democrat Mark Warner, said he's worried for Canada.
America's traditional adversaries had reason to rejoice on Friday.
In Moscow, the celebratory posts online popped like champagne corks. Referring to Zelenskyy, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev posted on X: "The insolent pig finally got a proper slap down in the Oval Office."
In Asia, anxiety is already mounting in Taiwan after Trump refused to comment on whether he'd defend it from invasion; geopolitical analyst Ian Bremmer said on X that China might be increasingly tempted after Friday's performance.
