Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Donald Trump’s approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has always been to root for Russia while pretending he isn’t. Trump just hates killing and death. More than that, he hates sending American money overseas. The claim that he actually agrees with Moscow is a hoax, remember. Trump is all about putting America first. Or so he’s said, and so his mostly non-Russophilic supporters claim to believe.

But now he has flung the mask to the ground. The president’s latest positions on the war reveal that he is indifferent to ongoing slaughter—indeed, he is willing to increase it—and that his opposition to Ukraine’s independence has nothing to do with saving American tax dollars. Trump simply wants Russia to win.

[Jonathan Chait: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

In recent days, Trump has said he is “looking at” a plan to revoke the temporary legal status of Ukrainians who fled to the United States. After Ukraine expressed willingness to sign away a large share of the proceeds from its natural-resource sales (in return for nothing), Trump said that might not be enough to restore support. Trump is now pushing Ukraine’s president to step down and hold elections, according to NBC. Volodymyr Zelensky’s domestic approval rating sits at 67 percent, and his most viable opponents have said that they oppose elections at the present time. The notion that Trump actually cares about democracy, and would downgrade his relations with a foreign country over its failure to meet his high governance standards, is so laughable that even a Trump loyalist like Sean Hannity would have trouble saying it with a straight face.

Trump exposed his preferences most clearly in his decision to cut off the supply of intelligence to Ukraine. The effect of this sudden reversal—which does not save the American taxpayer any money—was immediate and dramatic. Russian air attacks, now enjoying the element of surprise, pounded newly exposed Ukrainian civilian targets, leaving scenes of death and destruction.

The grim spectacle of watching the death toll spike, without any appreciable benefit to American interests, ought to have had a sobering effect on the president. At least it would have if his ostensible objectives were his actual ones. Instead, he seemed visibly pleased.

Paying close attention to his rhetoric reveals the significance of the turn. Speaking to reporters from his desk in the Oval Office, Trump, asked whether the bombing campaign changes his oft-expressed view that Vladimir Putin desires peace, affirmed that it does not. “I believe him,” he said. “I think we’re doing very well with Russia. But right now they’re bombing the hell out of Ukraine, and Ukraine—I’m finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine. And they don’t have the cards.” It was Trump himself, of course, who had taken “cards” away from Ukraine by suddenly exposing its cities to bombardment.

A reporter asked if Putin was “taking advantage” of Trump’s move. Trump made clear that the Russian president was doing precisely what he had expected. “I think he’s doing what anybody else would do,” he said. “I think he wants to get it stopped and settled, and I think he’s hitting ’em harder than he’s been hitting ’em, and I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now. He wants to get it ended, and I think Ukraine wants to get it ended, but I don’t see—it’s crazy, they’re taking tremendous punishment. I don’t quite get it.”

[Olga Khazan: Putin is loving this]

Why not, a reporter asked, provide air defenses? “Because I have to know that they want to settle,” Trump replied. “I don’t know that they want to settle. If they don’t want to settle, we’re out of there, because we want them to settle, and I’m doing it to stop death.”

Trump’s rhetoric signals an important evolution in his policy. He is no longer arguing for peace at any price. Instead, he has identified a good guy (Russia) and a bad guy (Ukraine). The good guy definitely wants peace. The bad guy is standing in the way of a settlement. Consequently, the only way to secure peace is for the good guy to inflict more death on the bad guy. Increasing the body count on the bad guy’s side, while regrettable, is now the fastest way to stop death.

This is the same moral logic that the Biden administration and NATO employed to support Ukraine—the way to end the war is to raise the cost to the party responsible for the conflict—but with the identity of the guilty and the innocent parties reversed.

If you want to see where Trump’s position is going next, pay attention to the bleatings of his closest supporters, who echo his impulses and point it in new directions. Elon Musk, for example, has begun demanding sanctions on Ukraine’s “oligarchs” and blaming them for American support for Kyiv. This is an echo of Putin’s long-standing claim that Ukraine is dominated by an unrepresentative class of oligarchs who have steered it away from its desired and natural place as a Russian vassal. The fixation with Ukraine’s corruption and the push to replace Zelensky both reflect Russian war aims. Putin wishes to delegitimize any Ukrainian government mirroring its population’s desire for independence, which would allow him to control the country either directly or through a puppet leader, like the kind he enjoyed before 2014 and has in Belarus today.

Ukraine certainly has its share of wealthy, influential business owners, but not nearly to the extent of Russia itself, whose entire economy is structured around oligarchic domination. And Trump is even less disturbed by corruption than he is by a lack of democracy. His administration’s earliest moves included defending or pardoning American politicians charged with corruption and ending enforcement of restrictions on bribing foreign governments. For that matter, Musk himself, who has obliterated conflict-of-interest guardrails by running much of the federal government while operating businesses with massive interest in public policy, fits the definition of oligarch neatly.

Senator Mark Kelly recently visited Ukraine and wrote on X, “Any agreement has to protect Ukraine’s security and can’t be a giveaway to Putin.” (His post did not mention Trump.) Musk replied, “You are a traitor,” which would be a rather odd sentiment unless one considered Ukraine an enemy of the United States. Where Musk is going, Trump is likely to follow.

