Niall Ferguson: The Reapolitik of Reality TV

The Oval Office visits of French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have been unlike anything in the modern history of the American presidency. Such occasions are traditionally more like scripted photo opportunities. These, by contrast, have been more like episodes of a reality TV show. This is foreign policy “realism” with a twist.

There is a reason why the most successful diplomacy tends to be secret. Journalists may hate it, but the fact of the matter is that hard negotiations about war and peace tend not to get very far when they lead the evening news bulletins. For the same reason, public press conferences between government leaders tend to be carefully scripted because the stakes are considered too high for improvisation. All of this was turned on its head in the past week—with predictable but not necessarily unintentional results.

The first two installments revealed that Donald Trump’s deep-rooted Anglophilia may well allow the UK to steer away from a transatlantic trade war. For Europe, however, the storm clouds are gathering. Trump threatened tariffs just a day after Macron’s visit. Furthermore, neither Macron nor Starmer managed to get Trump to promise a U.S. “backstop” for a possible European peace-keeping force in Ukraine. But the real disaster befell Zelensky, who yesterday made the mistake of pushing back too hard against Vice President J.D. Vance on the question of how grateful he should be for a ceasefire underwritten by a Reconstruction Investment Fund, as opposed to some kind of a security guarantee. This elicited a put-down from Trump that got more brutal the more Zelensky tried to argue back. The careful diplomacy by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and others that produced this week’s U.S.-Ukraine joint investment deal may just have been blown apart by a clash of personalities made more intense by the fact that both men are seasoned television performers.

This post is written by WWSG exclusive thought leader, Niall Ferguson.