The United States strove for more than 100 years—since we entered World War I in April 1917—to hold its own as leader of the free world. It took Donald Trump precisely one month to abdicate that leadership, destroying everything his predecessors—from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan—had built through two global conflicts, the Cold War and the creation of the post-World War II Western alliance. Trump thinks he is strong and making America stronger. But his bullying of Ukraine and capitulation to Vladimir Putin make us immeasurably weaker—a loss of reputation and power never likely to be regained.
Americans sympathetic to Ukraine have long worried that Trump would turn against the country on the receiving end of Russia’s brutal aggression. But the president’s behavior in the last week stunned even the Trump worriers. His ingratiating overture to the Kremlin, his preemptive giveaways—suggesting Ukraine should cede one-fifth of its territory and renounce joining NATO before Moscow even asked for those concessions—and his administration’s rush to meet a Russian delegation without Ukraine or our European allies, all of that was stunning enough.
But now the American president has sunk to baseless insults, calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “modestly successful comedian,” a “dictator,” and a thief. Zelensky’s measured response, telling Ukrainians that he was counting on their unity and courage and “the pragmatism of America,” showed up the president’s barbs for the schoolyard taunts they were.