[Anne Applebaum: The rise of the Brutal American]

Trump inherited an American government pushing to defend Ukrainian sovereignty. He has reversed American policy rapidly. The American position has already passed the point of neutrality. The new American goal is no longer simply to end the war, but to end it on Putin’s terms. Asked on Fox News Sunday if he was comfortable with the possibility that his actions would threaten Ukraine’s survival, Trump responded blithely, “Well, it may not survive anyway.” That is not merely a prediction. It is the goal.

One response to the egregious, often cruel actions of the Trump administration is outrage. That’s understandable, but mostly counterproductive, and, worse, a reaction that Donald Trump’s supporters enjoy. Ice is more advisable than fire in this situation, and the situation is better assessed with a cold head than a hot one.

Broadly speaking, there are three streams of influence on the administration. Trump’s vindictive, amoral, autocratic, and ignorant personality is the most obvious one. No less important, though, is the influence of marginal intellectuals and podcast ranters, who provide ideas for an angry but empty man. These ideas range from the merely dangerous (the unitary executive) to the religiously authoritarian (Seven Mountains Dominionism, or Catholic integralism) to the deranged (let’s get to the bottom of the John F. Kennedy assassination, shall we?). There are, finally, the structural elements and conditions that brought us to this moment: the loss of manufacturing jobs to China and other countries, the pervasive failures of American governing elites, and the popular rejection of identity-driven policies.

This mix of influences holds true ofor foreign policy as well. Trump’s policy toward Europe, and specifically Ukraine, is motivated by his understanding of NATO as a mismanaged protection racket, his animus toward Ukraine, and his warmth toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. Alongside these idiosyncratic grievances of a man who cannot separate the personal from the public, however, are ideas that Trump has absorbed from those around him.

The so-called international-relations realists, and even the advocates of the “restrainer” school of American foreign policy, have the unrealistic notion that values should play no role in foreign policy and an unrelieved contempt for those who think otherwise. They are tempted to play at being Metternich. This was on display, for example, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested to a journalist from Breitbart News that although the United States might not be completely successful at prying apart Russia and China, we could at least try to do so, apparently understanding as we do Russia’s interests better than Moscow does.

[Read: Helping Ukraine is Europe’s job now]

In this case, the secretary (not to mention his interviewer) forgot that the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China had coame at a time when Russia and China had waged a border war against each other and the Soviet Union was contemplating a preemptive strike on the Chinese nuclear arsenal. The tinhorn Talleyrands of Foggy Bottom might also have considered that suave statesmen do not announce to a crackpot news outlet that splitting the enemy coalition is the purpose of their European policy.

The idea—and it is an idea, though a very bad one—that the administration will make the United States safer by cutting a deal with Russia over the heads of our European allies is the kind of folly that only mediocre statesmen who think they are sophisticated tough guys can come up with. Such a deal would undermine America’s greatest international strengths—its alliances and its credibility—and reward two malicious powers whose hostility is profound, deeply rooted (in ideology and in fear of democratic contagion), and ineluctable. Or as my grandmother once said about someone who thought themselves clever, “Smart, smart, stupid.”

But it is also crucial to grasp the underlying forces at work here. Europe’s long dependence upon the United States for its fundamental security is untenable. This has been clear for a very long time indeed—so clear, in fact, that even as a naive, newly minted assistant professor, I understood it more than 40 years ago:

The greatest danger to the Alliance arises from the psychological relationship between the United States and an Old World dependent for its very survival on the arms of the New. As Raymond Aron has said, “By its very nature, Western Europe’s dependence on the United States for its own defense is unhealthy.” Once Europe had recovered from the devastation of World War II—let us say, for the sake of convenience, by 1960—the relationship of protector and protected was likely to evoke arrogance and condescension from the one side, resentment and irresponsibility from the other.

The eruptions of the Trump administration against NATO come in this context; conceivably, they were bound to come. Versions of the same critique, with much less vitriol, have been offered repeatedly, including by far friendlier administrations.

[Read: Trump sided with Putin. What should Europe do now?]

Deeper yet, European trust in a benign and protecting United States is the product of some selective memory. AlthoughWhile it is true that for nearly 80 years, the United States extended protection, including its nuclear umbrella, over Europe, let us not forget the bitter acrimony that has periodically beset the alliance. Furious debates over the rearmament of Germany, America’s betrayal of Britain and France during the Suez Crisis of 1956, mass hostility over the Vietnam War, the deep European antipathy to the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces to Europe, and American skepticism toward German Ostpolitik, not to mention the various perturbations of American economic and monetary policy, created repeated alliance crises. For that matter, this American visiting Europe in 2003, on the eve of the Iraq War, could not expect and did not receive an altogether pleasant reception.

The East European states have reason for warmer feelings towardabout the United States, which in the later stages of the Cold War did indeed help them with covert aid. But they are not entirely wrong to have felt abandoned by Washington before that and stymied in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse by American administrations that, rather than exploit Russia’s weakness, chose to appease the countryit, and were reluctant to admit them into NATO.

But the roots of U.S.-European tension are even more profound. Those 80 years of alliance were anomalous. Over a near quarter millennium, the relationship has been ambivalent. Most Americans descend from people who departed Europe in search of a new and better life. We are the people who left, and for the most part are glad we did. War with European powers occurred periodically, and could have been worse—France and the United States came close to blows over Mexico after the Civil War, and the lovely fortifications in Quebec City were designed to defend against American fleets. For their part, American leaders knew full well that the governments of France and Great Britain greatly preferred the Confederacy to the Union, and would not have been displeased at the breakup of, as it was then known, the Great Republic.

