The Ruthless Geopolitics of Alliance in the Trump-Zelensky Clash

The clash between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on February 28, 2025 reveals 3 inconvenient truths about the ruthless geopolitics of alliance often ignored or downplayed in Western mainstream mass media. More importantly, this case study of the current Russia-Ukraine war under the "United West" narrative in this essay has a much broader theoretical implication, which is to illustrate the widespread geopolitical ruthlessness in global relations, as a cautionary tale for actors on the world stage in the future. Inconvenient Truth #1: Small States Often Reluctantly Follow the Order of the Hegemon in an Alliance. The first inconvenient truth is that, contrary to political correctness in Western mainstream mass media, small states in an alliance, more often than not, reluctantly follow the order of the hegemon in an alliance. An illustrative example is the Trump-Zelensky clash in the White House on February 28, 2025, which reveals the precarious position of a small state like Ukraine, which, especially for those far-right nationalists in power, prefers to continue the war against Russia but faces the bullying stand of the hegemon like the U.S. under Trump to stop the war right away for a negotiated peace with Russia, because Trump wants to lure Russia away from the Sino-Russian "no-limits" friendship to focus on containing China as the rising superpower in the "Asian century." The rise of China as the dominant superpower was already predicted in my 1995 doctoral dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or M. I.T., which was later published in 2 volumes titled "The Future of Human Civilization" in 1999, and as further elaborated in my 2007 book titled "Beyond the World of Titans, and the Remaking of World Order," which includes India as the coming rival with China as the 2 "hyper empires" on Earth in the third Cold War or "Cold War 3.0," with the U.S. and the EU as the "meso-empires" in the 2nd tier of this new world order.