Ukrainian and European Union leaders not invited to Russia-US talks in Riyadh.

There is a rule in politics never to ascribe to malignity what one can explain through incompetence and stupidity. This approach has become difficult to sustain in the case of the Trump administration. But there is another possibility: Both explanations operate simultaneously.

This seems to be true of the latest burst of diplomatic activity by the Trump administration. Before focusing on the malice, however, first note the utter incompetence of the Trump team. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, for example, was speaking the truth when he said at the Munich Security Conference that a Ukrainian cease-fire will probably freeze the battle lines and not involve NATO membership. But Senator Roger Wicker, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was equally correct in calling it a rookie mistake to have given away one’s position in advance. Hegseth stumbled through a retraction, but the damage was done.

The only word to describe Vice President J. D. Vance’s speech at the conference is loutish. He meddled in European politics, was patronizing and hectoring, and seems not to have understood that if you are giving a tough message to allies, you need to combine it with an affirmation of the underlying relationship. Dumber yet was his apparent failure, and the administration’s, to recognize that even the United States needs allies, and that the European nations, with all their troubles, are some of the most important ones we have got.

The latest meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, between an American delegation consisting of the secretary of state, the national security adviser, and a special envoy with two experienced Russian diplomats was even worse. It was a meeting about Ukraine without Ukraine—a move calculated to make the Ukrainian leadership less tractable. It was a meeting about a European war not only without Europeans, but without the slightest consultation with them. Instead, the U.S. made concessions to the Russians—promising to let them send intelligence operatives masquerading as diplomats back to their embassy in Washington without extracting anything in return.

The Trump administration seems not to realize that the Russians are the ones in trouble, not us; that they are the ones with a faltering economy, a stalemated war, and more than three-quarters of a million casualties. Most important, the administration refuses to see Russia under President Vladimir Putin for what it is: a predatory dictatorship bent on rebuilding an empire on the bodies of its former subjects.

The commentary on the meeting offered by the three Americans who acted as if they intended to be stooges was embarrassing.

Steven Witkoff burbled businessman gobbledygook: “It was positive, upbeat, constructive, everybody there to get to the right outcome, solution-based.” Maybe the right flimflam for a real-estate deal, but not for a discussion with a couple of longtime hoods from Moscow Center who represent a country up to its armpits in the blood of innocents. It was a witless thing to say.

National Security Adviser Michael Waltz seemingly could not speak a paragraph without a grovel in the direction of his boss, President Donald Trump. His assessments were those of a courtier praising a king, not of the representative of the great republic conducting affairs of state.

And then there was Secretary of State Marco Rubio, delighted at the possibility of normal relations and exciting economic ties. Not only was this another implicit concession and gift to the Russians—why not extract something for the willingness to restore such ties?—it was a betrayal of all that Rubio used to say about Ukraine. For that matter, it was a betrayal of the sentiments he used to spill out on the campaign trail when he ran for president, invoking the story of his parents who were refugees from Castro’s Cuba. And here he was cheering on negotiations with Russia, the patron and inspiration of that very regime.

The negotiators displayed mainly incompetence, as well as cringeworthy servility to their master in the White House. Trump’s part, though, was pure malignity. Shortly after the meeting ended, he criticized Zelensky, lied about the latter’s polling numbers, and said, in a particularly callous remark, that Ukraine had had a seat at the table for three years. How being invaded and having your civilians tortured, raped, and slaughtered counts as a seat at the table is beyond understanding.

To be clear, no deal was inked in Riyadh, merely a set of commitments to begin working on ending the conflict in Ukraine without participation by the victims or their neighbors, even though the former are our friends and the latter are our allies. But the way it was done, and the mood music that surrounded it, has to confirm some of the worst fears of friends of Ukraine, and those who believe that the United States should stand for something in this world beyond the crudest kind of self-interest.

But an account of the supposed deal Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent put before the Ukrainians in Kyiv, before the Munich Security Conference, makes clear that the crudest imaginable self-interest is what this administration is all about. As one disgusted British observer commented in the podcast Ukraine: The Latest, the terms were more severe than what was demanded of Germany after its defeat in World War I. Bessent’s offer was an attempt to seize the most productive parts of the Ukrainian economy, permanently—unacceptable and shameful even to have presented.