During the wWorld wWars, the United States exploited its European partners and allies. It demanded repayment of loans made in the first war in a common cause, and used its leverage in the second to break up Britain’s imperial preference system and speed up the collapse of the European empires. The Marshall Plan was magnificent, but it was also an act of self-interest. And from the American point of view, it was enough that thrice in the 20th century, the United States rescued Europe from what, viewed in the largest perspective, were three attempts at collective suicide driven by nationalism, fascism, and Communism.

Americans and Europeans have been different and remain so, even if it is now possible to get excellent wine, bread, and coffee in the United States and jeans and rap music in Europe. Their concepts of liberty, free speech, and the appropriate roles of government are not the same, as J. D. Vance noted at the Munich Security Conference, although he should have had the courtesy and good sense to emphasize how much we have in common, and acknowledge that the differences were none of his business.

[Read: ‘What the hell is happening to your country?’]

The cast of mind has ever been different. As Henry Adams said, “The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest.” True enough, and the fact that English is now the lingua franca of Europe does not make American politics and culture any more transparent or predictable to those who reside on the other side of the Atlantic.

In the long run, a more normal kind of American administration will return. With it will also return productive and predictable relationships, cooperation, and friendship. But after the past two months, there cannot, and should not ever be, trust. One Trump administration was a mistake; two Trump administrations will be read, correctly, as a divergence that can never be repaired. The Atlantic alliance can be rebuilt, but its foundations will never be the same, and in some ways that is not an entirely bad thing. A well-armed Europe—even including, as the Polish prime minister has recently suggested, one with a larger group of nuclear powers—will be a good thing. A Europe free of its unnatural material and psychological dependence on the United States will benefit both sides.

As for the Trump administration, however, the mistrust should be of a completely different order. The man, the ideas, and the structural conditions have created a hellish synthesis, and Europe faces at this moment the utmost peril. If it frees itself of its psychological dependence, opens its treasuries, and unleashes the energy of its democratic societies, it can defend itself, including Ukraine. In the meanwhile, and with the deepest regret, I say that any European leader who believes any promise that comes out of the mouth of a Trump-administration official is a fool. For four years at least, you are in grave danger, because you simply cannot trust us.

Visit comes ahead of talks with the US this week, as Russia claims advances in Kursk region.

Russia has previously rejected a temporary ceasefire, calling it an attempt to buy time.

Hitler regretted the deal he made with Neville Chamberlain at Munich in 1938. What he actually wanted was war—his goal was to conquer all of Czechoslovakia by force as a first step toward the conquest of all of Europe.

He didn’t imagine that the British and French governments would be so craven as to give him everything he publicly asked for, including the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the occupation of the Sudetenland by the German army. When they did, Hitler found himself trapped into accepting, but he was unhappy. Within five months he ordered the military occupation of all Czechoslovakia, in violation of the Munich Agreement, and six months after that, he invaded Poland.

Today the Trump administration is offering Vladimir Putin a Munich-like settlement for Ukraine. Trump’s negotiators have offered Putin almost everything he has publicly asked for without demanding anything in return. They may assume that if they give him everything up front, he will agree to a cease-fire and some kind of deal that will save face for President Donald Trump, allowing him to claim the mantle of peacemaker, just as Chamberlain did, albeit for only a few months.

Will Putin accept? At the moment, thanks to Trump’s anti-Ukraine maneuvers, he has the luxury of watching Washington and Kyiv wrangle over terms while he pummels Ukraine’s population and energy grid and brings the country closer to collapse. But so far, Putin has been clear about the terms he is willing to accept to achieve peace. Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, his offer is this: nothing.

No security guarantee; no independent, sovereign Ukraine; perhaps not even a cease-fire. Putin’s goal, as it has been from the beginning, is the incorporation of Ukraine into Russia and the complete erasure of the Ukrainian nation, language, and culture. He will gladly accept Ukraine’s surrender whenever Kyiv is ready to concede, but short of that he is going to keep the war going until he takes everything.

[Read: Putin is loving this]

Let’s start with security guarantees. Putin has never agreed to them for Ukraine—in any form. Putin and his spokesmen have stated repeatedly that Moscow will never accept European troops on Ukrainian soil as part of a peace deal. To accept European troops in Ukraine is no different in Putin’s mind than to accept NATO—as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said as recently as last week.  

Nor is Putin’s refusal hard to understand. Any deal that put Western troops on Ukrainian soil would leave Russia in an objectively worse strategic situation than before the invasion. After three years of conflict, as many as 1 million casualties, and widespread economic suffering, Putin would have succeeded only in tightening the circle of containment around Russia, including the admission to NATO of Sweden and Finland; bringing hostile forces closer to Russia’s border; and substantially increasing even peacetime defense requirements. His broader ambitions in Europe would be blocked, perhaps forever. If Trump could see past the aura of his own dealmaking genius, he would see that for Putin to end the war with European troops on Ukrainian soil for any purpose would be a colossal strategic failure.

Putin has also rejected the idea of an international guarantee of Ukraine’s security even without troops on the ground. Early negotiations in 2022 broke down precisely over that point. Ukraine wanted an international commitment to come to Ukraine’s aid in the event that Russia launched another attack—something equivalent to the Article 5 guarantee in the NATO treaty. This would not have meant foreign troops on Ukrainian soil—or even any official relationship between Ukraine and NATO—but rather a commitment by signatory states to come to a “neutral” Ukraine’s aid if it was invaded. Putin rejected this, insisting on a Russian veto over any such action.

