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After days of meetings with European leaders, Israeli officials and other international security experts, Sen. Adam Schiff this week offered a blistering assessment of President Trump’s approach to foreign policy. In an interview with The Times, the California Democrat accused Trump and other administration officials of abandoning Ukraine and other European allies, bowing to Russian President Vladimir Putin, sidling up to far-right extremists in Germany and framing Gaza in absurdly cruel terms as a future U.
S.-owned resort space , purged entirely of Palestinians. And he said he was echoing those concerns from a host of others he met during a bipartisan congressional trip to both Munich and Israel in recent days, including some of the nation’s most steadfast European allies.
“They’re terrified. They see a president who is betraying a Democratic ally at war, who is suddenly blaming Ukraine for its own invasion by the Kremlin dictator, who is casting doubt on the legitimacy of [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky’s leadership in Ukraine, and who is essentially a mouthpiece for the Kremlin,” Schiff said. “They’re flabbergasted.
I think they believe that the president is not just an unreliable partner, but a hostile partner.” Schiff said Republican members of Congress on the same trip shared some of those views and voiced them in closed-door meetings. He said they told Zelensky the U.
S. still has Ukraine’s back, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Trump’s idea for Gaza was “a complete nonstarter,” with no support in the Senate for “investing American boots on the ground or resources into a U.S.
occupation of Gaza or U.S. reconstruction of Gaza.
” Schiff’s assessment followed a stunning stretch of U.S. foreign diplomacy in the last two weeks, during which Trump and other top administration officials — including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — have repeatedly shocked the world with their pronouncements about the U.
S. role in foreign relations moving forward. In his first trip to NATO headquarters in Brussels on Feb.
12, Hegseth suggested the U.S. could no longer guarantee the safety of Europe and that Ukraine would have to give up massive concessions — including territory — to end Russia’s war against it.
Days later at the Munich Security Conference, Vance said little about Russia’s war, lectured European allies on what it means to be a democracy and met with leaders of Germany’s far-right party just days before an election there. And Rubio met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to begin negotiations without any involvement from Ukraine. Meanwhile, Trump praised Putin and repeatedly denigrated Zelensky .
He blamed Ukraine for Russia’s invasion and called Zelensky a “dictator” who is ripping off the U.S. and who has “no cards to play” in ongoing negotiations with Russia.
He also kept suggesting Gaza could be a U.S.-owned “Riviera of the Middle East,” among other outlandish foreign policy positions — such as that Canada should be turned into the 51st U.
S. state. Several U.
S. foreign policy experts said the administration’s actions, if taken at face value, reverse longstanding U.S.
policy and break with diplomatic norms in massive and important ways. Robert English, an expert on Russian and post-Soviet politics and director of Central European Studies at USC, called the administration’s moves on the international stage the “most upsetting rupture” in U.S.
transatlantic relations since World War II and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and a “sharp turn” by the U.S. with still unclear results.
But he and others also left open another possibility: The wave of startling pronouncements could represent a negotiating tactic to shock allies and opponents into making more moderate concessions to the U.S. Benjamin Radd, a political scientist and senior fellow at UCLA’s Burkle Center for International Relations, said he believes Trump’s “bombastic positions” are indeed a tactic — and one that has worked.
As one example, he pointed to a Friday summit hurriedly called in the Saudi capital of Riyadh among leaders from Egypt, Jordan and other Gulf Arab states to discuss a path forward for Gaza, after Rubio suggested Trump’s remarks about the territory were in part a challenge to Arab nations to come up with their own plan. However, Trump also has shown a propensity to follow through with outlandish ideas when nobody stands in his way, Radd said, so even his most wild pronouncements can’t be dismissed out of hand. “It’s trolling until it isn’t,” Radd said.
“If you do not get in front of it, he’ll be like, ‘Wait a minute, there’s nobody to actually stop me.’” Schiff said he views Trump as irresponsible, dangerous and willing to go as far as others — both in the U.S and abroad — will let him.
And he said it will be incredibly important for those who understand the important role the U.S. plays in maintaining world order to reestablish some guardrails and block his worst impulses.
Whether that will happen is unclear, he and the experts agreed. Part of what will determine the administration’s next moves, English said, will be Europe’s ability to maintain a united front, including in its support for Ukraine. “If he’s able to drive a wedge into European Union solidarity, then their resolve will fall apart,” he said.
Within the U.S., Schiff said, much of the work will fall to Republicans.
Those in the Senate “clearly made a decision collectively” that they were not going to stand in the way of Trump’s Cabinet nominations, he said, but whether they will bend completely to his will on foreign affairs remains to be seen. If they aren’t willing to stand up to Trump, Schiff said, “their own institution will be destroyed” and they “might as well go home, because we won’t be doing our jobs.” If they are willing to make a stand, there is plenty of work to do, he added.
Schiff said he couldn’t “get into the specifics” of the conversation he and other senators had with Zelensky, but that it was “fair to say” that Zelensky “was concerned about the U.S. commitment to Ukraine, to our fellow democracies and allies,” and “that, if not stopped in Ukraine, that Russia had territorial ambitions against our NATO allies.
” Zelensky also “raised concerns about being pressed on things like mineral rights without guarantees of our support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, without security guarantees really of any kind,” Schiff said. Senators had expressed bipartisan support for Ukraine and Zelensky, he said, and now it’s time they prove it. Schiff said senators still have power to isolate Trump in his criticisms of Ukraine, but have to go “beyond rhetorical support” for Ukraine and affirm it through votes ahead.
“I sure as hell hope they stand up to him for the sake of our country and our allies, our standing in the world, the whole international rules-based order we’ve had since World War II,” Schiff said. Schiff said others in Munich, including NATO leaders, raised concerns with him about “how many people will suffer” and how the U.S.
is “abandoning the field to the likes of China” by closing the U.S. Agency for International Development , which Trump and his billionaire advisor Elon Musk have sought to shutter.
U.S. officials must also push back against that effort, and make it clear to Trump that the agency does important work abroad that serves U.
S. interests and must continue. In Israel, Schiff said he and a bipartisan group of colleagues made clear to Netanyahu that Trump’s proposal for Gaza was unrealistic.
They should be making the same clear publicly, he said — to force the administration to take a more responsible position that adheres to international law and protects the rights of Palestinians. Schiff said he personally told Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders that a two-state solution must still be worked out for the long-term stability of the region and of Israel itself. “I hope that ultimately it becomes a debate over the attributes of a Palestinian state, rather than whether one will exist,” he said.
The U.S. can remain a leader and a force for good, Schiff said — but it won’t be via Trump’s shock-and-awe approach, either overseas or domestically.
And he urged people to step up and play their part in demanding a different path. “We’re all going to have an important role to play now and over the next four years in the preservation of our democracy,” Schiff said. “It’s going to require those of us in office to be pushing back with every tool we have.
It’s going to require the courts to play their historic role. But it’s going to require ordinary citizens also to speak out, to demonstrate — to not let the country go quietly into some kind of one-man rule.”.
