We Know They're Faking It

On Ukraine, Trump and the natcons leaven mendacity with magical thinking

Magical thinking, meet bare-faced mendacity

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Leave to one side your outrage over the disgraceful scene in the Oval Office last Friday—which was and shall forever remain a blot on the honor of the United States—and ask yourself if you were really surprised by it. After all, Donald Trump has long been signaling that in one way or another, he intends to end America’s support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.

And in principle, this is a rational policy decision. Basing myself on historical precedent, it’s a policy with which I strongly disagree. But the arguments in its favor are not without validity: The United States has many commitments around the world, most formalized by treaty. But the country’s resources, economic, diplomatic, military, are not infinite. New commitments, therefore, should only be assumed if they clearly support the vital interests of the United States, and the fate of Ukraine does not meet that standard.

If that alone were a fair summary of the Trump Administration’s policy, the debate now underway would be much different in tone if not in substance. But the above argument has been profoundly corrupted by natcon ideology, which is a toxic amalgam of xenophobia, power worship, antisemitism and, yes, anti-Americanism. It’s one of the ironies of our time that hatred of America, once the preserve of the radical Left, has now been embraced by the lumpen-Right. Tucker Carlson’s descent into madness is only the most prominent evidence of this trend.

The natcon jihad against Ukraine is impudent, contemptuously so, in its reversal of reality. In the telling of the lumpen-Right, the villain of the piece is Ukraine, a quasi-fascist state ruled by a dirty little warmongering rat whose government brutally oppresses ethnic Russians. The hero of the piece is that whole-souled Russian patriot, V. Putin, champion of religion and traditional values, defender of the Motherland against the virus of soulless Western materialism and predatory NATO aggression. It’s a cult of personality to rival the adulation that Stalin and Hitler enjoyed in their day—subscribed to and promoted by Americans calling themselves conservative!

This crack-brained narrative is buttressed by a related narrative of American corruption and evil, different only in detail for the similar narrative of the New Left in the Sixties and Seventies. All the world’s problems, it seems, originate with America’s forever wars, regime change schemes, entangling alliances, soulless predatory capitalism. But at the same time, America is stupid, incompetent, bumbling, a power in decline, to be regarded with contempt.

And this complex of natcon narratives is rounded off with an antisemitic appendix. Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, is a Jew, you see. Need anything more be said…?

Donald Trump’s contributions to this filthy ideological stew are in the fields of ego, narcissism, and plain ignorance. There’s no doubt that in his murky thinking, the purely rational points mentioned above are swirling around. But they’re inextricably mixed up with feelings of personal resentment and hubris—memories of past slights, the need to be seen as a great man.

Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelensky played a major role in that comedy production, the Democrats’ first attempt to impeach Trump in 2019. Ever since, his attitude toward Ukraine and Zelensky has been one of simmering hostility. And this has little to do with the natcon narrative sketched above; consciously or not Trump feels that the Ukrainian president and his country have done him a bad turn. That’s all the reason he needs to screw them over.

On the flip side of the coin is Trump, Grand Master of the Art of the Deal. His ideas about international diplomacy, such as they are, rest on a belief that he can talk anybody around. Hey, who doesn’t want to make a deal? There’s a touch of Neville Chamberlain in this, but the operative driver is Trump’s belief that diplomacy is akin to a business transaction. Sometimes, of course, it is—and if the point at issue were a fisheries dispute between the US and Canada, the President’s dealmaking expertise might be relevant. But when one country aspires to conquer another country and extinguish its independence, there’s no splitting of the difference, no deal to be made.

And there’s no point in pretending that the President knows what he’s doing, that he has a plan, that he’s playing 3-D chess. All Trump’s bluster could not hide the fact that he had no real peace plan in mind or that his minerals deal was a hollow farce. Trump’s just faking it, as will be clear when the ceasefire proposal now being formulated by Ukraine, France, and the UK lands on the Resolute Desk. The three parties agree that any ceasefire plan must incorporate a security guarantee for Ukraine, backed by the United States. As British prime minister Keith Starmer said yesterday, “I’ve always been clear that that is going to need a US backstop, because I don’t think it would be a guarantee without it.”

Now what will President Trump have to say about that?