Putin has even insisted that Ukraine should not be permitted to maintain a military capable of resisting another Russian invasion. He has demanded strict limits on the number of Ukrainian forces and rejected any notion of allowing the U.S. or Europe to continue providing weapons to help Ukraine defend itself against future attack. In short, Putin’s unwavering demand in any peace settlement has been to leave Ukraine essentially defenseless.

Further, Putin has from the beginning demanded an end to the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a prior condition before any agreement. That he ever expected this demand to be met is doubtful: What nation agrees to the toppling of its government as the price for peace, except as terms of surrender? Yet he’s sticking to this demand. According to reports, Trump officials are right now working to force Zelensky from power and replace him with someone presumably friendlier to Moscow. Judging by the reaction of most Ukrainians to the ambush of their president in the Oval Office, this effort will not succeed. But the fact that Trump officials are trying shows that Putin has not budged an inch in response to Trump’s many concessions.

He has also not budged from his broader demand for “de-Nazification,” by which he means the suppression of Ukrainian as the official language of Ukraine, to be replaced by Russian, and of Ukrainian culture and nationalism, which Putin sees as tantamount to resistance to Moscow’s domination. If anyone wants to know what Putin hopes to do with Ukraine once he has control, they have only to look at what he is already doing in the territories Russia occupies, where Ukrainians are being forced to become Russian citizens, and any resistance leads to imprisonment, torture, and execution.

Everyone in the West seems to agree that there will be a cease-fire in Ukraine at some point. But one person who never talks about a cease-fire is Vladimir Putin. He does not talk about a cease-fire with his own people. He has at no time offered a cease-fire to the Ukrainians or the Americans. People assume he wants a cease-fire because his losses are staggering and his economy is suffering. But, as I and others have argued, Putin has to believe only that Ukraine is closer to collapse than he is, and that though he is suffering, the Ukrainians are suffering more. Trump’s latest moves to paralyze Ukraine’s defenses against missile and drone attacks by denying vital U.S. intelligence sharing can only bolster that assessment.

Putin might be tempted to strike a Munich-like deal with Trump just to strengthen an American president who seems determined to give Putin what he may never have imagined possible—a complete American capitulation in the global struggle, the destruction of the NATO alliance, the isolation of a weak Europe, and an open field for further actions to fulfill Putin’s overarching goal, which is the reconstitution of the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern and Central Europe. This is where the Munich analogy breaks down, because whatever else Chamberlain’s appeasement was, it did not include changing sides in the ongoing European crisis and joining Hitler to carve up the continent.  

[Read: The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler]

Yet Putin may calculate that he is getting that for free already. The damage Trump has done to NATO is probably irreparable. The alliance relied on an American guarantee that is no longer reliable, to say the least. But Trump is mercurial and could reverse course, at least partially, at any time. That’s a reason for Putin to seek victory as quickly as possible. He may never have a chance as good as this one to complete the task he set out to achieve when he launched his invasion three years ago.  

One thing is certain: Trump is no poker player. Thanks to his actions so far, Putin hasn’t had to reveal any of his cards. Trump claims to know what Putin wants, but his own actions show that he actually has no clue. One day Trump says Russia wants peace for reasons “only I know.” The next, he warns Putin that he’ll impose more sanctions. Putin must be laughing up his sleeve. He’s weathered American sanctions for the better part of three years now; more of the same is not much of a threat. If that’s the only card Trump intends to play, Putin will soon be cashing in, and Ukraine will soon be doomed. Neville Chamberlain believed that Hitler wouldn’t violate the Munich deal because Hitler respected him. Trump shares that delusion about Putin. We may all pay the price.

Historians like to play a parlor game called periodization, in which they attempt to define an era, often by identifying it with the individual who most shaped the times: the Age of Jackson, the Age of Reagan. Usually, this exercise requires many decades of hindsight, but not so in the 21st century.

Over the past 25 years, the world has bent to the vision of one man. In the course of a generation, he not only short-circuited the transition to democracy in his own country, and in neighboring countries, but set in motion a chain of events that has shattered the transatlantic order that prevailed after World War II. In the global turn against democracy, he has played, at times, the role of figurehead, impish provocateur, and field marshal. We are living in the Age of Vladimir Putin.

Perhaps, that fact helps explain why Donald Trump’s recent excoriation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office felt so profound. The moment encapsulated Putin’s ultimate victory, when the greatest impediment to the realization of the Russian president’s vision, the United States, became his most powerful ally. But Trump’s slavish devotion to the Russian leader—his willingness to help Putin achieve his maximalist goals—is merely the capstone of an era.

Nothing was preordained about Putin’s triumph. Twenty years ago, in fact, his regime looked like it might not survive. With the color revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, Russian influence in its old Soviet satellites quickly withered. The threat was that democratic revolution would spread ever closer to the core of the old empire, Moscow, as it had in the dying days of communism. Indeed, as Putin prepared to return to Russia’s presidency in 2012, after a stint as prime minister, protests swelled in Moscow and spread to other Russian cities, and then kept flaring for more than a year.  

