U.S. President Donald Trump's return to the White House on January 20, 2025 marked a major departure from the Biden Administration on foreign policy, including American relations with Ukraine during its war with Russia and the United States' role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Trump and Vice President JD Vance had some harsh words for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when he visited the White House in late February 2025, which, according to conservative Washington Post columnist George Will, will be remembered as one of Trump's worst foreign policy blunders.

"Fifteen months ago, in an Oval Office tantrum that will live in infamy, President Donald Trump ordered Ukraine to surrender," Will argues in a late May Washington Post column. "He told President Volodymyr Zelensky, 'You don’t have the cards.' He saw an incurable mismatch with Russia."

Trump and Vance angrily berated Zelensky in the White House, accusing the Ukrainian president of being ungrateful to the U.S. And quite a few Trump critics, from Democrats to Never Trumpers, accused him of being Russian President Vladimir Putin's "useful idiot."

Trump, Will emphasizes, badly underestimated Zelensky during that February 2025 meeting.

"Was Ukraine a tulip confronting a bulldozer?" Will writes. "Some tulip. Overrated bulldozer. Russia's subsequent stumble was dramatized this month by precautions Ukraine forced Vladimir Putin to take regarding Russia's annual Victory Day. Usually, the May 9 parade of military formations and hardware lasts much longer than this year's 45 minutes. There were fewer men and machines because Moscow now lives with the threat of Ukrainian drones."

The Never Trump conservative continues, "Staging areas for the parade would have been inviting targets. In a splendid taunt, Zelensky announced that Ukraine would 'permit' the parade by not targeting Red Square that day.

Zelensky, according to Will, is making it clear that surrender is the last thing on his mind.

"Putin's limp recent assessment of the war was, 'I believe the matter is coming to a close,'" Will notes. "'The matter,' his 'special military operation' to extinguish Ukrainian nationhood, began 51 months ago. He assumed it would require at most a few weeks. So far this year, Russia has captured about 0.04 percent of Ukraine — and in April, Putin's forces experienced a net loss of territory. By this month, The Economist estimates, the human cost of 4¼ years of aggression has been about 3 percent of Russia's pre-war population of fighting-age men killed or wounded…. A former senior Russian government official, writing anonymously for The Economist, says the war Russia started has reached a situation known in chess as 'zugzwang,' when every move worsens the position."

The Never Trump conservative continues, "By the end of this year, two current unknowns might be known: how Putin might lash out in response to the pain of Ukraine's military revival. And how Trump might lash out in response to the painful (to him) fact that, refuting his clairvoyance, Ukraine holds good and improving cards."

Economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has pinpointed a series of events that have led to the rest of the world seeing America as “inessential.”

Just weeks after President Donald Trump was sworn into his second term in office, he held a televised Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during which he and his top administration officials berated the leader fending off Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal war.

“You don’t have the cards right now,” Trump told Zelenskyy. But according to Krugman, Zelenskyy has “quite a few cards, while Trump has far fewer cards than he imagined.”

Krugman calls that Oval Office dressing-down “a spectacle that shamed America,” with Trump “engaging in petty bullying of the leader of a nation fighting for its life against tyranny.”

The Oval Office attack was just the start of what would make the world start to rethink its relationship to the U.S.

Trump then cut off all financial aid to Ukraine and blocked weapons sales to the battered nation — even when other nations were paying the bill.

Trump later met with Putin, where, “as the Russians see it, he offered to broker a deal that would give Russia control of a crucial fortress belt on Ukrainian soil.”

Krugman calls that “a shocking betrayal of a democracy fighting for its freedom — and, in so doing, fighting for the freedom of Europe as a whole.”

And while 18 GOP senators Thursday voted to restore aid to Ukraine, against the will of their leadership, should that bill come to Trump’s desk, it is doubtful he would sign it.

Despite Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine, Ukraine turned the war in its favor, and by doing so, taught the world a lesson.

“Before Trump, we were also a nation almost universally regarded as essential,” writes Krugman. “Nations believed that they needed access to U.S. banks to do business, access to U.S. markets to prosper, access to U.S. weapons to defend themselves.”

“But by breaking decades’ worth of international agreements — not to mention threatening allies and betraying Ukraine — Trump quickly forfeited the world’s trust.”

Trump “failing so spectacularly against Iran, a far weaker military power,” has also “dispelled much of the world’s fear,” Krugman says.

