Greetings and welcome to this unexpected, 26th performance of the Carnival of Fools. I say “unexpected” because this column was originally intended to be an appreciation of the career of Gene Hackman, one of the greatest and most versatile actors of my lifetime. I even announced as much on Thursday night, writing: “I expect to devote a significant amount of next week’s Carnival of Fools to him as a tribute, unless Donald Trump does something crazy in the meantime like attempting to annex North Korea.”
You already know where this is going, I presume. In the comments to that brief Hackman piece, I picked up some complaints from readers — “Why must he always bring Trump into this?” I’m sorry, dear readers, but I don’t do it out of pettiness; I do it out of prescience. Because I now understand what odds I’m up against as a writer. A mere twelve hours after I wrote that, on Friday morning, Volodymyr Zelensky met with Donald Trump and JD Vance in the Oval Office, in front of the press, for a conversation that went almost incomprehensibly awry. In its aftermath, we find ourselves pondering the potential end of the Western alliance system. Gene will have to wait, alas.
Lesson learned: During Trump’s second administration, as only one month’s evidence shows, you can’t really plan a writing schedule too far in advance. Something utterly mad and newsworthy will inevitably come along in the meantime — from Trump’s mouth or social media account — and while I’m grateful that we’re not annexing North Korea this week, I’m not sure trading it for the likely collapse of NATO was a fantastic move. Let’s get to clearing away the wreckage.
How Not to Read a Room
You probably haven’t noticed that, in roughly two years of work for National Review, I had never written a piece about the Ukraine war — until two weeks ago, that is, when Trump inaugurated peace talks with Russia by stating that, in his opinion, Ukraine had started the war, and capped it off with a series of mad fulminations about Ukrainian President Zelensky on Truth Social. The reason for my silence is twofold: For one, we have far more qualified writers on staff at NR to handle such grave international matters.
The other reason is that I have been pessimistic about the war’s outcome for several years now. I would love to see Ukraine “win” — many people reflexively dislike Russia out of hearty American patriotism; I dislike Russia because I am a student of Russian history — but I concluded, back in 2023, that the Russo–Ukrainian war had become essentially stalemated. There was no “happy ending” available, no realistic outcome other than Ukraine’s ceding its already occupied eastern lands in the Donbas to Russia and officially letting go of the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia illegally occupied (“reclaimed” would be their view of it) over a decade ago.
And, two years on, nothing has really changed my assessment: Since the summer of 2023, the war has been a stagnant meat grinder, resulting in zero substantive territorial gains on either side. The only plausible ending — other than Russia’s spontaneous, improbable disintegration as a national polity, à la the collapse of tsarism in 1917 — is a negotiated settlement by which Russia gets to keep most of its ill-gotten gains. (If you disagree with me and think a breakthrough for Ukraine is just around the corner, well . . . do you still think that after Friday?)
Nobody enjoys being the bearer of bad news, least of all I, and since nobody pays to read my foreign policy musings, I figured it was best to remain quiet in my pessimism and accept that the Ukraine war would be settled bleakly without my (unnecessary) input. But circumstances demand that we discuss last week’s Oval Office meltdown — where, for those only now just stumbling out of an isolation chamber, JD Vance exploded and gave Zelensky a wild dressing down in front of the world’s assembled media after Zelensky had poked Vance’s pride one too many times. Zelensky was in the United States nominally to sign a minerals deal giving the United States an as yet undetermined financial stake in Ukraine’s natural resources as a “soft” security guarantee to prevent Putin from breaking any subsequently negotiated cease-fire or armistice. As all now know, that did not happen.
One reason it’s difficult to talk about Friday’s White House disaster is that people cannot even seem to agree on what happened that day. Was Zelensky “ambushed” by Trump and Vance, who had planned this public humiliation in advance? This seems to be the most common take from Trump’s opponents. (Incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz labeled it “obviously a manufactured escalation.”) I don’t see that at all. I sat through all 50 minutes of the press conference — not just the explosive and viral clips from the ending of the meeting — and saw the same thing that the Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen and my editor Rich Lowry saw: a poorly advised (or perhaps incorrigible) Zelensky making a series of avoidable blunders for nearly 30 increasingly awkward minutes before Trump and Vance finally blow their stacks. Allow me to quote Rich, whose piece sums up my considered reaction in its title alone: “Is Zelensky an Idiot?”