The Trump administration seems to have some notion of the conduct of foreign affairs as being a set of deals, chiefly with America’s enemies, while administering kicks to America’s friends and allies. As a vision it is, in some reasonable sense of the word, evil. It is also appallingly dumb, and one wonders that intelligent men such as Rubio, Waltz, and Witkoff can bring themselves to articulate the demands that it implies.

Like so much of the Trump administration’s program, this will ultimately end in real disaster for others—quite possibly including the overrunning of Ukraine—and in political disaster for itself. The Biden administration never recovered from the debacle of its Afghanistan withdrawal; Obama from the disappearing red line in Syria; Bush from the mishandling of the Iraq War. At a deeper level, these policies will give aid and comfort to America’s enemies, which will never be partners; shatter the alliances that have made us strong; induce fearful former allies to align with the Chinese and develop nuclear weapons; and demoralize the men and women who have to implement policy.

People like Marco Rubio know better. But judging by the transcript of their CNN interview after the Riyadh meeting, the negotiators are determined to pretend otherwise. The level of sycophancy they show toward the president is shocking, but it conceals another source of future disaster. In this administration, no one will contradict the president, and no one will raise alarms about stupid and immoral policies. It’s a good way to walk into brick walls in foreign affairs, as it is with regards to all manner of other policies. In international politics as in economic affairs, public health, and emergency preparedness, this administration is a set of culpable disasters waiting to occur.

In such a situation the least of our concerns may be the souls of those who have chosen sycophancy despite their better selves and previous service. But they will pay a price. I knew a few of those who served in Trump’s previous term. Many of them ended up psychologically damaged, people who had no doubt once believed in integrity and an idea of America and then sacrificed them. History will treat them with contempt, and more important, they will never be whole again.

During Rubio’s abortive presidential campaign, Trump called him “Li’l Marco,” a put-down typical of someone with the manners of a grade-school bully. It was a reference to physical stature. What this sorry episode reveals, however, is that Rubio really has become small in a much more important sense—and in a way that no earnest television interview or ghostwritten memoir can ever fix .

A year ago this week, Senator John Thune and 21 of his Republican colleagues defied Donald Trump and voted to send $60 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine as it tried to ward off Russia’s invasion. “America cannot retreat from the world stage,” the South Dakota senator later said, explaining his vote. “American leadership is desperately needed now more than I think any time in recent history, and we need to make sure that Ukraine has the weaponry and the resources that it needs to defeat the Russians.”

The vote was gutsy: It drew a rebuke from Trump, who was then heavily favored to capture the GOP presidential nomination. And it was taken even though the bipartisan bill faced uncertain odds in the House, until Speaker Mike Johnson backed it two months later. The measure passed, and assistance continued to flow to Kyiv.

Twelve months later, Ukraine’s future is even more imperiled. Over the past week, the Trump administration has made clear that the United States will no longer be Kyiv’s largest and most crucial supporter, and that it might sideline Ukrainians from negotiations meant to bring an end to the war. But the response from Republicans has been noticeably different. Thune, now Senate majority leader, has remained silent, as have many of his GOP colleagues. He did not respond to interview requests this week.

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Republican capitulation to Trump is a familiar story line, but the moment is nonetheless worth marking. With a few, mostly timid exceptions, the party that once prided itself on standing up to Moscow—the party of Cold Warriors Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush—has bowed to a president who himself is bowing to an adversary. And as Trump officials yesterday embarked on negotiations with their Russian counterparts that could reward Vladimir Putin’s gamble on seizing territory from a sovereign neighbor, Republicans faced a new, extraordinarily high-profile test: whether to prioritize their long-held national-security beliefs or their loyalty to the president.

“The founders intended Congress to be first among equals of the three branches of government, [but] you’d be hard pressed to know it though looking at today’s Republican-controlled Congress,” Richard Haas, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. Haass, who worked in three previous Republican administrations, said that Republicans have been “not just subservient but invisible,” while “not holding hearings or otherwise challenging the Trump administration’s unconditional embrace of Putin’s Russia, the dismissal of Europe’s interests and Ukraine’s demands.”

No representatives from Ukraine or other European nations were present at a hurriedly arranged meeting between U.S. and Russian officials yesterday in Saudi Arabia. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters afterward that Russia and the United States had agreed to work on a Ukraine peace deal and to explore “the incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians” both geopolitically and economically. The message amounted to a dizzying change from President Joe Biden’s isolation of Moscow after the Ukraine invasion, which many Senate Republicans broadly supported.

