In the wake of President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance’s combative Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last Friday, the White House decided late Monday evening that it will stop sending U.S. weapons to Ukraine.
A White House official said that Trump “is focused on peace” and that it needs its allies “to be committed to that goal as well,” referring to Ukraine, according to multiple reports. “We are pausing and reviewing our aid to ensure that it is contributing to a solution,” the official said.
Trump had leveled an ultimatum at the end of the televised Oval Office meeting: Accept a ceasefire deal with Russia, “or we’re out.”
A halt to sending weapons to Ukraine was an expected shift for the Trump administration. Even before his selection as Trump’s running mate, Vance had advocated the idea that other European nations should be responsible for their own security and called for the end of U.S. military aid to Ukraine. Europe should “stand on its own two feet” and “not continue to use America as a crutch,” he said. Meanwhile Trump has openly embraced Russia, claiming President Vladimir Putin is interested in peace despite the fact his nation is the aggressor in the ongoing war that has killed more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians.
But while the Trump administration’s policy has shifted on Ukraine–Russia, making allies less reliant on the U.S. for security isn’t a uniform policy goal. Just look to Israel, a U.S. ally that continues to be the beneficiary of steadfast, undying American military support.
Mere hours after the Oval Office meeting with Zelenskyy, the State Department notified Congress that the Trump administration had approved a new weapons deal worth about $3 billion in arms to Israel. The sale came even as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu violated the terms of the ceasefire deal in Gaza by halting humanitarian aid from entering the territory. Netanyahu’s move — intended to force Hamas to accept new deal terms he credits to real estate developer and U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff — restricted the flow of food and other vital supplies into Gaza. The freeze has drawn criticism from the U.N., as well as Arab nations and human rights groups, which have blasted Netanyahu’s move as collective punishment of Palestinian people and a violation of international law.
“The Trump Administration will continue to use all available tools to fulfill America’s long-standing commitment to Israel’s security, including means to counter security threats,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement over the weekend about the new arms deal.
Trump’s new arms sales to Israel bypassed congressional approval, which is required under U.S. law for foreign sales. Trump used an “emergency” exception that allows the White House to skip the review by lawmakers. Even so, such unilateral actions from the White House are nothing new. Former President Joe Biden’s administration similarly bypassed Congress multiple times to sell weapons to Israel since October 7, 2023, sending more than $200 million in U.S.-made tank shells, bomb fuses, and other military equipment.
Throughout the first year of the war, Biden’s administration sent $17.9 billion in weapons to Israel, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Since Trump took office again, the White House has approved nearly $12 billion in weapons sales to Israel, according to the State Department.
“There’s unfortunately a lot of continuity between the Biden administration’s policy and Trump’s policy,” said Matt Duss, executive vice president of Center for International Policy, a progressive think tank. “I wish more Democrats would have spoken up previously — I wish more would speak up now; this is an absolute human catastrophe and it’s one that is going to produce horrible consequences, both now and into the future, for U.S. security.”
Trump’s deal will transfer to Israel $2.04 billion of munitions, including 4,000 Predator warheads and more than 35,500 MK-84 and BLU-117 bombs, also known as 2,000-pound bombs, which the Israeli military routinely used in dense urban areas in Gaza, killing scores of civilians and damaging hospitals and other civilian infrastructure. In his first week back in office, Trump had lifted a partial arms embargo on 2,000-pound bombs put in place by Biden last May. The deal also includes more than $600 million in additional munitions and nearly $300 million worth of Caterpillar bulldozers, which the Israeli military uses for destroying roads during operations.
“Money goes to Israel as ‘aid’ and it comes straight back into the pockets of U.S. firms that are building and developing these weapons, and they all get enormously rich doing it.”
For Muhannad Ayyash, a professor of sociology at Mount Royal University and policy analyst at Al-Shabaka, the motivations for Trump are clear: economic interest.
“It’s not aid, it’s investment — money goes to Israel as ‘aid’ and it comes straight back into the pockets of U.S. firms that are building and developing these weapons, and they all get enormously rich doing it,” Ayyash said. “And the Israelis also have Trump convinced that ultimately everything that they’re doing will be in the interest of the U.S.”
“Trump doesn’t see the economic angle for the U.S. in Ukraine,” he added.
