JFK and Charles De Gaulle knew something Trump can’t fathom
Trump’s disgraceful performance with Zelenskyy will mean America forsaken, not America first
Donald Trump lectures Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office of the White House. Photo by Getty Images
Larry Cohler-Esses February 28, 2025
It was in December 2001 that I sat down to a meal in Belgium, of all places, that permanently changed my worldview. It also deeply colors my reaction to President Donald Trump’s disgracing of America in his meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Our food wasn’t memorable. The only dish I actually remember was the excellent lemon meringue pie for dessert. But my table partners were unforgettable; and the waitstaff that served us, even more so.
My six fellow diners were family members of the firefighters and cops who perished while trying to rescue victims from Osama Bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Center a few months earlier. I was accompanying them as a reporter for the New York Daily News — first, to this obscure pitstop near Belgium’s Ostend-Bruges airport, then onward to a mission in Afghanistan. There, they would offer 90,000 pounds of rice, sugar, cooking oil, blankets and other goods to be distributed to poor Afghans struggling to survive Kabul’s grueling winter, just a couple of weeks after America had overthrown the Taliban regime that provided Bin Laden his base.
The American military accomplished this lightning-fast feat with support from NATO allies including Britain, France, Canada, and Germany, and the Afghan Northern Alliance within Afghanistan itself. The rest of NATO would support the United States during its occupation of the country in the years that followed. But impressive as it was, this initial operation was a coalition of mere governments. What amazed me was the reaction of the restaurant waiters, cooks and managers when they discovered the mission these 9-11 family members were on.
They refused to take our money. They hovered over us the whole meal. Well into the night, they continued to ply us with drink and food, urging us to eat well before undertaking the arduous second leg of our journey the next morning on a rickety old Soviet Antonov 225 cargo plane piloted by a crew of Ukrainians.
“This is our way of paying something back to you for liberating us years ago,” the restaurant owner told us. “You have been attacked!”
It was this encounter that taught me the difference between a transaction and a relationship.
Trump sycophants may rush to justify the president’s nauseating performance today as a frustrated and angry — and even predatory — Neville Chamberlain. They may extol his White House meeting with President Zelenskyy as an example of transactional politics uber alles. But the signal he has sent to our (now former?) allies is clear. Obsequious submission and hard cash on the table is the only interest that drives our country now.
That will matter the next time America needs anything from those who have been, up to now, its natural allies, even when they were also our chronic annoyances. French President Charles De Gaulle was one such prickly ally. Despite having found refuge in London with a resistance government-in-exile after the Nazis took Paris in World War II, De Gaulle often failed to show deference or gratitude to the United States afterward. Anxious to assert France’s independence as its post-war leader, he often upbraided the NATO alliance of which France was a part for being dominated by the United States. He took independent stances in his relations with the Soviet bloc and in 1966 actually left the formal military alliance while continuing to cooperate with it from the outside.
But during the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world stood on the verge of nuclear war, what took front and center was a relationship, not a transaction. President John F. Kennedy sent former secretary of state Dean Acheson to secure De Gaulle’s support for the military blockade he was throwing around the Caribbean Island. But when an accompanying CIA technical expert started to unfurl the photos he brought to show De Gaulle — proof that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear missiles just 90 miles from Florida’s coast — De Gaulle stopped him.
“Your president’s word is enough,” he told Acheson, as he dismissed the CIA officer. The French president quickly offered America his country’s support.
Given Trump’s grievance about NATO allies as states that only takes advantage of America, it’s ironic that America itself is the only country to have ever invoked the NATO treaty’s Article 5. That’s the provision that obligates all members to come to the aid and defense of any member when it’s attacked. And that is, in fact, what all NATO members did after Bin Laden attacked New York City from faraway Kabul.
The invasion itself consisted of American, British, Canadian and Australian forces. France, Denmark and Norway contributed special operations forces. Germany provided troops to support policing and disarmament afterward. Other countries that came in soon after included the Czech Republic, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Poland and Turkey.
It’s possible that Trump, who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, believes America will never again find itself in need of support beyond the transactional from other countries; or maybe he thinks the support it has sometimes gotten has been only based on that. But my experience that night in a Belgian restaurant in December 2001 taught me something much different.
We can’t know how or when, or under what circumstances. But sooner or later we will need support again. Next time we will have to pay for the meal — if they will agree to serve us at all.
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