A lot more than February just ended

A debacle at the White House

I live in a neighborhood with a number of tall, mature trees. Since most of the houses in my neighborhood were built roughly a century ago, it’s fair to assume that today’s tall trees were planted at around the same time. In other words, those trees probably knew a time before the post-World World II world order existed, in a way that I never have. Nobody from my generation, or my parents’ generation, has ever known a time where European democracies were not our allies, and Russia was not our adversary.

And all that changed yesterday, before our very eyes.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has led his country through three years of warfare against an invading Russian army, came to the White House for an in-person meeting with Donald Trump. I can’t even bring myself to attach the word “president” to his name after what I witnessed. A link to the full event is here, and the two-against-one nature of what took place was sickening, to say the least.

It seems very clear, to me at least, that Trump is not acting as an honest broker here. He appears to be quite comfortable with dictating the terms of the agreement to end the war to Zelenskyy and Ukraine, and then browbeating him until he agrees to those terms. He also appears incapable of understanding that Putin could simply decide to violate the terms of any agreement (Neville Chamberlain once had the same idea about Hitler, too) and insists that Putin “respects” him too much to do that. Trump seems like the sort of a man who confuses fear with respect, and doesn’t care to know the difference between the two, anyway.

After their meeting abruptly ended, Zelenskyy was told to leave the White House, without any deals being signed. The whole event seems to have been nothing more than an ambush, designed to provide embarrassing images of Zelenskky to be broadcast in Russia. A more regrettable abandonment of an ally can hardly be imagined.

But in a larger sense, the global order—similar to the large trees in my neighborhood—could not last forever. Eventually a storm of sufficient size would have to come through, felling the tree and opening up space for whatever comes along afterwards. And the storm in this case needed an assist from an overly-eager, and insufficiently restrained, vice president JD Vance.

A vice president, like the co-pilot of an airplane, should not get in the way of the captain, unless it is absolutely necessary to do so. And JD Vance’s intemperate suggestion that President Zelenskyy was being disrespectful or insufficiently grateful (neither of which is true) seemed to set Trump off and started a downward spiral which the whole world had an opprtunity to watch as it was happening.

It felt, at the time it was unfolding, like a bad dream which you’re relieved to wake up from. But this was all too real, and now we’ll need to start wondering about how the global neighborhood is going to look, without the tall tree that was around for such a long time.