The Situation: What America Stands For Now

The Situation on Friday asked whether it was still possible to serve ethically as a federal prosecutor.

Today, let’s stare betrayal in the face.

The United States has betrayed allies before. It has sponsored coups against democratic regimes. It has left people behind when it withdraws from conflicts it has come to regret. It has done its share of ugly things, and I’m not romantic about the history of American foreign policy. 

I cannot, however, think of a time when it has ever before turned against a democratic ally to side with a monstrous dictator pursuing a genocidal war of aggression.

I cannot think of a time it has lurched so readily to side with evil against the values it purports to represent.

I cannot think of a time it has so brazenly presented itself as running a protection racket for the democratic world—a pay-to-play, resource-extraction-oriented foreign policy designed to force other countries to pay tribute or risk predation from stronger powers. 

And I cannot think of a time when the most fundamental defense of such a global extortion scheme was a bald-faced set of lies about a country fighting for its continued existence.

I will not repeat here the things President Trump has said in recent days about Ukraine, about Russia, or about the respective presidents of the two countries. To repeat them, even by way of arguing with them or denouncing them, credits them ideationally more than they deserve. And arguing with liars and dilettantes on matters of moral consequence is, in any event, beneath the dignity of decent people.

I want, instead, to emphasize the likely consequences of a betrayal of this magnitude by the United States, which will reverberate far past Ukraine and has to be seen in the context of the administration’s concurrent retreat from transatlantic security cooperation and imposition of tariffs on our biggest and most reliable trading partners.

The administration is sending a message loud and clear to anyone who will listen: The United States is not a reliable partner. 

Not reliable in war—that much is clear. The president will not merely leave Ukraine to its fate and negotiate the fate of a sovereign nation without its duly elected representatives at the table. He will sign on to Putin’s mendacious account of how the war began. He will demand that Ukraine sign on the dotted line for rare-earth mineral rights in perpetuity in exchange for past support with no promise of continued military assistance. The United States is not a country with which any sane nation at war would want to share a foxhole.

Not reliable either in deterrence. This point follows ineluctably from the previous one. If a  country cannot rely on a security partner not to suddenly side with the enemy three years into a shooting war when a wide swath of the country’s territory is under occupation and its front line is steadily eroding, no other country can rely upon it as a deterrent against aggression either. There is no escaping this message—not for Estonia or Finland, not for the United Kingdom (whatever special relationship it might imagine that it has with the United States), and not for Taiwan or South Korea either. In case the administration’s actions have not screamed this message loudly enough, senior officials have been quite explicit about it in their various public statements—at the Munich Security Conference and elsewhere. 

And then there’s the openly mercantilist, extractivist trade policies, which involve everything from the extortion of rare earth minerals from Ukraine to slapping tariffs on Canada on the giggle-inducing theory that Canada is exploiting us. America is, most emphatically, not a reliable partner in commerce.

So what happens when America betrays its friends, including in life-and-death situations, turns its alliances into shakedowns, fêtes the dictator in Moscow, and purports to negotiate directly with him over the fate of millions of Ukrainians and untold numbers of square miles of territory not acquirable by the use of force? And what happens when it justifies this entire sordid enterprise with outright, unashamed lies?

The truth is that nobody knows.

Nobody knows whether this will precipitate a further erosion of the Ukrainian position or whether Ukraine can manage successfully to fight on with enhanced European assistance. 

Nobody knows whether Europe is up to keeping Ukraine in the fight or organizing itself to defend the other countries Trump is leaving vulnerable. 

Nobody knows whether manpower shortages will get to Ukraine or Russia first. 

Nobody knows whether and how soon China will take any of this as a green light to up the pressure on Taiwan.

Nobody knows whether democratic countries around the world will band together or whether they will cut their own deals with the giants that menace them—a list that now includes us, apparently.

Nobody knows how attractive China will look to European countries that need an alternative to Trump’s racketeering. (Ask yourself this question: Why should Huawei really look any worse than Starlink as a business partner to a European company or government?)

The future of world security is one of those ultimate multivariate equations, and there are many more ways to look foolish than wise in trying to predict it.

I will therefore venture only the most general prediction: that the withdrawal of the American security umbrella will be a really, really bad thing. It will have effects both immediate and long-lasting that will be exceptionally difficult to undo. These effects will be almost uniformly terrible and will be measured in lost lives and lost freedom of real people. They will implicate issues we cannot even dream of today.

The betrayal is of a sort and of a magnitude that gets known by the name of a city—Munich, Yalta, Riyadh—a city that comes to represent a principle.

So let’s identify the principle isolated—appropriately enough—at Riyadh, the capital of an absolute monarchy that dismembers dissidents.

The Riyadh Principle is that America repents the values it has promoted in foreign policy—that whole second-half-of-the-twentieth-century thing where America stood for something. The Riyadh principle is that great powers keep what they can grab. And it is that smaller powers—like Melos, or Taiwan, or Ukraine—suck it up. Again. 

This is what America stands for now. How does it feel?

The Situation continues tomorrow.