[Read: Putin is loving this]

Preserving his power, both at home and abroad, necessitated a new set of more aggressive tactics. Resorting to the old KGB playbook, which Putin internalized as a young officer in the Soviet spy agency, Russia began meddling in elections across Europe, illicitly financing favored candidates, exploiting social media to plant conspiracy theories, creating television networks and radio stations to carry his messaging into the American and European heartlands.

Just as the Soviet Union used the international communist movement to advance its goals, Putin collected his own loose network of admirers, which included the likes of the French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, who venerated Putin for waging a robust counteroffensive on behalf of traditional values, by claiming the mantle of anti-wokeness. The fact that so many Western elites abhorred him titillated these foreign fans.

Putin’s objectives were always clear: He craved less hostile leaders in the West, people who would work to dismantle NATO and the European Union from within. Above all, he hoped to discredit democracy as a governing system, so that it no longer held allure for his own citizens. Scanning this list, I’m dismayed to see how many of these objectives have been realized over time, especially in the first weeks of the second Trump administration

One of Putin’s core objectives was the protection of his own personal fortune, built on kickbacks and money quietly skimmed from public accounts. Protecting this ill-gotten money, and that of his inner circle, relies on secrecy, misdirection, and theft, all values anathema to democracy.

[Read: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

Kleptocrats, in the mold of Russian oligarchy, ardently desire to sock away their money in the relative safety and quiet anonymity of American real estate and banks. Not so long ago, a bipartisan consensus joined together to pass laws that would make it harder for foreign kleptocrats to abuse shell companies to move their cash to these shores. But, as one of his first orders of business, Trump has shredded those reforms. His Treasury Department announced that it would weaken enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act; his Justice Department disbanded a task force charged with targeting Russian oligarchs and relaxed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, such that Putin’s allies can hire lawyers and lobbyists without having to worry about the embarrassing disclosure of those relationships. The Trump administration has essentially announced that the American financial system is open for Russia’s kleptocratic business.

As Putin has sought to impose his vision on the world, Ukraine has been the territory he most covets, but also the site of the fiercest resistance to him—a country that waged revolution to oust his cronies and that has resisted his military onslaught. Until last week, the United States served as the primary patron of this Ukrainian resistance. But the Trump administration has surrendered that role, thereby handing Russia incredible battlefield advantages. Because the Trump administration has cut off arms to Ukraine, it will exhaust caches of vital munitions in a few months, so it must hoard its stockpiles, limiting its capacity to fend off Russian offensives. Because the U.S. has stopped sharing intelligence with Kyiv, the Ukrainian army will be without America’s ability to eavesdrop on Russia’s war plans. All of these decisions will further demoralize Ukraine's depleted, weary military.

Just three years ago, as European and American publics draped themselves in Ukrainian flags, Putin’s Russia seemed consigned to international isolation and ignominy. For succor and solidarity, Putin was forced to turn to North Korea and Iran, an axis of geopolitical outcasts. But Trump is bent on reintegrating Putin into the family of nations. He wants Russia restored to the G7, and it’s only a matter of time before he eases up on sanctions that the Biden administration imposed on Russia. And Trump has done more than offer a place among the nations. By repeating Russia’s own self-serving, mendacious narrative about the origins of the Ukraine war, he lent American legitimacy and moral prestige to Putin.

The Russian leader’s rise wasn’t uninterrupted, but the ledger is filled with his victories, beginning with Brexit, an event he deeply desired and worked to make happen. That was a mere omen. His populist allies in France and Germany now constitute the most powerful opposition blocs in those countries. Within the European Union, he can count on Viktor Orbán to stymie Brussels when it is poised to act against Russian interests. Meanwhile, the European Union’s foreign-policy chief claims that the “free world needs a new leader,” and former heads of NATO worry for the organization's very survival.

[Garry Kasparov: The Putinization of America]

Putin is winning, because he’s cunningly exploited the advantages of autocracy. His near-total control of his own polity allows him to absorb the economic pain of sanctions, until the West loses interest in them. His lack of moral compunction allowed him to sacrifice bodies on the battlefield, without any pang of remorse, an advantage of expendable corpses that Ukraine can never match. Confident in the permanence of his power, he has patiently waited out his democratic foes, correctly betting that their easily distracted public would lose interest in fighting proxy wars against him.

What’s most devastating about Putin’s reversal of fortune is that he read Western societies so accurately. When he railed against the decadence of the West and the flimsiness of its democracy, he wasn’t engaging in propaganda, he was accurately forecasting how his enemy would abandon its first principles. He seemed to intuit that the idealism of American democracy might actually vanish, not just as a foreign-policy doctrine, but as the consensus conviction of its domestic politics.

Now, with a like-minded counterpart in the White House, he no longer needs to make a case against democracy to his own citizens. He can crow that the system is apparently so unappealing that even the United States is moving away from it.

Updated: 2025-03-08 07:00:00
Editor’s Note: On Tuesday, the French senator Claude Malhuret gave a powerful speech about the implications for Europe of the reversal of American policy toward Ukraine. Malhuret is the former mayor of the town of Vichy as well as a doctor and an epidemiologist, and the former head of Doctors Without Borders. He is a member of the center-right Horizons party representing the district of Allier. The speech, whose dark urgency and stark rhetorical force made it a social-media sensation, follows, translated and adapted by The Atlantic.