The world is “managing economically” despite Trump’s tariffs and his abandonment of Ukraine — and Ukraine is “surviving despite Trump’s attempt to cut it off at the knees,” says Krugman, revealing that America is “much less essential than everyone assumed.”

One of President Donald Trump’s closest allies, far right activist Laura Loomer, admitted on Wednesday that she had been seemingly tricked by the Russian government.

“When I was deplatformed, and when my election was rigged because the Big Tech social media companies wouldn't allow me to have access to social media, RT started reaching out to me and asking me to come on their show,” Loomer said, referring to her failed Florida congressional run (about which there was no evidence of fraud) and the Russian state-sponsored television network. “And they said, why don't you have a byline on RT? And you can even write for RT?”

Loomer claims she never took money from RT but appreciated that they allowed her to appear on their network. Yet even though she interpreted this at the time as the network perhaps caring “more about free speech than my own country,” she later felt manipulated.

“Now, when I see them say things like, we need to denazify Ukraine and we need to continue our brutal war with Ukraine, while they pretend to be, you know, some Orthodox Christian country — but they're slaughtering thousands, like hundreds of thousands, of young Christians in Ukraine — and then they're supporting actual neo-Nazis in the United States of America by clipping their podcasts, I'm like, wow,” Loomer said. “We fell for Russian propaganda, and I fell for Russian propaganda. And so when Loomer Unleashed had this opportunity to send a correspondent, um, abroad to Ukraine, to be embedded on the front lines of the war and meet with, uh, Ukrainian officials — and there were multiple U.S. senators there at the Odessa Security Conference, um — and Andrew asked me whether I would approve a correspondent to go to Ukraine, I thought about it for a while, and I was really hesitant to do so, because I thought, what are people going to think of me?”

She added that she has been anti-Ukraine for so long without “recognizing how, you know, as a conservative, or as a Trump supporter, or just as an American citizen, how I was being emotionally manipulated by propaganda online. And so I felt a little embarrassed, to be completely honest, sending a correspondent abroad, because I thought, well, people are going to attack me, and they're going to say that I'm a hypocrite, and they're not going to be gracious, and they're not going to give me an opportunity to change my opinion.”

This is not the first recent occasion in which Loomer has split with the Republican’s far right on foreign policy. In May she argued that former Trump supporters like former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Candace Owens have “Israel derangement syndrome” by seemingly blaming all the world’s problems on Israel.

“It’s like a psychosis. It’s literally a psychosis,” Loomer said. “It really is Israel derangement syndrome.”

At the same time, Loomer has had outsize influence over American foreign policy during the second Trump administration, such as getting key national security council advisers fired and urging the president to wage war against Iran.

Russia is now bombing NATO countries, and it appears that President Donald Trump is asleep at the wheel.

Writing on Monday, MS NOW producer Steve Benen sounded the alarm about an incoming disaster visible on the horizon.

A Wall Street Journal report last week quoted several world leaders in Europe as saying that they fear Russian President Vladimir Putin is about to go beyond Ukraine and look at the countries he can go to war with next in an effort to grow the former Soviet Union back to its original borders.

"Russian drones have repeatedly crashed without causing casualties along the Danube River border between Romania and Ukraine since 2023. But the drone crash on Friday, on the roof of a residential compound in the port city, Galati, sharply escalated tensions between NATO and Moscow," The New York Times reported.

On Friday, a Russian drone hit an apartment building. The incident was condemned by world leaders, and even Trump's ally and NATO ambassador, Matthew Whitaker, reaffirmed the U.S.'s commitment to NATO, promising that the U.S. was ready to defend Europe.

Trump, by contrast, has remained silent. It's unusual, Benen said, because he loves to beat his chest and project strength.

Hitting a building in Romania isn't merely a one-off. Benen explained that it is a pattern with Russia. Last fall, Russian drones entered Polish airspace. NATO pilots shot them down.

Then, Russian pilots violated Estonian airspace.

Benen added that none of these "tests" happened under non-Trump administrations. It makes Trump's "weakness toward Vladimir Putin ... especially humiliating," he wrote. The GOP has similarly been quiet.

"In recent weeks, the Republican president has repeatedly criticized NATO as a 'paper tiger' because its members chose not to participate in his misguided war with Iran, but he has offered no comparable criticisms of Russia for incidents inside NATO member nations," Benen closed.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was quick to condemn the Kremlin government and President Vladimir Putin after a Russian drone struck an apartment building in Galati, Romania early Friday morning, May 29. Matthew Whitaker, U.S. President Donald Trump's ambassador to NATO, spoke out as well. But political scientist Ian Bremmer called him out for omitting a crucial detail: Russian involvement.