The majority of Israeli military aid from the U.S. comes through grants for Israel to spend on buying new weapons directly from U.S. companies, which helps fuel the country’s weapons industry. Ukraine, in contrast, receives most of its U.S. weapons from preexisting Department of Defense stockpiles. Throughout the entire five-year war, the U.S. has sent $4.65 billion in new weapons transfers to Ukraine, according to the State Department. The U.S. exceeded that total in military assistance to Israel by more than $2 billion within the first year of its genocidal war in Gaza.
In a sit-down interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity that aired Monday evening, Vance further laid bare how financial interests motivate the U.S. government’s foreign policy decisions, commenting that if Ukraine wants to prevent another invasion by Russia, “the very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine.” The two countries previously considered a minerals deal that would allow the U.S. to mine rare minerals in Ukraine to offset costs of military aid. Whether the deal is still on the table is unclear after the halting of aid to Ukraine.
Both Duss and Ayyash are concerned about the implications of the U.S. policy of unwavering military support for Israel, especially as Netanyahu threatens any chance at a permanent ceasefire and the Israeli military ratchets up its offensive in the West Bank. Rather than transitioning to the second phase of the ceasefire deal, which would have seen the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and commitment to end the war, Netanyahu instead pitched an alternative deal to Hamas that called for extending the deal’s first phase by another 40 days. Hamas rejected the plan; Egypt and Qatar, essential brokers of the original deal, decried the last-minute counterproposal. Netanyahu responded by blaming Hamas for the crumbling of the deal and blocked aid into Gaza.
The ceasefire’s first phase allowed for thousands of displaced Palestinians to their homes in the north of Gaza, the start of cleanup efforts, and the search for the dead who remain buried under the rubble. Alongside the reprieve, Netanyahu continued to assure his far-right Cabinet that the war against Hamas would continue. Trump echoed those sentiments, famously pledging for the U.S. to “take over” Gaza and force Palestinians out of Gaza during the rebuilding process. Arab nations are meeting this week to offer a counter-rebuilding plan that would keep Palestinians within Gaza and would lead toward a two-state solution of Palestine and Israel.
“They were never serious about this ceasefire and now we see that and and they never even try to really negotiate for phase two,” Ayyash said of Netanyahu and Israel. “Their goal is still to drive out as many Palestinians as possible from the Gaza Strip, to colonize as much of it as is possible, and to end the Palestinian resistance — they want to ultimately call it all, from the river to the sea, Israel, under exclusive Israeli Jewish sovereignty with a minimal Palestinian population living there.”
This breakdown of a ceasefire deal may be precisely what is giving Zelenskyy pause in accepting a U.S. brokered peace deal with Russia, said Duss.
“If the Trump administration is in fact backing Netanyahu in breaking the terms of the ceasefire he agreed to with Hamas, that really doesn’t give the Ukrainians a lot of confidence that the United States is going to uphold any possible ceasefire with Vladimir Putin,” Duss said. “Ukrainians at the very least need to be able to have confidence that the United States is going to be willing to hold Russia to the terms of a ceasefire that it helps broker — and right now Trump is demonstrating with Netanyahu that he is not.”
“Trump now seems to be siding more with the powerful side that is occupying a less powerful people.”
Though Biden also largely failed to enforce its red lines with Israel in the face of violations of humanitarian law, his administration openly opposed Russia’s invasion and criticized its alleged war crimes — forming what rights advocates and experts saw as a contradictory double standard. Trump’s shift toward Russia makes U.S. policy more ideologically consistent: America now supports nations with imperialist ambitions facing accusations of war atrocities.
“Trump now seems to be siding more with the powerful side that is occupying a less powerful people,” Duss said. “I would prefer the United States end that double standard by upholding international law for everyone, friend and foe, but Trump is choosing to resolve this tension in the other direction.”
Both Ayyash and Duss called for the intervention of U.S. lawmakers and the international community to restore norms of international law, much of which were set up after World War II and have been challenged and eroded between both wars in recent years.
Duss also expressed concern for Americans who may pay the price for U.S. foreign policy decisions. “We don’t need to look back too far in history for examples of this,” he said, and added when asked for an example, “The September 11th attack.”