Europe is at a crucial juncture of its history. The American shield is slipping away, Ukraine risks being abandoned, and Russia is being strengthened. Washington has become the court of Nero: an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a buffoon on ketamine tasked with purging the civil service.

This is a tragedy for the free world, but it’s first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. [President Donald] Trump’s message is that being his ally serves no purpose, because he will not defend you, he will impose more tariffs on you than on his enemies, and he will threaten to seize your territories, while supporting the dictators who invade you.

The king of the deal is showing that the art of the deal is lying prostrate. He thinks he will intimidate China by capitulating to Russian President Vladimir Putin, but China’s President Xi Jinping, faced with such wreckage, is undoubtedly accelerating his plans to invade Taiwan.

Never in history has a president of the United States surrendered to the enemy. Never has one supported an aggressor against an ally, issued so many illegal decrees, and sacked so many military leaders in one go. Never has one trampled on the American Constitution, while threatening to disregard judges who stand in his way, weaken countervailing powers, and take control of social media.

This is not a drift to illiberalism; this is the beginning of the seizure of democracy. Let us remember that it only took one month, three weeks, and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its constitution.

[Read: How Hitler dismantled democracy in 53 days]

I have confidence in the solidity of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in the four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator; now we are fighting against a dictator supported by a traitor.

Eight days ago, at the very moment when Trump was patting French President Emmanuel Macron on the back at the White House, the United States voted at the United Nations with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.

Two days later, in the Oval Office, the draft-dodger was giving moral and strategic lessons to the Ukrainian president and war hero, Volodymyr Zelensky, before dismissing him like a stable boy, ordering him to submit or resign.

That night, he took another step into disgrace by halting the delivery of promised weapons. What should we do in the face of such betrayal? The answer is simple: Stand firm.

And above all: make no mistake. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic states, Georgia, and Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to the Yalta Agreement, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.

The countries of the global South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe, or whether they are now free to trample it.

What Putin wants is the end of the world order the United States and its allies established 80 years ago, in which the first principle was the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.

This idea is at the very foundation of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressed, because the Trumpian vision coincides with Putin’s: a return to spheres of influence, where great powers dictate the fate of small nations.

Greenland, Panama, and Canada are mine. Ukraine, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe are yours. Taiwan and the South China Sea are his.

At the Mar-a-Lago dinner parties of golf-playing oligarchs, this is called “diplomatic realism.”

We are therefore alone. But the narrative that Putin cannot be resisted is false. Contrary to Kremlin propaganda, Russia is doing poorly. In three years, the so-called second army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country with about a quarter its population.

[Read: Russia is not winning]

With interest rates at 21 percent, the collapse of foreign currency and gold reserves, and a demographic crisis, Russia is on the brink. The American lifeline to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made during a war.

The shock is violent, but it has one virtue. The Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in a single day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands, and that they have three imperatives.

Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that Ukraine can hang on, and of course to secure its and Europe’s place at the negotiating table.

This will be costly. It will require ending the taboo on using Russia’s frozen assets. It will require bypassing Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself through a coalition that includes only willing countries, and the United Kingdom of course.

Second, demand that any agreement include the return of kidnapped children and prisoners, as well as absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia, and Minsk, we know what Putin’s agreements are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.

Finally, and most urgently because it will take the longest, we must build that neglected European defense, which has relied on the American security umbrella since 1945 and which was shut down after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The task is Herculean, but history books will judge the leaders of today’s democratic Europe by its success or failure.

Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is a recognition that France has been right for decades in advocating for strategic autonomy.

Now it must be built. This will require massive investment to replenish the European Defense Fund beyond the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and munitions systems, accelerate European Union membership for Ukraine, which now has the leading army in Europe, rethink the role and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, and relaunch missile-shield and satellite programs.

Europe can become a military power again only by becoming an industrial power again. But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.

We must convince public opinion in the face of war weariness and fear, and above all in the face of Putin’s collaborators on the far right and far left.

They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump says is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of a de Gaullian Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain under Putin’s thumb.The peace of collaborators who, for three years, have refused to support the Ukrainians in any way.

[Read: What Europe fears]

Is this the end of the Atlantic alliance? The risk is great. But in recent days, Zelensky’s public humiliation and all the crazy decisions taken over the past month have finally stirred Americans into action. Poll numbers are plummeting. Republican elected officials are greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News is becoming critical.

The Trumpists are no longer at the height of glory. They control the executive branch, Congress, the Supreme Court, and social media. But in American history, the supporters of freedom have always won. They are starting to raise their heads.

The fate of Ukraine will be decided in the trenches, but it also depends on those who defend democracy in the United States, and here, on our ability to unite Europeans and find the means for our common defense, to make Europe the power it once was and hesitates to become again.

Our parents defeated fascism and communism at the cost of great sacrifice. The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century. Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.

J. D. Vance doesn’t look like himself. In recent days, memes have spread across social media in which the vice president’s face has been Photoshopped to give him cartoonishly chubby cheeks. He looks like a bearded baby or Humpty Dumpty. Sometimes, he is holding a lollipop and wearing a child’s baseball cap with a propeller affixed to the top. One meme takes his edited baby face and adds lusciously curly locks, while another changes his skin tone to a gentle purple hue, making him look like a Willy Wonka–inspired human blueberry. In every image, Vance has been reanimated as an utter doofus.