You can rue, for good reason, the way that Trump views this conflict and how he expects to get fluffed up by people he meets and talks with, but it’s a reality. All sorts of foreign actors have taken this on board and reacted accordingly to protect their interests — except the one guy who has the most to lose by stupidly refusing to play by the simple, easy-to-understand rules.
Zelensky dressed in his usual fashion and scored some nice debating points in the Oval Office yesterday. What did it get him or his country?
Just so. Zelensky’s primary objections during the Oval Office meeting — that Putin can’t be trusted as a fair negotiator and that any peace deal, if it is to be viable in the long term, would require concrete security guarantees for Ukraine — are cognizable enough as far as they go. But that was not to the time to voice them. Save that sort of remonstrance for a moment when the cameras are gone from the room — instead of foolishly attempting “public diplomacy” over the heads of the president and vice president of the United States, for the benefit of the cameras, while simultaneously insulting their negotiating skills.
As someone who wants Ukraine to secure the best possible deal for itself, watching all 50 minutes of the press conference was agonizing; akin to watching someone idly flick a Zippo lighter without realizing that his clothes are soaked in gasoline. Nobody who sat through the entire thing could possibly think otherwise, not after watching Zelensky step on one land mine after another without any pushback — Trump even opened by trying to blow off Zelensky’s decision to wear his typical military uniform, saying that Zelensky looked good enough.
It is tempting to think that Zelensky’s experience with his European counterparts and the mentally dormant Biden administration left him unprepared to deal with Trump — but even this is difficult to believe given Zelensky’s yearslong prior entanglement with his fortunes. (You may have forgotten that Donald Trump’s first impeachment was directly related to the “perfect phone call” he had made to Zelensky, but Donald Trump sure hasn’t.) And maybe this meeting was always destined to turn sour simply because Trump and Zelensky have wildly different views of the war’s acceptable outcomes.
But why didn’t Zelensky suck up his pride and wear a suit, for God’s sake? Why the constant interruptions, corrections, lectures for the benefit of the media audience as opposed to the two principals in the room? Does he not understand that he must negotiate with the United States? There is no “appeal to the masses.” There is no “appeal to the opposition.” Deal with Trump — however difficult he may be — or go home. There are no other options.
Pro-Zelensky arguments inevitably turn to the point that Rich addressed above: “Why should Zelensky have to kowtow to Madman Trump? The man is an immoral fool! He’s taking the side of Russia! Should we not consider that the moral outrage instead?” Fine, then. Let us grant that it is an outrage; it is, nevertheless, a completely unsurprising one, which nobody can do a single thing about. However true it may be that Trump has disordered international priorities — and note that his fans emphatically disagree with this statement — this should be functionally irrelevant to Zelensky’s calculations. This isn’t a game of American domestic politics. Donald Trump is now the president of the United States. Don’t needlessly offend him, because he alone makes the deals, whether you like it or not. Moralizing and huffing about the unfairness of it all won’t produce a different president for Zelensky to negotiate with.
Whither the Western Alliance?
As all this happens, I can feel the ground shifting perceptibly under our feet. I fear that Americans fail to appreciate what effect this Oval Office meltdown is going to have on the rest of the world. I understand why, too: It’s dangerously easy to assume that only the opinions of Americans matter. But the rest of the world gets a vote, too, at least on matters of global importance. And our postwar alliances are fraying to the point of snapping under the strain of Trump’s revisionist approach to American foreign policy.
All the players in this game well understand that the Ukrainian crisis is not just about Ukraine; it’s a proxy for the deeper, likely unbridgeable rifts forming within NATO and the entire postwar Western alliance. This is properly a subject for a separate piece — 2,000 words is enough to force on a person for one morning — but I actually share Trump’s and Vance’s disgust at our European allies’ unwillingness to spend their own money on military defense in favor of propping up their collapsing welfare states. (It’s hard not to notice the irony that Trump’s preferred course of action here in America — drastically cutting the defense budget to prop up America’s collapsing welfare state — is exactly the same.)
I can predict only one thing for now: We will all be back here tomorrow, and the day after that, because we are stuck in a permanent news cycle. Donald Trump’s tariffs on Mexico and Canada are scheduled to go into effect today. (The Dow Jones dropped 650 points yesterday after the news broke; enjoy your consumer prices rising sharply again!) Trump is set to address the nation tonight. For all I know, he’ll announce the dissolution of NATO in an improvised aside while delivering his scripted remarks. (That seems like the way Trump would do it.) The news just keeps coming, battering and buffeting us about like shipwrecked sailors waiting for the final, fatal wave to sweep us to our fates.
Until next week.