Romania wasn't the Russian military's intended target. Rather, the drone was meant for Ukraine, which has been at war with Russia since 2022 and experienced some of Europe's worst fighting since World War 2. But the Russian drone went to Romania by mistake, hitting an apartment building in Galati (a port city) and setting it ablaze. Two people were injured, according to NBC News reporter Alexander Smith — who described it as "exactly the type of spillover from the war in Ukraine that many in Europe have long feared."

On X, formerly Twitter, Whitaker posted, "We stand with our NATO Ally Romania and condemn this reckless incursion on its territory. Our thoughts are with the injured in Galati. We will defend every inch of NATO territory."

In response to Whitaker's tweet, Bremmer noted that he failed to mention that the drone came from Russia.

Bremmer posted, "stronger and more effective if you directly mention russia here."

Whitaker is a longtime Trump ally. After Trump, during his first presidency, fired Jeff Sessions as U.S. attorney general, he appointed Whitaker as acting AG before choosing Bill Barr as a permanent replacement.

Unlike Whitaker, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte mentioned Russia by name when condemning the drone attack.

Rutte, in an official statement, said, "Russia's reckless behavior is a danger to us all. Last night showed yet again that the implications of their illegal war of aggression don't stop at the border…. NATO stands ready to defend every inch of allied territory."

Romanian Foreign Affairs Minister Oana-Silvia Țoiu, meanwhile, described the drone attack as "a serious and irresponsible escalation by the Russian Federation" and a "serious violation of international law and of its airspace." And Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha‎ warned, in a statement, "Russian aggression poses a real threat to the Black Sea region and the entire Europe."

Massachusetts-born political scientist Bremmer is the founder and president of the Eurasia Group, a consulting group that was launched in 1998 and is known for its focus on political risk management.

Britain’s King Charles III delivered a “carefully targeted rebuff” of President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies during his historic address before Congress, Politico reports, as he lauded NATO and called for “unyielding resolve” to defend Ukraine against Russia.

“British monarchs deliver their political messages in code,” Politico noted, adding that “contrary to the president’s repeated claims over recent weeks, NATO was in fact there to help in America’s hour of need.”

Charles told members of Congress that in “the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when NATO invoked Article 5 for the first time, and the United Nations Security Council was united in the face of terror, we answered the call together, as our people have done so, for more than a century.”

“Shoulder to shoulder,” he declared, “through two world wars, the Cold War, Afghanistan, and moments that have defined our shared security. Today, Mr. Speaker, that same unyielding resolve is needed for the defense of Ukraine and her most courageous people.”

His Ukraine entreaty received bipartisan applause and a standing ovation.

Charles praised the United States’ armed forces’ “commitment and expertise,” and that of its allies, that “lie at the heart of NATO.”

Calling it “a direct plea to Trump and Hill Republicans to maintain American support against the Russian invasion,” Politico stated that Charles “is striking a very different tone from Trump’s incessant criticisms of Ukraine and its President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.”

The significance of Charles's appearance before Congress extended beyond the immediate policy disagreements. Royal addresses to foreign legislatures are rare occurrences, with the British monarchy traditionally maintaining careful distance from domestic political controversies. The king's decision to deliver such pointed remarks about NATO and Ukraine suggested the gravity with which British leadership views current American foreign policy direction.

Charles's emphasis on shared sacrifice throughout history—invoking collective defense commitments spanning generations—carried particular weight given Trump's recent suggestion that the U.S. might withdraw from NATO or reduce its commitment to allied nations. The monarch's framing positioned American security interests as fundamentally intertwined with European stability, challenging the administration's transactional approach to international alliances.

The standing ovation that greeted Charles's Ukraine remarks also highlighted deep fissures within Republican ranks. While Trump and his closest allies have repeatedly questioned the wisdom of continued U.S. support for Kyiv, substantial portions of the GOP remain committed to the traditional transatlantic security framework. This congressional reception suggested that Charles's message resonated with lawmakers concerned about abandoning long-standing commitments at a critical moment in global affairs.

By delivering his address in diplomatic language rather than direct confrontation, Charles employed the formal protocols of statecraft while still making his position unmistakable to American policymakers and the public alike.

With additional reporting by Roxanne Cooper.