These memes first appeared in October, when a user on X posted an image of Vance captioned: “For every 100 likes I will turn JD Vance into a progressively apple cheeked baby.” But baby-faced Vance has gone fully viral since last week, when the vice president clashed with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Many of the photos, the most popular of which have received tens of thousands of likes on platforms such as X and Instagram, include captions that imagine Vance talking like a small child who cannot yet properly pronounce his words: “You have to say pwease and tank you, Mistow Zensky.”

Of course, people love making memes that portray their political adversaries as hapless and incompetent. That’s not exactly what’s happening with these images of Vance. The memes are going viral on the left-wing internet. But they are equally, if not more, popular on the right. Explicitly pro-Trump accounts on X that otherwise spend their time bashing liberals are posting embarrassing memes of their party’s second in command.

No, the right doesn’t appear to be posting unflattering memes of Vance because it has turned on him. As I wrote when Vance joined the Republican ticket, he uniquely appeals to various factions across the party. The online right, in particular, has long appreciated Vance’s recognition of it (he follows some of its most prominent accounts on X, such as Bronze Age Pervert).

So why is the right willing to make fun of one of its own with memes? One user on X who goes by the name Aelfred the Great and frequently shares right-wing memes has been posting and reposting the unflattering viral images of the vice president. “They’re just funny,” he told me when I asked him about them. For what it’s worth, Vance seems to agree, or at least says he does. On Thursday, he told a reporter for The Blaze that he thinks the memes are “funny.” Others on the right swear that by posting images of Vance as a man-baby, they’re actually helping him. “The right is having so much fun roasting Vance’s baby fat that it’s just completely neutered the left’s capacity to make fun of him,” one right-wing account, @martianwyrdlord, wrote in a post that garnered about 22,000 likes on X. “This feels like a precursor to Vance’s inevitable presidency,” Auron MacIntyre, a prominent MAGA influencer, posted. “He will have been so thoroughly memed that he becomes immune to the effect before ever entering office.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that politicos have tried something like this. The “Dark Brandon” memes of Joe Biden and the coconut-pilled memes of Kamala Harris initially started out as right-wing attempts to denigrate the Democrats. “Dark Brandon” caricatured Biden’s reputation on the right as a doddering old man by imagining that he harbored a secret personality as a cold-blooded killer. And “coconut-pilled” began when the right harped on a clip of Harris recounting how her mother had once said the phrase “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree.” Harris then awkwardly laughed.

Both the Biden and Harris memes eventually made their way to Democrats, who tried to lean in to the jokes. Biden supporters made memes that earnestly portrayed him as a savvy, Machiavellian political operator (with laser eyes, of course). Harris supporters started putting coconut and palm-tree emoji in their display names on social media, calling themselves “coconut-pilled.” This strategy seemed successful at the time. As my colleague Charlie Warzel noted when people first started coconut posting, the memes had an “authentic” and “maybe even fun” energy to them. In both instances, it felt like Democrats could take a joke and even spin it around to their favor. In the end, this tactic did not work out. Biden’s age caught up with him, and Harris’s folksy awkwardness didn’t seem to charm voters.

The Vance memes might work against the vice president even more. There is no silver lining to looking like a doofus. As trivial as they might seem, memes about politicians can be telling. “Dark Brandon” memes wouldn’t have been quite as funny if Biden was actually sharper and quicker than he seemed. “Coconut-pilled” memes wouldn’t have endured if Harris didn’t frequently say bizarre and confusing things. Whether or not they consciously realized it, by spreading such memes, liberals were copping to some uncomfortable truths about the politicians they supported. The Vance memes seem to contain an admission as well: that even some conservatives do not see him as essential to the current MAGA movement.

Consider the fact that Democrats have long tried to embarrass Trump with memes and images of him as an infant, a Cheeto, and other forms. None of it has really stuck, even ironically, on the right. Trump’s own base just doesn’t see him that way, and they instead often make memes portraying him as heroic and muscular. But for a vice president who was picked with widespread support in his party, Vance, at times, has almost seemed like a fringe figure in Trump’s second term. He is, of course, overshadowed by the president himself—but also by Elon Musk, who is gutting the federal bureaucracy through his Department of Government Efficiency, and by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has legions of fans as part of his “Make America healthy again” movement. Vance might nominally be more powerful than Musk and Kennedy, but he’s easier to forget about.  

That might be why the memes of baby-faced Vance have been so popular. Vance has taken such a back-seat role in the administration that when he tried to assert himself in the Zelensky meeting, it did look slightly forced and unnatural—like a child trying to boss around a group of adults. The best jokes always have a kernel of truth in them. The same goes for memes.

The vice presidency has long been the booby prize of American politics. “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived,” America’s first vice president, John Adams, lamented to his wife in 1793. J. D. Vance has been in office for only 48 days, but he has already found a better use for the largely ceremonial post than many of his predecessors: posting constantly on social media.

Since being sworn in, Vance has opined more than 120 times on X, with some of his missives running hundreds of words long. He has engaged in detailed policy debates, promoted his political allies, and dunked on his critics. Watching the veep unfurl his latest novella on Elon Musk’s platform, many of his progressive critics have smirked: Doesn’t he have better things to do? But mocking Vance’s social-media habit misses its significance.

As the sidekick of a president who charts his own idiosyncratic course, the former senator from Ohio has few avenues for influencing policy and may simply be marking time until he can launch his own bid for the White House. Trump, having decamped to his personal Truth Social platform, has effectively ceded the online arena, and Vance—a New York Times best-selling author and Yale Law–trained debater—has been making the most of it. His posts provide a window into where the vice president thinks the country should go and how he plans to make sure that he is the one to lead it there.

