What Zelensky Can Learn from Rabin

President Trump’s increasingly hostile treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky raises the question: What can Zelensky do to mitigate the risk that the president’s volatile mood swings pose to Ukraine?

Part of the frustration for Zelensky and his allies—and the U.S. ought to be one of those allies—is that Trump’s clear personal dislike of the Ukrainian president, combined with his indestructible sympathy for Vladimir Putin, defies facts and logic. So Ukraine is at the mercy of irrational policymaking.

To take just the latest example: energy prices. Trump knows that oil prices, especially diesel costs, remain too high as his party faces a midterm reckoning in two weeks. And he’s decided to scapegoat Zelensky for targeting Russian refineries: “He wants to make problems for the world. He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel.”

Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries show scant correlation with higher U.S. diesel prices. The war in the Middle East, specifically the fight to free the Strait of Hormuz from Iran’s grip, is much more important to energy costs. Further, Trump’s position ignores the fact that Ukraine agreed to an energy cease-fire, which Russia promptly violated. When Ukraine hit back, Trump eased sanctions on Russia.

Then there’s the simple fact that Russia started this war and Russia can end it. We should not blame Zelensky for refusing to allow his country to be overrun, destroyed, and erased from the map.

As the public falling-out between the two men continues, Zelensky is grasping for ways to change Trump’s mind. He has tried being less confrontational in the past, and obviously that led nowhere. So now Zelensky is hitting right back at Trump, as the New York Times recounts:

“‘People have to hear reality,’ Mr. Zelensky said in an interview with ABC News last week. That reality, as the Ukrainian leader described it, was that Mr. Trump had an affinity for dictators, was on the wrong side of history in siding with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and would only prolong the war by helping him.”

Is Zelensky wrong here? Sure doesn’t seem to be, even though it’s not going to persuade Trump. Today Secretary of State Marco Rubio called Zelensky to try to reassure him. “No doubt there are tensions,” Rubio said after the call. “That is why we had the call. The president is frustrated. The president is responding to the insinuation that he is doing things to deliberately harm Ukraine, which is not fair and not true.”

What options does Zelensky have at this point?

One possibility is to look to Israel’s foreign policy in its earlier decades, before its special relationship with the U.S. was in full bloom and before it became an economic and military powerhouse. In those precarious days, the threats facing Israel were usually existential; the state had almost no room for error. Even as Israel won land wars, it remained vulnerable.

Two facets of Israeli diplomacy could benefit Ukraine. The first began before the founding of the state. It followed Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s theory of public pressure, and Benjamin Netanyahu—whose father was an adviser of Jabotinsky’s—has made it central to his own management of U.S.-Israel relations over the past four decades. He explains in his memoirs:

“[Jabotinsky] posited that the most potent influence on democratic governments is the pressure of public opinion. It matters not, he argued, if a government is headed by the friendliest of leaders. If your opponents apply sufficient pressure on that government, it will eventually tilt against you. To balance this, you must sway public opinion to your side by an unceasing public campaign ‘like the constant drizzle on a green English lawn,’ he said.”

Perhaps, then, Zelensky and his allies need to balance Trump and MAGA, rather than try to win a battle of wills against them.

Relatedly, there is the fact of Congress. This is trickier for Zelensky to pull off, but he’s in desperate need of bipartisan help. Amid the fight over President Gerald Ford’s “reassessment” of U.S.-Israel relations in 1975, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s allies in the Senate wrote a public letter to the president warning him that his ability to have his foreign-aid budget approved would be tied to ensuring necessary security material wasn’t withheld from Israel.

In the end, Ford still got Israel to agree to the Israel-Egypt deal the president was looking for, but there was no major security crisis for Israel. The Jewish state’s allies in Congress did not undermine the president’s policy, they simply limited the ways Israel could be threatened along the way, thus preserving stability in the relationship.

Is this too sophisticated a strategy for Ukraine to fulfill at the moment? Would it take too long to get this kind of thing up and running? Maybe. But Ford’s overarching policy went unhindered while Israel’s security went unthreatened by the U.S.. In dealing with Trump, this might be the right combination for Zelensky to seek.

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