Well, this is different.

After three years of leading a global coalition against blatant Russian aggression in Ukraine, and sending hundreds of billions of dollars of military, economic and other assistance to Kyiv, the US just voted against a UN resolution condemning Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Among those voting similarly to the Americans on the UN resolution were Iran and North Korea.

American president Donald Trump also was quoted as saying that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is an “unelected autocrat”, that Ukraine was guilty of starting this brutal war, and that it was OK for the US and Russia to sit down together, without Ukraine, to discuss how to bring the war to an end.

Trump is, of course, behaving badly, as he often does, at least partly to gain attention. But he is also practicing something different in international affairs. His foreign policy seems to be guided by a principle called transactional diplomacy, which is characterised by a kind of zero-sum game mentality in which one side can benefit unsentimentally at the expense of the other. Here is a common description of the term:

Transactional diplomacy is a pragmatic approach to international relations that prioritizes concrete exchanges, such as economic incentives, security guarantees, and political concessions, over abstract principles or long-term alliances. Unlike traditional diplomatic methods that emphasize norms, institutions and trust-building, transactional diplomacy is often conducted through negotiations that focus on immediate gains and tangible benefits.

In transactional diplomacy, diplomatic engagements resemble business deals, where each party assesses the costs and benefits before committing to an agreement. It is commonly associated with leaders and governments that prioritize tangible outcomes over ideological consistency.

The NATO alliance is at the centre of any discussion of Trump and the world of transactional diplomacy. You can find in any of former president Joe Biden’s frequent comments on the North Atlantic alliance many references to NATO as a “bedrock, immutable, sacred” tenet of American foreign policy. It was not something to be seriously questioned.

The NATO alliance has formed since the end of World War II the basis for US foreign policy. In his first term, Trump regularly denigrated NATO, often insisting that America’s European allies pay a greater percentage of their Gross Domestic Product for their own defense – both in terms of manpower and materiel.

This was not new. Many Republicans and isolationist-inclined politicians in the US had been complaining about insufficient European contributions to their own regional defense for decades. But Trump in his first term did amplify these complaints, and European leaders were openly relieved when Trump was beaten in the 2020 election.

Now he’s back, and so is transactional diplomacy.

And even as a cascade of criticism rolls toward Trump for his stubborn, continuing embrace of Russian president Vladimir Putin, there persists a hope in many minds that Trump somehow knows just what he is doing. Some feel that he is simply flattering Putin to ultimately deceive him.

Perhaps Trump really does grasp the realities that history teaches, and that he well knows the appeasement trap that snared Western leaders as Adolph Hitler and the Nazis accumulated power and land in the 1930s. Time will tell.

The US and Ukraine are at present in the midst of negotiating a deal that appears to grant to America a long-term interest in Ukrainian mineral wealth, including rare earth materials that are essential in the production of many current and future essential items.

This deal, according to the BBC, was originally proposed to Trump by Zelensky last September as a tangible justification for the US to continue supporting Ukraine. Former UK prime minister Boris Johnson told the BBC in Kyiv that such a deal was “the great prize”, because it would secure “a United States commitment under Donald Trump to a free, sovereign and secure Ukraine”.

Ukraine’s mineral wealth is reportedly impressive. It has a third of all European deposits of lithium, the key component in current batteries. And Ukraine’s global share of titanium production, a lightweight metal used in the construction of everything from airplanes to power stations, has been estimated at 7%. Ukraine reportedly is “one of the top five leading countries” for the supply of graphite, which is used to make batteries for electric vehicles.

Ukraine also has significant deposits of rare earth metals. These are a group of 17 elements that are used to produce weapons, wind turbines, electronics and other products in the modern world.

It is, however, hard to reconcile this reported hard-nosed, practical style of transactional diplomacy with Trump’s continuing deference and respect for Putin, who remains a despotic, avowed opponent of American hegemony in the world.

Many are skeptical about any deal with Ukraine which would essentially barter American security guarantees for access to Ukraine’s mineral wealth. Would such a deal really be reliable for Ukraine – or for the rest of Europe that regards recent Russian aggression with profound, existential apprehension? And anyhow, it isn’t really clear how many security guarantees would be included in the possible US-Ukraine deal.

Despair reigns among the liberal punditry. For example, influential New York Times international affairs columnist Tom Friedman asked the following questions this week: “Are we being led by a dupe for Vladimir Putin — by someone ready to swallow whole the Russian president’s warped view of who started the war in Ukraine and how it must end? Or are we being led by a Mafia godfather, looking to carve up territory with Russia the way the heads of crime families operate? ‘I’ll take Greenland, and you can take Crimea. I’ll take Panama, and you can have the oil in the Arctic. And we’ll split the rare earths of Ukraine.’

“Either way, for the next four years at least, the America you knew is over. The bedrock values, allies and truths America could always be counted upon to defend are now all in doubt — or for sale. Trump is not just thinking out of the box. He is thinking without a box, without any fidelity to truth or norms that animated America in the past.”

One might well wonder where among the American constitutional system of checks and balances are the counterweights to such a dramatic and perhaps dangerous departure from diplomatic norms and foreign policy precedents that have informed American relations with the world for so long.

The best answer is in the American Congress. Republicans actually control the US Senate by a slightly larger three-vote margin than they control the House of Representatives, where New York GOP congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s departure for Senate confirmation as the American ambassador to the UN is reportedly being delayed to assure her vote on a big upcoming Trump-approved omnibus budget bill.

There have been a few murmurs of Republican Senate dissent at Trump’s belittling of Ukraine and Zelensky. But they are relatively muted and sometimes opaque. South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, Senate majority leader John Thune of South Dakota, Arkansas’ Tom Cotton, Iowa’s Joni Ernst and Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair James Risch of Idaho are all speaking of Trump, Russia and Ukraine, Putin and Zelensky in more modulated ways than they did as recently as last summer. Their moral outrage at Putin is greatly diminished.

Hopefully, they have not abandoned their previous obdurate support for Ukraine’s fight for independence. They may well simply be trying to survive politically in a new world essentially defined by Trump’s whimsy.

To underscore that point, consider the following remarks by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz at the aforementioned US – Russia talks in Riyadh on ending the Ukraine War.

Here’s Waltz: “Just in a few months President Trump has shifted the entire global conversation from if to how the war is going to end. And only President Trump can do that. In the Oval Office less than a week ago, both President Putin and President Zelensky both said to him only you, President Trump, can drive this war to a conclusion.”

And here’s Rubio: “The only leader in the world who can make this happen, who can even bring people together to begin to talk about it in a serious way, is President Trump. He’s the only one in the world who can do that right now.”

Such obeisance! It’s oddly reminiscent of the fealty required in North Korea of its own supreme leader.