- By supporting Putin and demonizing Ukraine, the US is withdrawing from the post-World War II world that it created and has supported for 80 years;
- With comments from Heather Cox Richardson, Nicholas Kristoff, Slate’s Emily Tamkin, and NYT’s Peter Baker;
- And my observation that most people don’t realize that history is happening around them, and haven’t throughout history.
Heather Cox Richardson, February 19, 2025
The past week has solidified a sea change in American—and global—history.
A week ago, on Wednesday, February 12, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Belgium, that President Donald Trump intended to back away from support for Ukraine in its fight to push back Russia’s invasions of 2014 and 2022.
And in effect conceded that the US will let Russia keep the Ukrainian territory it’s captured, that Trump now parrots Putin’s talking points, and that the US will focus on China and leave Europe alone — i.e. to let Russia do whatever it wants.
Then, on Friday, at the sixty-first Munich Security Conference, where the U.S. and allies and partners have come together to discuss security issues since 1963, Vice President J.D. Vance attacked the U.S.A.’s European allies. He warned that they were threatened not by Russia or China, but rather by “the threat from within,” by which he meant the democratic principles of equality before the law that right-wing ideologues believe weaken a nation by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. After Vance told Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” he refused to meet with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz and instead met with the leader of the far-right German political party that has been associated with neo-Nazis.
Richardson is too disciplined to sound genuinely alarmed at all this. But many observers draw the straightforward conclusions: Trump is Putin’s puppet, not for any political reasons but simply because Trump admires dictators and wants to be one; Vance thinks Europe should become as dominated by extreme right-wing groups as the US now is. (Because treating people who are not white Christian men as equals “weakens” the nation.) This is pure xenophobic tribalism. The arc of history is twisting backward. But Richardson does take the long view.
To be even clearer: under Trump, the United States is abandoning the post–World War II world it helped to build and then guaranteed for the past 80 years.
Ending:
For his part, Trump appears to be leaning into his alliance with dictators. This afternoon, he posted on social media a statement about how he had killed New York City’s congestion pricing and “saved” Manhattan, adding “LONG LIVE THE KING!” White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich reposted the statement with an image of Trump in the costume of an ancient king, with a crown and an ermine robe. Later, the White House itself shared an image that imitated a Time magazine cover with the word “Trump” in place of “Time,” a picture of Trump with a crown, and the words “LONG LIVE THE KING.”
The British tabloid The Daily Star interprets the changes in American politics differently. Its cover tomorrow features Vladimir Putin walking “PUTIN’S POODLE”: the president of the United States.
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Nicholas Kristoff is more blunt about all this.
NY Times, opinion by Nicholas Kristoff, 19 Feb 2025: With Trump’s Prostration to Putin, Expect a More Dangerous World
I’m not sure most Americans appreciate the monumental damage President Trump is doing to the post-World War II order that is the wellspring of American global leadership and affluence.
He’s shattering it. He’s making the world more dangerous. He’s siding with an alleged war criminal, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and poisoning relations with longtime U.S. allies. The trans-Atlantic alliance is unraveling.
“We have Trump and his oligarchy of ignorant shoe shiners vandalizing the network of organizations, agreements and values — largely put in place by America since the Second World War — which have given most of us, including America, on the whole an extraordinary degree of peace and prosperity,” Chris Patten, the former British Conservative Party chairman and European foreign affairs chief, told me.
The title of this piece in print today is “A Humiliating Month to Be an American.”
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This has all happened before. Thinkers thought it wouldn’t happen again. But humanity, except for a few individuals, seems incapable of learning, and avoiding past mistakes.
Slate, Emily Tamkin, 20 Feb 2025: Where Trump’s Ukraine Lies Are All Too Familiar, subtitled “He wants us to disbelieve our own eyes and memories. Ukraine’s neighbors have seen it all before.”
“I’m afraid we’ve never been this close to Orwell’s ‘war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength’ before.” —Vít Rakušan, Czech minister of the interior, on X after U.S. President Donald Trump blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for starting Russia’s war in Ukraine
The writer reviews the same events of this past week as the others have done. And concludes,
And down is not up. We can see that with our own eyes. We know what just happened. Zelensky and Ukrainians lived through it, and the rest of us did, too. To say otherwise isn’t disgraceful; it’s to insist that, for all the power that Trump has, he does not control what’s true.
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An analysis of yesterday’s news.
NY Times, Peter Baker, 19 Feb 2025: Trump Flips the Script on the Ukraine War, Blaming Zelensky Not Putin, subtitled “As he seeks to negotiate a peace deal with Moscow, President Trump is rewriting the history of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor.”
When Russian forces crashed over the borders into Ukraine in 2022 determined to wipe it off the map as an independent state, the United States rushed to aid the beleaguered nation and cast its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a hero of resistance.
Three years almost to the day later, President Trump is rewriting the history of Russia’s invasion of its smaller neighbor. Ukraine, in this version, is not a victim but a villain. And Mr. Zelensky is not a latter-day Winston Churchill, but a “dictator without elections” who somehow started the war himself and conned America into helping.
Mr. Trump’s revisionism sets the stage for a geopolitical about-face unlike any in generations as the president embarks on negotiations with Russia that Ukraine fears could come at its own expense. By vilifying Mr. Zelensky and shifting blame for the war from Moscow to Kyiv, Mr. Trump seems to be laying a predicate for withdrawing support for an ally under attack.
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I think there’s an historical truism here. Most the events that historians write up in their textbooks are events that didn’t affect very many people at the time. Most people live their mundane lives without being affected by changes in governments or policy that turn out to have long-term effects.
Heather Cox Richardson, I think, manages both to be matter-of-fact about daily events, while keeping a perspective on what current events mean for the long-term.