Consider Vance’s careful choice of issues. Since inauguration, he has posted nearly two dozen times critiquing U.S. support for Ukraine, participating in extensive exchanges on the subject. He has never once mentioned Gaza. This is no accident. Cutting off Ukraine unites a large majority of Republican voters. Trump’s plan to “take over” Gaza and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” is one of the president’s least popular proposals among his supporters.

Vance would surely defend Trump’s Gaza gambit if pressed in a live interview, but the beauty of social media is that he can choose which questions to answer. Trump’s benign neglect of both X and his running mate has allowed Vance to pick his spots. It also allows him to hone in on the worst arguments advanced by the opposition rather than defending the worst ones advanced by his boss and his allies. Where Trump uses social media solely as a one-way broadcast, Vance relishes mixing it up in public, not just posting but replying—often in order to skewer left-wing critics. In doing so, the vice president has flipped the script on anti-Trump media and exposed weaknesses among his cultured despisers.

[Read: The J. D. Vance I knew]

Last month, after Vance told the Munich Security Conference that “you cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail,” the progressive media magnate Mehdi Hasan accused him of hypocrisy. “Hey @JDVance, I know you’re busy lecturing the Europeans on free speech,” he wrote on X, “but have you seen this?” Hasan appended a post about the Trump administration banning the Associated Press from the White House briefing room over its refusal to rename the Gulf of Mexico in its coverage. This jibe was nothing new. Since 2016, many left-wing commentators have generated applause on social media by performatively pummeling various Trump officials for their progressive audience. But this time, Vance punched back.

“Yes dummy,” he replied, “I think there’s a difference between not giving a reporter a seat in the WH press briefing room and jailing people for dissenting views. The latter is a threat to free speech, the former is not. Hope that helps!” The riposte quickly went viral, racking up nearly 50 million views, more than 15 times as many as Hasan’s original post.

The rapturous response from conservatives shouldn’t be surprising. Vance’s dunk was a perfect fusion of the poles of the pro-Trump camp—a “yes dummy” for the “own the libs” crowd and a debater’s quip afterward for the National Review set. (The vice president conveniently did not answer follow-up questions about Musk’s declaration that week that the makers of 60 Minutes deserved “a long prison sentence.”)

That Vance momentarily got the better of Hasan, himself a potent persuasive force, says less about Hasan than about the general flabbiness of left-liberal media’s approach to Trump. Faced with a shambolic first Trump administration—which didn’t expect to win, wasn’t prepared to make its case to the public, and had alienated many of the most capable mainstream Republicans—Democratic-aligned politicians and pundits have been playing on easy mode since 2016. Operating within the monocultures of academia and media, many of those on the center-left spent more time fending off attacks from their left than worrying about challenges from their right.

Today, the situation could not be more different. Trump has united the Republican Party behind him, and while his administration still has its substantial share of cranks, it also has the benefit of more effective spokespeople—not just Vance, but media-savvy figures such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and United Nations Ambassador-Designate Elise Stefanik. And with the information landscape no longer dominated by a few establishment outlets and channels, the administration is able to circumvent legacy media and use podcasts and platforms like X to amplify its message. The game has changed, and Trump’s critics will have to change with it, or get rolled by the likes of Vance.

But just because the rules of engagement have shifted doesn’t mean that Vance will end up the winner. Social media can just as easily delude its users as enlighten them. Whether left or right, internet-poisoned campaigns tend to lose because they convince political partisans marinating among the like-minded on X or Bluesky that their most polarizing positions are ascendant when they are actually alienating to many everyday voters. This is why campaigns that mistake social-media virality for electoral reality often self-destruct, as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis learned the hard way in his presidential bid.

[Read: DeSantis is making the same mistake Democrats did in 2020]

Venturing too far into the Very Online vortex risks leaving behind the people who actually put Trump in office. Many of his voters have no investment in the MAGA universe and its culture-war obsessions; they just want a better economy and less immigration. A successful politician today needs to know how to use social media without being used by it—to appeal to their partisan base without being captured by it.

If anyone is up for this task, it’s Vance. The vice president is used to being the outlier in the room—whether as a conservative in liberal spaces like Yale Law, or as a hillbilly from Appalachia in the halls of Washington and Silicon Valley. He has extensive experience making his case to diverse and often hostile audiences. Indeed, Vance’s meteoric rise from little-known law student to vice president is a master class in political persuasion.

First he ensnared Never Trump Republicans and bemused liberals searching for a Trump whisperer from the heartland to explain the 2016 election. Then he won over the likes of Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr., who helped him secure the 2024 VP nod. He has played the pugilist provocateur on conservative podcasts and the civil conciliator on the vice-presidential debate stage. Now Vance has set his sights on the Republican Party itself, using social media as a 21st-century bully pulpit to outmaneuver his conservative rivals and liberal critics, and unite the base behind his leadership.

None of this will matter if Trump 2.0 tanks and Vance is seen as an accomplice to national catastrophe. Precisely because he has so little authority, Vance’s fortunes are hostage to those who do. But if the administration completes its term without utterly discrediting itself, the country’s first vice president of social media will be well positioned for a promotion. Maybe all John Adams needed was an X account.