Trump’s call with Putin yesterday was a long time coming, but that didn’t make it any less of a shock for Europe: a few people from a fake-sounding place like “Pennsylvania” changed their minds last year, and now it’s finally your problem. Credible journalists are reporting that current US foreign policy is being run as a game of fill-in-the-blank in which White House aides select a random word out of Cecil Rhodes’ diary (‘annex,’ ‘expel’, ‘tariff’) and then throw a dart at a map of the world. The brunt of this strategy has so far mostly been reserved for the Americas and the Middle East, but now it’s Europe’s turn to experience being made great again.

In a double blow to Ukraine this week, new US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth said that Ukraine would need to give up on reclaiming lost territory and joining NATO, while Trump had a long call with Putin that is rumoured to lead to a direct meeting between the two leaders in (fills in blank) Saudi Arabia. His more minor call with Zelensky scared the Ukrainians for good reason: once considered to be a respected partner of the West, Ukraine is simply hoping to have any say in the negotiating process at all. What seems to be under discussion is not a simple ceasefire but a large cession of territory and maybe even the removal of the current Ukrainian government.

This would be a surprising end to the long and tortured story of Western support for Ukraine in the past years: it has been both an impressive flex of Western power in the short term and a potentially catastrophic showing of weakness in the long. Russia, considered by many to have the world’s second strongest military at the start of the war, was drawn into a stalemate by an unstable Eastern European state with some old Soviet stocks and a trickle of aid that made up a tiny proportion of Western military spending. But the West’s inability to have a unified policy to counter an invasion on its borders can make all the economic might in the world useless.

Some pro-Ukraine practitioners of Trumpology had high hopes for the new American administration because they felt his rhetoric during election season was too irrational to actually happen. If you fancy yourself a hard-headed realist in the world of foreign policy, as many populist governments in the West do today, then you had the choice between two options for Ukraine support: you could fully fund Ukraine and benefit from the military victory of an ally, or you could negotiate with Russia from the start and compromise Ukraine’s sovereignty to ensure stability. Not in that list of two options is to get the worst of both worlds by giving substantial aid to Ukraine and then yanking it away as the war reaches its culmination, but that’s what Trump seems to have settled on.

The reason why this is happening is because Trump rides on vibes, and for various reasons, the vibes are against Ukraine right now. Being against support for Ukraine is vaguely anti-American (cool) and, for Trump types, vaguely anti-establishment (also cool). The people who are really into the Ukrainian cause are usually Lib Dem types who hang Ukraine flags in city centres (lame) or neoconservatives who eat flesh and drink blood (also lame). Politics is, of course, about feeling good all the time, and it’s hard to feel very good about grim drone videos and malfunctioning T-72s in the Donbass. Ukraine is not only an easy issue to drop for these reasons—abandoning Ukraine also fits the specific vibe the Trump administration is trying to form.

This vibe is a sort of vulgar Machiavellianism, where being plainly evil and self-interested is equated with political prudence and wisdom. In this worldview, the worst thing someone can be is a hypocrite, and taking actions like extorting Ukraine for all its natural resources in return for continued support is not bad because it’s not hypocritical. In response to an establishment that claimed to aid Ukraine altruistically but enacted its own fair share of foreign policy evils, the solution is to simply get rid of the former in the name of consistency. Keep in mind that this is a vibe, an appearance, not actual self-interest, which cannot be boiled down to grabbing as much stuff as you possibly can. Vulgar Machiavellianism is taking over. The cover of New York magazine was a picture of a Trump inauguration party, and the title reads “The Cruel Kids Table,” and the Trump crowd rejoiced. Nations will be sacrificed to this vibe.

There are times when one simply needs to stand in front of an oncoming vibe like it’s a tank in Tiananmen Square. Everyone took the Ukraine flags out of their Twitter usernames. Many are now vaguely embarrassed at their earnest, useless little pro-Ukraine Instagram posts in 2022. The flow of public opinion seems to have moved on. But Ukraine, and European foreign policy more generally, cannot just be handed to the idiots and villains of the world. Pursue the good, even if it is a little Lib Dem-y.∎

Words by Myles Lowenberg. Image Courtesy of Jiří Sedláček.