Weighing dependence on Washington: Trump between Zelensky and Netanyahu

Within eight days in October, US President Donald Trump made two statements about two wartime leaders that, placed side by side, read like a confession. On 10 October, speaking to reporters as he left the White House, he said of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky: “I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.” He accused Zelensky of passing up the chance to settle the war with Russia “many times, many many times” and of driving up diesel prices by striking Russian oil refineries: “He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel.”

On 18 October, Trump posted a letter on his Truth Social platform describing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “a Great Warrior Prime Minister, and an even greater Partner for Peace.” In the letter, he gave Netanyahu his “Complete and Total Endorsement” nine days before Israel’s general election on 27 October.

Trump’s endorsement of Netanyahu was expected, given Washington’s long record of backing Israel. His remarks on Zelensky, by contrast, shocked many. They revealed the real logic of the Trump administration: politics driven by calculations of interest rather than by allegiances or alliances. Together, the two statements hold an important lesson for anyone who believes American support is a promise rather than a calculation. They also expose Zelensky’s own strategic failure: he relied on a foreign power with its own interests instead of honestly weighing his own capabilities in the conflict with Russia.

A card that no longer plays

Zelensky’s fall from grace was triggered by a dispute over diesel. On 9 October, after a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump announced a deal under which Russia would immediately supply more than 300,000 tonnes of diesel, followed by 500,000 tonnes in November and larger volumes after that. The Kremlin said Russia was ready to supply “the American and global markets.” Zelensky condemned the agreement as “an investment in a war that must be ended, not prolonged,” and warned that Russia would “repay” the diesel “with further terror and perfidy.”

Trump responded with fury. For weeks, he had pressed Zelensky to halt strikes on Russian refineries, which had cut Russian diesel output and pushed up global fuel prices. A US official told Axios that Trump struck the deal with Putin after Zelensky ignored his requests. Driven by his own political calculations, Trump wanted Ukraine to stop unilaterally and made no matching demand of Moscow. “We said you could do whatever you want to Russia, don’t hit the refineries,” Trump told reporters. “So what does he do? He goes and hits the refineries.”

The domestic context was decisive. The US was just over three weeks away from the midterm elections on 3 November. Diesel prices were close to record highs, driving up the cost of almost everything. Trump’s approval rating had fallen to the lowest point of his presidency amid the war on Iran, which the US and Israel launched in February. That war, and to a lesser extent the Ukrainian drone strikes, lay behind the energy crisis. By blaming Zelensky, Trump sought to shift responsibility for rising prices onto a foreign leader at a moment when American voters were preparing to punish the party in power.

The episode shows that Zelensky’s abandonment is not tactical but structural. He is no longer a useful card in American domestic politics, where Ukraine has no lobby to match the influence of pro-Israel groups. The Trump administration, along with other Western political circles, appears to have concluded that the war against Russia cannot be won.

Behind Trump’s insult lie facts about this war that are hard to deny. Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 was an act of aggression in breach of international law. Yet even if Western countries encouraged Kyiv to keep fighting, the choice to pursue the conflict on the battlefield rather than at the negotiating table was ultimately Zelensky’s, and he bet everything on Western support. His former spokeswoman Yulia Mendel has claimed that he undermined around seven attempts to end the war, an allegation his office rejects as baseless. In October 2022, he also signed a decree declaring negotiations with Putin “impossible”. The result is plain: having relied heavily on foreign powers, he is now stuck in a quagmire, with foreign support shrinking and no prospect of gains on the battlefield.

A war criminal who remains indispensable

Netanyahu is a different calculation entirely. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for his arrest for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The warrant remains in force even though Washington has sanctioned the court’s judges and deputy prosecutors and its president. He is a fugitive from international justice. Yet a sitting American president has endorsed his re-election in the most personal terms available.

Why? Because Trump needs him, both for his war on Iran and for electoral calculations shaped by pro-Israel lobbying networks in American politics. The most prominent of these is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which a US senator says plans to spend $233 million to defeat candidates critical of Netanyahu’s government. If Trump abandoned Netanyahu now, he would be abandoning his own decision to go to war with Iran. He believes the Israeli leader is central to the future of the US confrontation with Iran, and he does not want to carry on alone, which would become far more complicated if Netanyahu loses. Trump spelt this out himself: “If Israel has the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi, America will have to do this work ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so.” The endorsement was not moral; it rested on political calculation and self-interest.

The lesson: interest, not values

The contrast between Zelensky and Netanyahu is not one between good and bad. It is a practical lesson in how far a leader can rely on a foreign power. Netanyahu remains indispensable not because the case against him has gone away, but because he remains useful to the man who endorsed him. Zelensky was discarded because, at least in Trump’s view, he had become useless, with no domestic constituency in the US to protect him.

The difference is not between two leaders or their conflicts. It is between an asset and a liability. It is Zelensky’s own fault, not anyone else’s, that he failed to recognise the limits of American support when he chose to continue the war rather than settle it through direct talks. He believed a foreign leader would back him without exacting a price. Trump sees Netanyahu as an asset he would like to keep in power, while Zelensky was traded for a diesel deal that carries electoral value for Trump and his party in the upcoming midterms.

Return, finally, to the two men. One is a wanted war crimes suspect who received a presidential endorsement in a public letter. The other is a wartime president who was told publicly that his country should find someone else. The contrast is not an anomaly to be explained away; it is an instruction manual. Those who place their fate in Washington’s hands should study Zelensky’s path and adjust their expectations of a foreign power, whose support will never come at the expense of its own interests. That is American politics today.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.