Last week, Trump’s White House signaled a fundamental shift in relations with both Europe and Russia by stridently dismissing longtime democratic allies while looking to re-establish ties with the nuclear-armed autocracy to the east. The president prioritized a call with Putin over one with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and invited the Russian leader, and not the Ukrainian one, for multiple summit meetings. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ruled out Ukraine joining NATO or receiving substantial future American security guarantees as part of the negotiations to end the war. Vice President J. D. Vance upbraided European leaders for freezing the far right out of government in their nations. And then yesterday, at a Mar-a-Lago news conference, Trump chided Ukraine for the conflict, snapping, “You should never have been there,” and ignoring that it was Russia that invaded.

[Read: The day the Ukraine war ended]

Some Republicans in the Senate offered outright support for Trump’s Putin-friendly view of American security. “I don’t think anybody really believes Ukraine should be in NATO now,” Senator Eric Schmitt told reporters last week. “Unless you want World War III.”

Others took a more measured approach, expressing the wish that the U.S. would still support Ukraine—or at least not yield to Putin—while still avoiding outright criticism of Trump. Senator John Cornyn, who voted for the aid package last year, told reporters after Trump’s call with Putin, “Ukraine ought to be the one to negotiate its own peace deal. I don’t think it should be imposed upon it by any other country, including ours. I’m hopeful.” But he added: “I can’t imagine President Trump giving up leverage. I don’t know what his strategy is for negotiating, but he’s pretty good at it. I think it surprises people, including me, sometimes what he’s able to pull off.”

Few represent the Republican Party’s evolution more than Senator Lindsey Graham, who spent years as the late Senator John McCain’s wingman, earning a reputation as a globe-trotting national security hawk. But he has since become one of Trump’s most obsequious supporters, often offering over-the-top praise of the president in a way that McCain would not have recognized. Over the weekend, Graham highlighted Trump’s plan to seize half of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals as payment for the United States’ support of Kyiv in the war, praising the scheme as “a game-changer.”

Zelensky immediately declined the proposal. But only a few Republican senators—including Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins—publicly opposed Trump’s concessions to Russia. “This was an unprovoked, unjustified invasion,” Collins told reporters. “I appreciate that the president is trying to achieve peace, but we have to make sure that Ukraine does not get the short end of a deal.” Senator Roger Wicker criticized Hegseth’s declaration last week that Ukraine would not recover its territory, deeming the statement a “rookie mistake” on the world stage. But the White House believes those voices of GOP dissent will stay in the minority, a senior administration official told me under the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

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Trump has been eager to strengthen ties with Putin and asked aides to schedule a summit with the Russian leader in the weeks ahead, the official said. The president has told aides he believes that resetting relations with Russia reduces the chances of a nuclear war and will allow the U.S. new economic opportunities. American officials who spoke to reporters after the Riyadh meeting suggested that Biden-era sanctions on Russia could be lifted, and they did not spend much time in their briefing with reporters discussing Moscow’s violation of international law in invading Ukraine or the war crimes allegations against Putin for the attacks.

Instead, Rubio, whose own views have seemingly evolved since his time in the Senate as a Russia hawk who supported NATO, made a point to repeatedly praise Trump’s approach to Russia. “For three years,” Rubio said, “no one else has been able to bring something together like what we saw today, because Donald Trump is the only leader in the world that can.”

Thom Tillis, another Republican senator who strongly supported the funding bill a year ago, has continued to support Kyiv even though he cast the deciding vote to confirm Hegseth. Tillis, in fact, made a trip to Kyiv on Monday with two other senators, pledging support for the war effort even as the Trump team was landing in Riyadh to begin negotiations without Ukraine.

“I believe, first, we should understand that this is just the beginning of a dialogue. There is no specific framework that’s been mapped out yet,” Tillis said. “We expect that that will come to pass very quickly, we hope, and that Ukraine has to be front and center as a part of the negotiations to make sure that it’s something sustainable.”

Tillis then turned to his colleagues for validation. Both assented. But both were Democrats.

Top US and Russian officials met for four hours Tuesday before President Donald Trump suggested that Kyiv was to blame for the conflict.